Irish reels
The reel is the backbone of an Irish session. It runs on an even stream of eighth notes with no swing and no dotted rhythm, and it is the fastest thing most players will ever be asked to hold together.
- Time signature
- 4/4, though 2/2 describes it better
- How you count it
- Two heavy beats to the bar, four notes on each. Tap your foot at a comfortable pace: if four notes fit between taps it is a reel, if three fit it is a jig.
- Session tempo
- 50 to 62 bars per minute (100 to 124 half notes)
- Structure
- 8 bars per part. 57% are AABB, 29% are AB
- Share of the tradition
- 31.6% of all tunes, 37.3% of tunes played at sessions
Where the reel came from
The reel is Scottish, not Irish. The earliest documented reference is a 1590 witchcraft trial reported in Newes from Scotland (London, 1591), where someone "daunced this reill or short dance". It reached Ireland in the late eighteenth century, and then took over.
It is now the default. Nearly a third of every Irish tune in print is a reel, and at a live session that rises to well over a third. If somebody starts a set without saying what it is, this is what it will be.
How a reel is built
Alan Ng measured 2,445 reels and found 57.3% in AABB, 29.1% in plain AB, 3.8% in AABBCC, and a long tail running out to a single reel with twelve parts. Two older Irish words are worth knowing: the A part is "the tune" and the B part is "the turn". "Doubled" and "singled" tell you whether each 8-bar part repeats.
Playing reels on banjo and mandolin
Strict alternate picking, with the weight on the downstroke. Tony O'Rourke: "where there are 8 quavers in a bar I play D.U.D.U.D.U.D.U. All triplets I play D.U.D and after the triplet I immediately revert to the normal DUDU pattern." Marla Fibish teaches unequal strokes inside that pattern, so the downstroke runs a little longer and the upstroke becomes the return of a weighted down. The common beginner fault is rushing at the end of a phrase, because the picking hand stops moving through the long notes and then panics.
New reels from players
Sent in by the people who play them, too new for the books this library is built from. Each one has notation, tab, playback and a metronome.
Every reel in the library
601 reels, each with tab already written. The 14 that turn up most often at sessions are first.
Showing all 601 reels
Questions about Irish reels
4/4, usually written in cut time. Alan Ng argues 2/2 is the more honest notation, because the bar really divides into two groups of four notes rather than four groups of two, and the accent falls on the first and third beats.
Between 50 and 62 bars per minute, which is 100 to 124 half notes on a metronome. Listening sessions sit at the slower end, around 50 to 55. Set dancers want 58 to 62. Competition speeds under the Irish dancing commission run 113 to 124 quarter-note clicks depending on grade, which works out at 56.5 to 62 bars per minute.
They share a time signature. The reel is faster and its eighth notes are even. The hornpipe is slower and swung, so each pair sounds long then short, and it usually ends each part with three long notes. In practice the distinction is a spectrum, and a hornpipe played fast and straight sounds like a reel.
Two, in most cases. Each part is 8 bars and each repeats, giving 32 bars in total. Just under a third have parts that do not repeat, and a handful run to three, four or more parts.
Miss McLeod's Reel is the usual first one. It is one of the most recorded tunes in the tradition and one of the simplest, and it sits in first position on a GDAE instrument with no position shifts.
The other tune types
Each one counts differently and runs at a different speed.
Tempo ranges, structure percentages and repertoire shares from Alan Ng,irishtune.info Irish Traditional Music Tune Index. Historical sources are named in the text.