| Please read ALL this
text the first time you visit, as otherwise you may end up a
bit confused. (Which would be completely natural. It's confusing.)
The links from the tune titles are SCTLS links. The MP3 files were
recorded by beginning musicians just like you, to share what it's
like to teach and learn tunes from your peers.
While we provide some
of our tunes here, as well as the tunelists from the general Slowplayers.org
website, we do not use these during our tune learning sessions.
We have actually long since stopped providing these, because we
found people felt they could learn only off of these links and didn't
bother coming into the session. (See The Most Important Note Of
All, below.)
The SCTLS links (the
ones you can click on through the tune titles) offer the files in
MP3 format (at learning speed and as unornamented as we could make
it and still play), a printable gif, and abc.
The gifs and MIDIs in
the column on the right are SlowPlayers.org settings that you might
hear in San Francisco or perhaps Boston -- that's a great way to
check out some variations you may not have thought of! (You can
check even more versions at some of the other SlowPlayer.org member
groups by using the links to the left.)
The Slow Players pdf and abc files on the right of the table below
are the complete listings for the group (reels, jigs, etc), and
may be quite large.
If you're going to learn tunes from these linked files, we highly
recommend that you learn from the mp3s provided rather than from
the sheet music. Keep in mind that MIDI files are only good
for notes, as you will not get anything close to a good feel of
Irish music from them, and Irish trad music is all about the feel,
not so much about the notes. A fairly good playback tool, ABCMus
is shareware (see the links below) for a better
feel (compared to MIDI) of the music.
Important
Note: remember: there's no such thing as a definitive
setting! Different settings are a large part of what keeps Irish
traditional music so interesting and alive.
Another Important
Note: please be careful about learning tunes from
recordings. Solo recording artists are not playing out at a session
(although 99% of them do play at sessions). The recording may be
in a different key from what it's played in out in the wild of sessions.
It may include variations that you may learn as the basic melody.
It may be an entirely different setting than the "norm".
The Most
Important Note of All: it's always best to learn your
tunes directly from other players, especially out at sessions. There's
lots and lots of reasons for this. We promise we're not lying to
you or making this up.
Finally, we've
also included some links below to offer you
some tools and more tune archives.
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