In this week’s tune playalong you can find easy, intermediate and advanced chords for the Irish slip jig, The Butterfly! The tune is played slowly at 65 beats per minute, at a medium pace at 90 beats per minute and at full session speed of 115 beats per minute. This should help beginner Irish, Scottish and general Celtic guitar players to learn to play along with slip jigs and understand how to add chords to a tune.
If you find this useful then check out the full pack of 20 playalong videos by visiting the Folk Friend Members’ Area!
This week’s free guitar lesson from Folk Friend covers two super easy guitar finger picking patterns. They can be used to accompany Irish or Scottish reels on guitar or as a nice accompaniment for traditional / folk songs in 4/4! I demonstrate them using my Maid Behind The Bar Playalong video, which you can find here.
This week’s free playalong is a very popular Irish session hornpipe called The Rights Of Man. The tune is in the key of E aeolian (otherwise known as the natural minor), the darker of the two minor modes used in Celtic music. The tune is played on the tin whistle, both slowly and at session speed so you can practice your Irish backing guitar. There are also on screen guitar chords beginning with the very simplest options, adding basic substitutions and then progressing to more advanced jazzy chords. Visit the Folk Friend Members’ Area to get hold of the full pack of 20 playalongs!
In this week’s free Irish guitar accompaniment lesson from Folk Friend, I’ll be showing you an unusual clawhammer picking pattern which you can use with Celtic reels! I like this pattern so much that I used it in my fingerstyle arrangement of John Ryan’s polka, which appears in my latest book. It’s called Irish Tunes For Fingerstyle Guitar and you can get it on the shop page.
If you would like to practice the chords and picking pattern demonstrated in this video, then try playing them along with my Maid Behind The Bar playalong video, available here.
If you have short nails and would like to learn this pattern, I recommend these plastic finger picks from Stagg! They are only a fiver and work pretty well for this style of picking (maybe leave the thumb pick off). This is an affiliate link so I receive a small commission if you buy through it.
In this free Irish guitar lesson from Folk Friend, I’ll be looking at how to play polkas. These are a type of tune written in 2/4 which are infamous amongst Irish and Scottish backing guitarists for their speed! The polka is also a common dance and tune type in western European folk music.
We’ll be demonstrating using John Ryan’s polka, a very common session tune. If you’d like to practice along at home, you can find my slow, medium and fast playalong track with on-screen guitar chords here.
A clawhammer style arrangement of John Ryan’s can be found in my book Irish Tunes For Fingerstyle Guitar, available in the Folk Friend online shop!
Here’s the clip of the amazing Steve Cooney and Seamus Begley playing polkas to which I refer in the video:
This week’s free Irish tune playalong from Folk Friend is John Ryan’s polka! This is a session classic in the key of D ionian / D major. Often the A part will be played as a solo by each tune player in turn, with all the musicians present playing the first two staccato notes and all coming in for the B part. I have included three sets of chords for beginner Irish guitarists. The slow version contains two rounds with simple chords and then two with basic substitutions and the medium and fast speed versions begin with the substitutions and then move onto more advanced chord options.
This free Irish guitar lesson from Folk Friend covers “swing” and shows you exactly what is actually going on. It also shows you how you can copy the amount of swing a given melody player puts on a tune and reflect it in your own backing.
I have a special guest in this week’s Folky Fridays free Celtic guitar lesson from Folk Friend! My mum Alexa, from whom my love of Irish music stems, will be joining me to play some classic session tunes. I’ll also be showing you lots of ways to vary standard chord and strumming patterns and covering all the shapes I use for each set.
Here is a list of all the tunes we played (they are under the names my mum knows them by- some of them have several others!):
The Lonesome Jig – D ionian
The Roaring Barmaid – G ionian
The Mushroom Treatment – A mixolydian
Taylor’s Rambles – A mixolydian / A dorian (possibly not the standard version you would hear)
Reaping the Rye – E aeolian
The Butterfly – E aeolian
Light and Airy – A mixolydian
Christy Barry’s (?) – G ionian
The Donegal Lass – A mixolydian
The Old Flail – G ionian
Porthole of the Kelp – E aeolian
Unknown (recorded by Carty & Tully) – A dorian
The Old Bush – D mixolydian (starts on an Am chord)
O’Gallagher’s Frolics – E aeolian
Sean Ryan’s (widely known as The Castle- this is arranged in my Fingerstyle book available on the shop page) – E aeolian
A few months ago I released a book of fingerstyle arrangements and soon after I ran a competition, in which I encouraged viewers to submit their own. One of the entries was from Jordan Lively, and it was so good that I thought it would be interesting for other Folk Friend viewers to hear him talk about how he writes his Irish fingerstyle arrangements and some of the playing techniques he uses.
Jordan has very kindly provided a free tab for the arrangement of Whelan’s Old Sow: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1q5cyVQYUwurUGJAv_ceX-SGBXmGxir1Y?usp=sharing
If you want to find more of Jordan’s music, then check out his Facebook page: https://facebook.com/jordanlivelymusic
Here you can watch Jordan’s duet with the fantastic harpist Catherine Magee: https://www.facebook.com/167930823860401/posts/600620417258104/?sfnsn=scwspmo&extid=OQP7fmPS0mStOQTn
Jordan has lessons with Tony McManus- I’ve linked some of his recordings below along with Michelle Mulcahy, the harpist whose tunes we talk about later in the clip.
Tony Mc Manus’ album The Makers Mark: https://amzn.to/34Lg7ua 0
Suaimhneas album, by Michelle Mulcahy (source for the two tunes mentioned later in the clip): https://amzn.to/2YEFqdL
In other news, I recently finished writing a complete Beginner’s Guide To Celtic DADGAD Accompaniment! You can find it here.
This week I’ll be looking at an arrangement of an Irish jig I wrote for fingerstyle guitar in drop D tuning; the tune is called Out On The Ocean. This is a very popular session tune in D ionian (or D major) and appears in my collection of Irish tune arrangements, “Irish Tunes For Fingerstyle Guitar”.
