Customer Reviews

Scottish Fiddlers Session Tune Book

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I don't play in Scottish sessions (mainly Irish ones around my area) but I found this book to be a great collection of Scottish and related tunes. The presentation is clean and readable, with recommended chords above the music and no extraneous ornamentation -- just the bare bones of the tunes. The arrangements are good; some of them are different from the ones I've heard played around here, which is cool. The selection of hornpipes is curious, in that two tunes on the same page are not in the same or related keys, and putting them in sets together doesn't make a lot of sense. I would have liked to see more James Hill and other Scottish Borders hornpipes represented; also, the selection of jigs is very spare. Admittedly Scottish music isn't as jig-focused as Irish, but there are a lot of ones out there that aren't represented in the couple of pages here devoted to them. But there are a lot of tune types represented here, from marches to 4- and 8-bar reels, strathspeys, airs, hornpipes and jigs; it's understandable that a larger breadth wasn't reachable in the number of pages. Overall a great collection for a primer of well-trodden tunes for fiddlers and other instruments with similar ranges -- be warned, non-fiddlers, that many of the arrangements won't work for whistles and other diatonic instruments due to the key signatures (Bb, A and E major are common keys in these tunes).

I got this for "Ashokan Farewell" song, which this edition is true to the version heard in recordings by Jay Ungar. I've tried out most of the the other songs, none of them are familiar to me so I'm not entirely sure I'm doing them right. They are relatively simple songs, if you've been able to get through Suzuki Violin Vol. 1 then you could probably do 70% of the book without problems. Most songs have guitar chords above the measures for accompaniment. I wish the book came with an accompaniment CD. And I'm not thrilled with the binding... you basically have to break the binding to get the pages to stay open. Even then I have to prop metronomes and other heavy items against the pages to keep it open, so the only thing that annoyed me. For a recital I just photo copied the pages I needed, but I'd like not to have to photo copy everything in order to play it.

There are a lot of songs with some very odd names: "The Cup of Tea", "The Clumsy Lover", "Jack Broke da Prison Door", "King of Fairies", "The Wind that Shakes the Barley." They're names that sort of imply words to go with it. Now I know this is a "Fiddlers" book, and it's kind of hard to play and sing, but I still wish they put in some words, it might just make more sense to people like me who are unfamiliar with these songs. Nevertheless I highly recommend this book for students, amateurs and performers.

There are some songs that are long, a page, a page and a half, and take 4 or more minutes to perform. But there are a lot of short pieces in this too, there are usually 2 songs per page, and take a minute or less to play.