Hanging on at a Fast Irish Session

Hanging on at a Fast Irish Session

My fast is moderate. My moderate is slow. If left to my own devices, I wouldn't exceed 80 bpm for a reel or 90 bpm for a jig. So an Irish session that runs 20% over my comfort zone can be a shock to the system. If I were to try to play every single note as I might have them memorized, in the sequence that I know them, I’d fall behind very quickly. So I have to make adjustments on the spot.

In an effort to stay in sync and not lag behind, I might only grab about 75% of the notes I would normally play when trying to keep up at a fast-for-me Irish session. You’ve just got to know which notes to leave in and which notes to take out, and the more familiar you are with the sound of the tune, the easier that may be. I don't actually practice or rehearse this. It's just something I improvise in the moment based on what I am feeling capable of.

If I were to actually practice this at home, a good first step would be to remove everything but the quarter notes. In other words, remove the notes that are pick-direction “up strokes”. Then once you have it stripped down to those bare essentials, you can add back in whatever up-stroke notes you feel are necessary to make the tune sound more like itself. Pretty much every tune can be simplified in this manner.

Another way to do it is to take the full sheet music version of the tune and then whittle away at it by identifying places in each measure or two where you can make adjustments. Places where you are like “nope my fingers aren’t going to do that” when playing fast. The sequence of triplets in Harvest Home comes to mind, as does the little end-tag thing at the end of each part of Rakes of Mallow. There are less "notey" ways to play those sections. 

The more that a tune is under your fingers, the more equipped you are to make variations to that tune when you need to or want to. In a beginner-level slow session this might mean going hog wild with attempting triplets or other ornaments, but in a high-speed setting where you are pushed beyond your normal limits, it might mean getting rid of everything but the basic melodic line so that you can still play in the sandbox.

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Key Signature in Irish Music

Key Signature in Irish Music

When looking at the sheet music for a garden variety Irish session tune, seeing one sharp in the key signature does not tell me that the tune is in G, just like seeing two sharps does not inform me that the tune is in D. What one sharp can tell me is that some or all of the following notes are expected to be in the tune: D, E, F#, G, A, B and C. What two sharps lets me know is that some or all of the following notes should be present: D, E, F#, G, A, B and C#. 

The notes D, E, F#, G, A and B are pretty much expected to be there, so what I’m really looking for is whether the sheet music thinks the tune is more reliant on a C or a C# note within its melody. You might even observe C natural accidentals within the notated music when there are two sharps in the key signature, since it’s not unusual for a tune to have both a C and a C#. 

On the rare occasion that the key signature shows three sharps, I check the notation to see if that’s really true. Does the tune really use the notes D, E, F#, G#, A, B and C# or are there G-natural “accidentals” present? If you see three sharps in the key signature but then G-natural “accidentals” throughout the tune itself, it might just mean that the person writing the score was trying to convey an A modality. 

Another thing the key signature does not explicitly tell you is what drone note is going to sound the most correct for the duration of the tune, and this is important for understanding the modal aspect of Irish music. This is more of an ear thing. Generally speaking, the tonal center could be either D, G, A or E.  I recommend separately playing each of those four home notes - D, G, A and E - over a recording of the tune to decide for yourself which one resonates the best. 

One sharp could mean D-Mixolydian, G-Ionian, A-Dorian or E-Aeolian and each of these have different feels despite having the same key-signature. Two sharps could mean D-Ionian, A-Mixolydian, or E-Dorian. You can kind of rule out G as a home base when the key signature has two sharps because, you know, there ain’t gonna be no Lydian up in there. This is Irish music we’re talking about, not the Disco Biscuits!

Another thing I’d like to mention is that Irish tunes can be hexatonic, which means a six-note scale. (I had to look up what a six note scale is called). And the funny thing is, when only six different notes are required to play the basic tune, the note which gets omitted is often C/C# or F/F#! Think on that for a minute. This is another indication that the key signature chosen by the transcriber/arranger doesn’t tell the whole story.

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Where to add Triplets and Double Stops in Irish Tunes on Mandolin or Tenor Banjo

First off, I'm not really qualified to be commenting on where to add triplets or double stops in Irish tunes. But I do have a theoretical idea of where they could go. So this post is to help document what I am in the process of figuring out.

Where to Add Triplets

There are lots of places to add triplets, but here are two that are probably the most simple or obvious. 

Triplet Rule Number One: Any time there's a quarter note/long note/crotchet you can add a triplet. By quarter note or long note I simply mean a note that has a brief pause after it. For example, look at the G note at the beginning of measure one of The Sally Gardens, or the D note at the beginning of measure 3. Those are quarter notes and a perfect place to add a triplet. You can just do GGG in place of that G. Or DDD in place of that D. That's going to sound OK. You don't have to get any fancier than that at first.

Triplet Rule Number Two: Any time there's a 3rd interval on one string, you can add a triplet, whether you are going up or down. There's an interval like that in measure two of The Sally Gardens. The first two notes of that measure are D and B, fret 5 to fret 2. So you could make that a triplet by playing D-C-B, frets 5-3-2. Or take a look at measure three. You could do it going the other direction by adding a C note between B and D for a B-C-D triplet. Or if you miss that one, there's another chance at the end of that measure where the last two notes are (3rd fret) G and (open) E. You could do G-F#-E as a triplet.  

That's all I'm going to say about triplets for now! On to double stops.

Where to Add Double Stops

I think of a double stop as being a two note mini-chord. Basically, you still play the same melody note as you would normally but you find a note on the next lower string that harmonizes with it. I've been thinking about some choices you can make that the odds should be in favor of. I'll go string-by-string since it's not always the same. Note: sometimes there are two choices that can be used interchangeably. Other times it may be one or the other depending on the harmony of the moment.

D String/3rd String Melody (Double Stop on G String/4th String)

Open D. Double stop on 2nd fret A (D chord) or 4th fret B (G chord / B minor chord).

2nd fret E. Double stop on open G (C major chord / E minor chord) or 4th fret B (E minor chord).

4th fret F#. Harmonize with 2nd fret A (D chord) or 4th fret B (B minor chord).

5th fret G. The obvious choice that will always work is the octave 4th string open G. Another good choice is the 4th fret B (G chord).

A String/2nd String (Double Stop on 3rd String / D String)

Open A. Double stop on 2nd fret E (A chord) or 4th fret F# (D chord).

2nd fret B. Harmonize with open D (G chord) or 4th fret F# (B minor chord).

3rd fret C. Double stop on 2nd fret E (C chord / A minor chord).

4th fret C#. Double stop on 2nd fret E (A chord).

5th fret D. Octave with open D or double stop on 4th fret F# (D chord).

E String / 1st String (Double Stop on 2nd String / A String)

Open E. Harmonize with 2nd fret B (E minor chord), or 3rd fret C (C chord or A minor), or 4th fret C# (A chord). The choice of C and C# is not an either/or. You have to know which of those notes is part of the mode the tune is in.

2nd fret F#. Double stop on open A (D chord).

3rd fret G. Double stop on 2nd fret B (G chord).

5th fret A. Octave with open A or double stop on 3rd fret C (A minor chord) or 4th fret C# (A chord). Once again, C vs. C# depends on the tune.

You may notice there are some common shapes or patterns. 

With any of these, use sparingly until you figure out what sounds good. If it's adding to the music great! If it's taking away from it then don't.

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The Modes and Scales of Irish Tunes

One thing I’ve noticed about Irish session tunes, at least those played at intermediate level sessions in both Oregon and Virginia, is that over 90% of the tunes use notes from either the D scale or the G scale, including the various modal variations of those scales (D mixolydian, E dorian, E aeolian, A dorian, A mixolydian). This means the the majority of the tunes require only the notes D E F# G A B plus either C or C#. I think this is because some of the common instruments used by hobbyists of Irish music, such as tin whistle, aren’t entirely chromatic and can only play certain notes, with the notes in the key of D being the most accessible.

This observation has me feeling empowered to make broad generalizations about the scales and modes commonly heard in Irish sessions! As categorized below.

D through D with a C#

This is your standard D major scale. D Ionian. The notes used are D E F# G A B C#. Tons of reels have this: Lady Anne Montgomery, Maid Behind the Bar, Merry Blacksmith, Silver Spear, Wind that Shakes the Barley, Wise Maid.

D through D with a C

This is what they call a “modal” scale, although it’s one with a major sound. It uses the same notes as the G major scale but with D as the tonal center. Also known as D Mixolydian. The notes used are D E F# G A B C. Common in jigs such as Banish Misfortune, Blarney Pilgrim and I Buried My Wife. 

G through G with a C

This is your standard G major scale. G Ionian. The notes used are G A B C D E F#. Examples include Father Kelly’s, Kesh Jig, and Miss Mcleod’s Reel. Sometimes these dip into a minor feel as heard in Temperance Reel or maybe even Out on the Ocean. E minor is the relative minor of G, after all!

A through A with a C

This is another modal scale but it has a minor sound. In Irish music, it’s often referred to as simply “A minor”, but to be more exact it’s usually A Dorian. The notes of that being A B C D E F# G, although sometimes the F# (or implied F natural?) is not present, which means it could pass for either A Dorian or A Aeolian since it omits the note which would distinguish it as one or the other. “A Minor” is a catch-all term that works either way. Check out Geese in the Bog, Lilting Banshee, Star of Munster, and so on. The Ballydesmond polkas as well.

A through A with a C#

You could easily mistake these types of tunes as being in D major because they use the same notes as the D major scale: D E F# G A B C#. However, they like to center around the note A of that scale so that with that tonal world in mind, the notes of the mode are A B C# D E F# G. Same notes, just starting at a different part of the clock or the wheel. This is called A mixolydian. You might hear it in reels such as Dinky’s, the High Reel, Monaghan Twig, and the jig Atholl Highlanders.

E through E with a C or E through E with a C#

Unlike A through A with a C and A through A with a C#, which sound very different, the two E through E scales used in Irish music both sound pretty similar. For one thing, they are always going to have an E-minor sound. Sometimes an E minor tune will eschew having either a C or a C# note, making the difference between E Dorian and E Aeolian open to interpretation. With the exception of E minor hornpipes which seem to have a C note, I tend to assume these are in E Dorian which would make the notes E F# G A B C# D. Although it could also be E F# G A B C D. There’s a long list of E minor tunes including Road to Lisdoonvarna, Cooley’s Reel, Drowsy Maggie, The Butterfly, A Fig for a Kiss, King of the Fairies, Jacky Tar and more.

Some other observations:

Some tunes could go either way. Star Above the Garter is one that I hear as having D as its tonal center, so I put it in the D through D with a C category, while others might say it’s just in the key of G.

On the rare occasion that a tune does have an F natural note built-in, it stands out. Like in Chief O’Neill’s hornpipe or the errant D-Dorian reel. It brings an F-chord or D-minor chord into the options.

In Virginia I would hear Irish tunes in A major sometimes as well, but I think this is because the instruments that could play in A major like fiddle and accordion were alpha in the session. Boys of Malin for example. I would call this A through A with a C# and a G# instead of a G.

Some tunes toggle between C and C#.

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The Secret to Learning Irish Tunes by Ear

Disclaimer: I’m not really someone who learns tunes 100% by ear. What I do is more like memorize and visualize the tune. I like to have both an audio play along track and matching sheet music or tab handy. It helps me to “see” the tune written out measure by measure. I can’t resist the urge to cheat and look at the music. That said, I do have advice about learning a tune by ear that has worked for me before. And that advice is…

Write it yourself!

If you’ve ever written a melody of your own before this should be fairly easy for you. If you’ve never tried to write your own tune before, then this can be a start. When writing an Irish tune that already exists a lot of the work is already done for you. You don’t have to write Silver Spear, Out on the Ocean, or Boys of Bluehill completely from scratch. You just have to write a tune that sounds exactly like the one you are trying to write! Or as close to it as you can get at this moment in time*.

The first step is to listen to the tune you want to learn until you can hear it in your head. Find a YouTube video or some other simple source that sounds like the way they play it at your local session. For the purposes of this exercise, once you can hear it in your head the distinction between a tune you are composing vs. a tune that already exists is insignificant. 

Take what you are hearing in your head and find those notes on your instrument. I recommend knowing the names of the notes you are playing and writing them down. At least know where then notes D, E, F#, G, A, B, C and C# are. You don’t have to write this in sheet music format. You can do it in whatever shorthand method works for you. You can also skip writing it out altogether and keep it entirely aural. I happen to like writing it out so that I can put the notes into some sort of context. 

Have the recording on loop and play along with it. Play the rhythm even if you can’t play the notes. Imagine that the tune is a wheel that’s spinning and if you get off the tune doesn’t stop. It just keeps on spinning until you jump on again. Or imagine that it’s a block of wood and you are chipping away until you have carved something that looks like an approximation of the original. At first you might only get 10% of the notes correct and you have to fudge the other 90%. If you stay on the wheel and slowly chip away, you’ll start to connect more dots and the notes or phrases that you land on become like little stepping stones to get across the pond without falling in.

Things to listen for and make note of

How many parts does the tune have? Plenty of Irish tunes have just two parts: an A part and a B part each played twice through AA/BB. However, sometimes there are three or even four parts. Or other times it is just a two part AA/BB tune but the second time through the B-part maybe you play a different ending than the first time through the B-part. Like AA/B1B2.

Where is the tonal center? AKA where does it want to resolve to? Irish session tunes tend to have tonal centers resolving to the notes D, G, A or E and there are certain sounds these keys or modes make that distinguishes one from the other. 

Does it have a C natural or a C sharp note? Assuming that your melody has one of these notes, are you hearing a C natural or a C sharp? If this distinction becomes significant to you, then it can act as a shortcut that helps other connections fall into place. 

Does the B-part go higher? Quite often the B-part of a tune will be in a higher octave, or at least use some higher notes than the A-part did. After a while you can almost guess where a tune is going to go.

Are there any patterns or scalar things that you notice? Being able to recognize things like this can really help with your ear learning. I don’t really know the musical term for it, but for example a tune might be doing something over an A-minor arpeggio for a measure and then do the same type of pattern but over a G-major arpeggio for the next measure. Or there might be a scalar phrase that starts on a G. Then that phrase gets repeated starting on an F# note. Then it repeats again starting on E note. Stuff like that.

Are there any repeated sections? It’s not unusual for the B-part of an Irish tune to re-use portions of or even half of the A-part. So if you’ve learned the A-part, you sometimes have a head start on learning the B-part because something you already went over is going to be re-used in the B-part.

Grade Yourself

Give yourself 30 minutes to write the tune. After you’ve “written” the tune, compare what you have to an actual transcription of the tune you were trying to play. What did you get right? What did you get wrong? For the parts that you got completely wrong, could you already tell that you were unclear about that part or did you think you had it right? Comparing your version to the original and making note of where you were off vs. where you were on track can help so that next time you get even closer to the actual notes.

*On the bright side, if you are really, really bad at transcribing what you hear then the worst thing that happens is you accidentally write an original tune! 

Interview with Myself

 When did you start playing music?

I started playing music in 2006 at the age of 32 after someone suggested that I should play banjo. After a day of researching what type of banjo to get I chose the tenor banjo.

Why did you wait until you were in your 30’s before taking up an instrument?

I never wanted to play a musical instrument as a kid or as a teenager or even in my 20’s. I don’t think it ever crossed my mind. I played golf and baseball. Later on, when I was old enough to be really into music, the idea of playing an instrument seemed out of reach because it was something your idols such as Jerry Garcia did. Not something that I myself could do. In 2004 and 2005 I went to Ireland and that sort of primed the pump. Witnessing regular people sitting around a table playing music in pubs - not up on a stage as a performance - probably broke the ice a little bit. By the spring of 2006 I guess I was ready and just needed a little nudge from a stranger. My mom taught herself how to play piano when she was in her late 40’s or early 50’s so that may have been a subliminal inspiration.

Why did you choose tenor banjo?

I’m left-handed. During that day of research in May 2006 I learned that you could buy a vintage tenor banjo and have it set up left-handed. As opposed to a 5-string banjo which would have to be purpose-built to be lefty. So that was a big factor. That, and thinking that the tenor banjo would be easier. I also found out that the tenor banjo is used in Ireland and that it can be tuned like a mandolin and that people used picks/plectrums rather than their fingers. I had no interest in playing the obvious instruments - guitar or mandolin - because the bar was too high. Tenor banjo felt obscure which appealed to me, and I realized that learning tenor banjo was kind of like learning two instruments in one, because I could later switch to mandolin if I wanted to.

Did you take any lessons starting out?

Yes I found two local teachers right away - Josh Bearman of the band Special Ed and the Shortbus in Richmond, VA and Cleek Schrey who was living in Charlottesville at the time. Josh specialized in old-timey stringband music and primarily taught clawhammer banjo, guitar, and mandolin. I was probably his only tenor banjo student. I was starting from scratch so he showed me the basics of music - scales, how to read mandolin tab, chords. I didn’t really have anything in mind but I was really interested in theory. He would write out Arkansas Traveler for me and then the next week I would come back wanting to learn a Meat Puppets or Neil Young song. It was all over the place. 

Cleek, on the other hand, was an expert in Irish traditional music and assumed that I wanted to learn Irish tenor banjo, so that’s what he showed me. Cleek is known as a fiddler so most people didn’t know he even had a tenor banjo but he did. Cleek’s lessons were focused exclusively on Irish music. He would load me up with Irish trad CDs to take home and make copies of. It was as fundamental as how to hold the pick and the difference between a jig and a reel. I wasn't a very good student.

When did you first hear Irish music?

In the fall of 2004 my wife and I spent a week in Ireland on vacation. We traveled around County Clare and County Galway, but spent the first and last nights of our trip in Doolin. We happened to land in Doolin on the night that fiddler Yvonne Casey was doing the release party for her self-titled debut CD at McGann’s pub. That was my first real exposure to Irish music and it was one of the peak experiences of my life. Eoin O’Neill and Quentin Cooper were there along with James Cullinan. I can’t remember who else. Maybe Kevin Griffin on banjo. I didn't know who any of these people were at the time but I later bought every CD I could find featuring either Yvonne, Quentin, Eoin or Kevin Griffin! These local County Clare musicians were the stars of Irish music as far as I was concerned.

Do you play any other instruments?

I don’t really play any instruments, per se, so yes and no. I think of what I do as playing melodies on an instrument. I don’t have an ear for chords and I don’t enjoy singing songs or playing accompaniment or soloing. I kind of just enjoy playing the tune so any instrument I’ve ever had that’s all I did was play melodies. I have a guitar - a six-string Vagabond travel guitar - that I haven’t played in a while but during the pandemic I taught myself how to play melodies on it by tuning it in all 4ths. I also went through a glockenspiel > xylophone > marimba phase. I didn’t really learn how to play mallet instruments properly, I just learned how to find melodies on the layout of the bars/tone plates. I might be getting a hammered mbira in 2025.

Do you ever write your own music?

I went through a phase of writing my own melodies as a creative outlet. Starting in June of 2017 I gave myself the task of writing a tune a week for a year. I never missed a deadline and actually kept this up for three years straight. These weren’t tunes in any style. And they weren’t entirely original. For example, I might hear a snippet of melody in an old field recording from South America and write an A part based on that. Then I might hear a snippet of melody 20 minutes into a Phish Chalkdust Torture jam and write a B part to the tune based on that. I wasn’t transcribing these note-for-note because I’m not capable of doing that. But I was using my ear to transcribe what I thought I was hearing and make sense of it as conforming to a scale or mode, and then transposing it into a tune of my own. The more wrong I got it the more original it was. This definitely was good ear training if nothing else because I had no music to look at when “writing” these tunes.

What kind of music did you listen to growing up?

When I first got my driver’s license and had a paycheck to burn I would spend it on cassette tapes. This was 1990 or ‘91 just before CDs became a thing but after vinyl had gone out of fashion. I was really into 60’s folk and folk-rock and early 70’s singer-songwriter stuff. Some of my first cassettes would have been Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, The Byrds, Crosby Stills and Nash, Woody Guthrie, Janis Joplin, James Taylor, Eric Clapton and John Prine. Black Sabbath and Lynyrd Skynyrd too! The only tapes I had by current bands of the time were Against the Grain by Bad Religion and Bloodletting by Concrete Blonde.

The Grateful Dead would have also been in my purview but didn’t stand out from the pack just yet. However, when Eric Clapton’s Unplugged came out, a record store clerk turned me on to Reckoning by the Grateful Dead, their all-acoustic live album from 1980. That is the one that did it and then I was off to the races buying every Grateful Dead and Grateful-Dead related CD there was like Jerry Garcia Band, Garcia/Grisman, Kingfish, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, Hot Tuna and Old and In the Way. This deep-dive led me backwards and sideways to all kinds of acoustic, roots-based, folk, blues, stringband, and bluegrass music such as New Grass Revival, the Red Clay Ramblers, Norman Blake, Hot Rize, Cephas and Wiggins, and John Hartford. Lots of stuff on Rounder and Flying Fish records. I soon found Phish and now I had a contemporary band to obsess over as well as other mid-90’s jambands like Leftover Salmon, and .moe. 

Do you have any favorite music books?

Improvise for Real by David Reed. Helped me better understand modes and their relationship to the major scale, such as Dorian and Mixolydian. Also where I learned how to write out melodies by scale numbers 1 through 7, similar to Chinese jianpu.

The Pattern System for the Bass Player by Ariane Cap. Taught me the importance of proper finger technique, and where notes on the fretboard fall in relation to the major scale.

Best Practice by Judy Minot. Designed with the adult learner in mind.

Musical Scales of the World by Michael Hewitt. Reinforced how almost everything can be seen in comparison to the major scale.

Do you have any musical influences?

Thank you for asking. I wish I could say that I do, but as an adult learner who memorizes Irish tunes from a combination of sheet music and play-along tracks, the closest thing I have to an influence is the ice cream truck version of Turkey in the Straw!

My favorite musician of all time is Jerry Garcia. He's a very expressive, very musical player with a gift for melody. Listen to how to how he can go several times through and around on a traditional song like Peggy-O. That's likely where I got my initial interest in plucking melodies from.

The band I've seen the most and listened to the most in my life is Phish. If I take anything away from that which could pertain to Irish music, it is the way the four band members of Phish listen so attentively to one another in a live setting. At any moment, all four members are responding and I think that's a good characteristic to have.

Irish tenor banjo tends to be flashy, and I shy away from that. If I was going to be influenced by actual players of the instrument I play in the style of music that I play, it would be by the sensitive, more subdued players such as Angelina Carberry, Mick O'Connor, Paddy "Paahto" Cummins, and Brian Fitzgerald. Unfortunately, I don't know how much I've taken the time to actually approach it this way though.

Oddly enough, golf is another influence. Sure there are the Tiger Woods and Annika Sörenstams of the world, but the average golfer is struggling to break 90, right? You go out and play bogey-golf on the weekends with your friends. You might have the occasional par or birdie, but mostly it's bogeys, double bogeys or worse. But you still have fun as an amateur hobbyist. Nobody is watching you on TV or asking for your autograph. You're still a golfer though. That may be one of the biggest influences when compared to the community aspect of playing Irish trad music. 

What are you working on now?

Right now, I’m still focusing almost exclusively on familiarizing myself with the tunes played in Irish sessions. Every single day there’s a new tune to learn. I’ve put ornamentation on the back burner, but occasionally I’ll practice triplets and double stops or other variations. 

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Best Albums of 2024

I stayed in my comfort zone during 2024. Without really being in search of new music, I let it come to me. These were my favorites. 

Woodland by Gillian Welch & David Rawlings. Gillian & Dave take turns singing lead vocals in what is easily the best album of 2024!


Evolve by Phish. Somehow at 40 years into their career Phish keeps climbing to higher peaks with a studio release that helps demonstrate just how great their post-pandemic work has been.


Tension by Mulatu Astatke & Hoodna Orchestra. Ethiopian jazz meets exotica in a style I like to refer to as “elevated elevator” music.


Hydra by Nuala Kennedy & Eamon O’Leary. Two of the best vocalists and instrumentalists in Irish music come together for a release that will stand the test of time.


Wild Rose of Morning by Andrew Marlin, Christian Sedelmyer, and Jordan Tice. This Andrew Marlin led project gets a big kudos for being able to effortlessly pull off both the O’Carolan piece Si Bheag Si Mhor and a cover of Norman Blake’s Billy Gray.


Atriums by Trey Anastasio. Time goes out the window as you listen to this long form piece of ambient music. Simply amazing.


Trail of Flowers by Sierra Ferrell. With lyrics such as “I could break a hundred down at the Dollar Bill Bar”, what’s not to like?


When I’m Called by Jake Xerxes Fussell. Album number five from this song catcher continues the trend of excellence. If you haven’t heard Jake Xerxes Fussell, I urge you to check him out. All of his stuff is great!


Epiphany: Irish Traditional Music on the Tenor Banjo by Elaine Reilly. As an amateur Irish tenor banjo player, I’m required to include this marvelous debut album by Elaine Reilly. But it's not without merit. Forgoing the technical pyrotechnics that some whizz kids might lean toward, Reilly focuses on taste, tone and joy in a mature style reminiscent of Angelina Carberry and John Carty. 


Highway Prayers by Billy Strings. Billy Strings’ creativity and musical drive are unparalleled. His once-in-a-generation talent is on full display with Highway Prayers.


Cuimhne Ghlinn: Explorations in Irish Music for Pedal Steel Guitar by David Murphy. Irish pedal steel guitarist David Murphy makes beautiful use of a non-traditional instrument that is actually perfectly suited for the playing of slow airs and harp tunes. For fans of Susan Alcorn.

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