Re: Headed to Ireland - Bring the mando?
Originally Posted by
rick frank
I know a few Irish tunes but past experiences have shown me that it's better to sit and listen a fair amount before trying to join in.
I'm afraid the latter is what you are going to do 99% of the time in a real Irish session, and you can do that without a mandolin in hand. To have guaranteed fun playing along one should have some 100 tunes under his belt, yielding a chance that the overlap with the session repertoire will be 10.
I have been playing TB in Irish sessions some 30 years back, and you have to know where the real open sessions are in order to find them - you don't just stumble across them at every corner. Everything else, music-wise, is either Tourist Disneyland like Jill said or local amateur non-Irish music such as Rock, Country etc. As a preparation, I recommend Colin Irwin's book In Search of the Craic - One Man's Pub Crawl Through Irish Music; it's fun reading, too.
Basically, you must decide what you want to be: a tourist inhaling as much scenery as possible per minute after being served breakfast in a hotel, or a musician hanging out with other musicians, sleeping on pub floors, collecting his own breakfast fry-ables in the next Spar; it's next to impossible to be both at the same time.
I'd do whatever the wife can put up with best
the world is better off without bad ideas, good ideas are better off without the world
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