The 20 tunes you'll actually hear at a session
Every session has its own repertoire, but a core of tunes turns up night after night, in Ireland and everywhere the music travels. Here are twenty of them, grouped by type, with free GDAE tab for each. Ten of these played steadily is enough to take part.
- Tunes on the list
- 20, each with free tab
- Enough to take part
- About ten, played steadily
- The shape of it
- 9 reels, 6 jigs, 1 slip jig, 4 hornpipes
- Tune not on this list?
- Paste its ABC into the converter
How this list was chosen
There is no official session repertoire, and anyone selling you "the" list is guessing. What exists is overlap: the tunes that appear again and again in Comhaltas's Foinn Seisiún repertoire books, in beginner session lists published by teachers, and in twenty years of "what should I learn first" threads. This list is that overlap, filtered to tunes we can give you tab for.
Every tune below links to its page on this site: GDAE tab under standard notation, playback with a speed control down to 20%, and the ABC source. The tab reads the same on tenor banjo, mandolin, octave mandola and bouzouki, because all four share the tuning.
One honest note: sessions vary by region and by the people in the room. Treat this as the core you are most likely to meet, and then learn what your local session actually plays.
The reels
Reels carry most sessions. If you only learn one type, learn these, and learn them slowly first: a reel you can hold together at half speed is worth more than one you can scramble through at full tilt.
| Tune | What to expect |
|---|---|
| Drowsy Maggie | Often the first reel anyone learns. The A part rocks over a droning E, and the B part is where beginners come off. Worth pushing through: it is called constantly. |
| The Merry Blacksmith | About as friendly as reels get. D major, first position, no surprises. An ideal second reel. |
| The Star of Munster | A minor-key showpiece that sits beautifully under GDAE fingers. Watch the string crossings in the B part. |
| The Musical Priest | Three parts instead of the usual two. The third is the payoff. |
| The Wind That Shakes the Barley | A rolling, driving reel that turns up everywhere. Good triplet practice once it is up to speed. |
| Miss McLeod's Reel | Played in every tradition from Scotland to Appalachia, so the whole room joins in. |
| Rakish Paddy | Older and darker. A big two-part reel that rewards a strong right hand. |
| Toss the Feathers | Exists in several settings, so listen before you launch in. Learning one version still gets you most of the way to the others. |
| The Swallow's Tail | A stately minor reel that swings well at slower speeds, which is why slow sessions love it. |
The jigs
Jigs are the other half of the core repertoire, and several of the easiest tunes in the whole tradition live here. If reels feel out of reach, start with these.
| Tune | What to expect |
|---|---|
| Out on the Ocean | G major, gentle range, one of the first jigs at any beginner session. |
| Saddle the Pony | A tidy G major jig, often the very first tune a teacher hands over. |
| Haste to the Wedding | As old as the collections themselves and still called every week. Simple and singable. |
| The Blarney Pilgrim | Three parts that each start differently and resolve the same way. A crowd favourite. |
| Banish Misfortune | Three parts with an older, modal sound. Harder to play cleanly than it looks. |
| The Lark in the Morning | Four parts and a real sense of occasion when a session lifts into it. |
The slip jig and the hornpipes
Two more types you will meet in the first year. Slip jigs run in nine-eight, which takes a few evenings to stop counting. Hornpipes swing: dotted pairs rather than straight eighth notes, and the swing is the whole point.
| Tune | What to expect |
|---|---|
| A Fig for a Kiss | The slip jig the old books actually contain, and one you will genuinely hear. A good introduction to nine-eight. |
| The Boys of Bluehill | The beginner hornpipe. Learn the bounce here. |
| Off to California | Relaxed, melodic and forgiving. A good first hornpipe if Bluehill feels busy. |
| The Harvest Home | Faster and flashier. A test of clean triplets. |
| The Rights of Man | The serious one. Long minor lines, and everybody's party piece eventually. |
The famous ones the old books don't have
Some of the biggest session tunes settled into the repertoire after the old collections were printed, or circulate under names the collectors never used. The Kesh, Morrison's, Cooley's, The Silver Spear, The Butterfly, The Maid Behind the Bar, The Sally Gardens: you will hear all of these, and none of them is in the public-domain books this site is built from.
They are still a one-minute job to get as tab. Thesession.org lists ABC notation for dozens of settings of each. Copy the ABC of the setting you like, paste it into the tab converter, and it renders GDAE tab you can transpose and print. It works for any ABC from anywhere, and nothing you paste leaves your browser.
How to work through them
Learn one tune at a time, and learn it properly: the whole tune from memory, at a steady speed, before starting the next. Ten solid tunes beat thirty half-known ones, because a session plays tunes in sets and a memory lapse at speed takes the whole set down.
Use the playback on each tune page at 40 to 60% until your fingers know the road, then bring it up in steps. The target speeds by tune type are in the tune tempos guide, and if tab itself is new to you, start with how to read banjo tab.
Then go to the session and listen more than you play. Nobody minds a beginner who joins in on the five tunes they know and sits out the rest. That is how everyone in the room started.
Questions about session repertoire
The things people ask before they commit to an answer.
About ten, played steadily from memory, is enough to take part in a beginner-friendly or slow session. A regular session repertoire runs to hundreds, but nobody expects that from a newcomer. Knowing five tunes well and sitting out the rest is completely normal behaviour.
Start with the friendly ones: The Merry Blacksmith or Saddle the Pony first, then Out on the Ocean and Drowsy Maggie. Add The Boys of Bluehill once you can swing a hornpipe. Leave the three and four part tunes, like The Lark in the Morning, until single-part memory feels easy.
No. Every session has its own repertoire and every region its own favourites. These twenty are the overlap you are most likely to meet, drawn from published repertoire lists and decades of session experience. The reliable move is to visit your local session, note what gets played, and learn that.
Find its ABC notation, which thesession.org lists for almost any tune in the tradition, then paste it into the converter on this site. It renders GDAE tab in the browser, free, and nothing you paste is uploaded anywhere.
Slower than you think. A tune held together cleanly at a moderate pace is useful at a session; a tune scrambled at full speed is not. Session reels commonly run around 100 to 115 beats per minute, and the full breakdown by tune type is in the tempos guide.
Keep reading
Read the guideIs the Irish tenor banjo hard to learn?
Easier than the fiddle, harder than it looks on YouTube. The notes come quickly and the right hand takes years. Here is an honest account of what is actually difficult, what is easier than people expect, and how long it takes to be useful at a session.
Read the guideHow fast should Irish tunes be played?
Almost every published tempo for Irish music is unusable, because the number is given without saying what one beat is. A reel and a hornpipe both listed at 113 are running at 56.5 and 28.3 bars per minute. Here are the figures with their units named.
Read the guideGDAE or CGDA? Which tuning for Irish tenor banjo
A tenor banjo bought second hand is almost always in CGDA, and almost every Irish player retunes it to GDAE. Here is why, what it does to the strings, and how to make the change without breaking anything.