Paddy Fahey's No 1 - a reel in D Dorian tabbed for mandolin and played by Aidan Crossey 

Hi John. I was pushed for time the day I made the recording that accompanies the tab, so I had to aim to record it without a repeat. But the great thing about running a tune learning channel such as this is that *I* get to learn some new tunes too. There are one or two other Fahey tunes which I'm considering spending some time with. If I can get to grips with them properly then, who knows, they may make an appearance at some point!

Thanks, Chris... that's very kind of you to say...

Thanks for that Andrew. As I said in my reply to John, one of the benefits of operating a tune learning site is that it incentivises me to broaden my repertoire. I get quite a few suggestions from various folks these days about tunes they'd like to see me include here and at my site and clearly some of these are going to be tunes I don't know... Thanks also for the comments about my playing. I have developed a very deliberate "spartan" playing style over the years which is in marked contrast to a lot of other mandolin players whose playing tends to become more ornate as time passes. (A lot of my move towards minimalism was inspired by a single remark from a friend around the mid-2000s when I was having a few tunes with him. I'm paraphrasing a bit but the gist was - you should concentrate more on playing the tunes and less on playing the mandolin; unless you're prepared to spend a lot more time on your technique. That really stung at the time but I can see now where he was coming from.) When I brought up this conversation quite recently, he was mortified and explained that it wasn't just directed at me. He notices that a lot of players seem to chase technique at the expense of tunes and that he simply meant that he'd rather hear a tune played cleanly and well than ornately but poorly. But he hadn't intended his remark to lead to some dark night of the musical soul. And as for tone... I've had my current mandolin for a little over 6 months now and it is such a characterful instrument that I've had to work quite hard with it to get consistent tone. You know the score - where are the sweet spots, how much pick pressure, how much left hand pressure, how long to hold a note before moving on to the next. It's very lively and responsive but sometimes a little unforgiving so it really forces me to work on how we get the best out of each other. (Anthropomorphising my instrument - lordy!) While I'm in confessional essay mode, one thing I'd share is that I have a very bad habit of "pulling off" in certain phrases - a kind of slur between one or two notes. I don't know how the habit developed but I'm very conscious when I listen to my recordings that it sometimes jars. I'm trying very hard to cut it out of my playing but it's an incredibly stubborn habit!!

@@TheIrishMandolin yes it must be a real incentive to learning new tunes. I don’t have much of a repetoire yet and I think that’s down to me not making learning new tunes a habit, and also I only really learn tunes I like to hear or ones that really catch my ear on recordings. there are tunes I see in ‘top 100’ session tune lists that I’m not too keen on at all, I’m not sure why. So I love listening to your channel for discovering new tunes and for the sheer variety of tunes you record. I really like your more spartan style, and do agree that the tune is the thing and more important than ornamentation. When I started too it was all about ornaments for me, and it was a bit hit and miss. I feel like I’ve stripped back a bit on the ornaments in my own playing too recently, but exploring playing with little variations more, here and there. I have to say I haven’t heard anything at all jarring in your playing :-) I saw an interview online with Martin Hayes a couple of months ago, he was saying something about older recordings of players on archives of tapes he’d collected and that although the recordings and playing even was far from perfect, with little mistakes and sometimes even on instruments that weren’t in tune, there was real soul in the recordings. it was a lovely observation and I got thinking about that afterwards. It has me a lot less worried now about seeking perfection and more about feeling the tune and just playing the notes best I can. Tone is definitely a combination of the instrument and the player, as you say, we learn to get the best from an instrument and find those sweet spots, you’ve totally found a lovely tone on yours. Something I’ve found after having just moved house is how drastic the change in tone can be from one room to another. Playing in my new place with a larger room with a stone floor I’m having to rethink my pick choices, the wegens I loved are sounding muddy and the thinner (less than 1mm) picks I always avoided are giving me a bit more clarity and sound fuller than they did before, so strange.

Irish music isn't about "following a script". The dots are just a "guide" to get us started.