Playing and Listening Tips
Irish Tune Types - A. Brown :Posted Monday 20th April 2009
Cut down article by Alan Brown from The Session website - good descriptions of tune types and tips on rhythm and modal chords.
Videos :Posted Friday 27th March 2009
Out on the Ocean on mandolin - played slowly and simply, then with simple ornamentation.
Out on the Ocean on whistle - played slowly and simply.
Suggested listening :Posted Saturday 22nd Oct 2008
A list of Irish traditional music cds which are worth listening to. The best way to learn is to become as acquainted with the music as is possible, and that entails lots and lots of listening. The upside of this is that it's really enjoyable and not hard work at all.
Mandolin Triads - Key of D :Posted Friday 7th Nov 2008
The three main chords in the key of D Major are D, G and A. Each chord is made up of three main notes - the root note, the third note in the scale, and the fifth note in the scale. If you look at a phrase of music, for example one bar from a jig or reel, you can use this as a rough guide to find out which chord should be played.
For example, if the notes in the first bar of a jig are D E F#, d A F# (stressed notes in bold), we can see that most of the notes (and particularly the stressed notes) are part of the DMaj triad chord (see pics below). This would suggest that we could accompany this bar with a DMaj chord. Alternatively, if we had the same music with the chords written along the top, we could quickly work out that for the duration of this bar we could play different combinations of the those 3 notes rather than the tune itself.
(NB. this doesn't always work out, so you still have to listen to what you are playing and make a judgement as to whether it sounds ok!)
Some Major, Modal & Partial Chords :Posted Thursday 13th Nov 2008
