Durning my holidays this year I had taken with me a book from which I like to play every now and then:
300 Fiddle Tunes – Fiddle Songbooks
published by Hal Leonard. This book is a collection of 300 Irish pieces for fiddle or mandolin, and almost every piece in this collection sounds great and is fun to play. This book is very cheap and it is niclely illustrated. It does also contain some basic introducory notes for the different styles of Irish music. If you like Irish music and want to have it in a nice book you should have a look at this collection.
When I played the music I remembered that I had already found out that this collection is based on an old collection of Irish tunes, and so I tried again to find the source for this edition. The tunes are taken from Ryan’s Mammoth Collection, a collection of more tan 1000 Irish tunes. The collection is available as free download on the following site:
I have found some videos with performances of tunes from Ryan’s Mammoth Collection, this is the band Pendragon with some of the tunes:
PENDRAGON “Ryan’s Mamouth Collection” I
An even better resource can be found on the site of the ITMA – Irish Traditional Music Archive . There you can get all the tunes as interactive scores, you can display the music and listen to the sound, change the speed and even the key. That’s great to learn the tunes and practice them. (The website has changed in the meantime since this was posted – you can find score in the “text” page, recordings on the “sounds” page)
PENDRAGON “Ryan’s Mamouth Collection” II
More videos with Pendragon in the youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/georgerd1/videos
Playlist Ryan’s Mommoth Collection
Additional Information
Website of the band “Pendragon”: http://www.pendragoncelticmusic.com/
ITMA website with interactive scores, recordings, videos, pdf downloads, and more – a great website about Irish music in general.