When I went looking for sheet music notes for an Irish folk song on line and couldn't
find any, there was plenty of pieces of music for the Irish tunes but not for the songs. I thought, why were these big music
sites not displaying the folk and ballads along with the traditional Irish music tunes.
Where were The Dubliners, The Wolfe Tones, The Furey Brothers and the hundreds of traditional
Irish song notes ?
When you first take up and learn a musical instrument, be it banjo, fiddle, mandolin or whatever,
you will want to learn something that's familiar to you. since most would already know more songs that tunes then the logical
thing would be to learn something easy, for example a song that already in your head and have known it for years.
So you
look around for an easy song to play, right ?
Well, if you ever took music lessons that's the way things work, you would
be started on some simple song to you had it off by heart before moving on.
So when I looked for sheet music notes for Irish songs on the Internet and couldn't find any,
I thought, this isn't right ! So I started to collect as many songs as were already here on the site and tried to get sheet
music to go with them, a hard thing to do,So I made up my own.
I was successful in selecting most of the older traditional songs but not the more recent
ones, and as for tin whistle notes, well they are even harder to get.
Not everybody can play by ear, so most will look
for the sheet music or tin whistle notes image of the song for guidance. I'm surprised the big sites like ceoltas who pride
themselves on promoting Irish music don't have an online tin whistle song collection.
Anyway I will continue with this section of the site and try build on what's already here.
Don't forget, If you have sheet music or tin whistle notes for any Irish folk or ballads including
Dubliners, Pogues, Furey Brothers, The Clancys, The Wolfe Tones will you please send them to me.I have now started collecting
abc music notes which are used mainly for beginners of tin whistle. Although I've heard well established Irish musicians
use the abc system also. Some of the abc music notation is by Cathal Lynch [see above photo] who has done a
great deal of working in providing these song notes in a simple to understand method.