100 Folk Tunes For All Instruments – Learn Slowly By Ear

These well-known Tunes are played live, and very slowly for 5 minutes, repeated over and over to help you learn easily

What you’ll learn
Learn Folk Tunes By Ear
Prepare Yourself To Play Folk Music On Any Instrument
Olay Each Tune For 5 Minutes To Cement It Into Your Memory Bank
Train your Ears To Memorise Tunes

Requirements
Playing chords or single notes on whatever instrument you play will be required

Description
The recordings are from Sidmouth Folk Week over 2023/4 and made with encouragement from the course leader Jeanette. I interview her so you can understand the purpose, legacy and context. She has been running these workshops for a few years to teach people how to gain confidence playing folk tunes and to increase their repertoire so they can then go to ‘normal speed’ sessions aka ‘darned fast playing!’ I went to all of these classes personally and you might even hear me trying to learn the tunes in the background although I did try to be very quiet about that! The way the sessions run I think I really excellent, you just play the same tune over and over for five or seven minutes at a slow speed, and from what I could see everybody in the room got better and better at the Tune and did slightly begin to speed up towards the end, which is no bad thing. Some of the tunes are repeated and they were played on different days so just play all of them including the repeats as you will get a slightly different feel each time. This is about 12 hours of study or at least I was in the classroom for about 12 hours learning these songs so I think you should get a great workout here on any instrument and thoroughly enjoy it. They have produced a book to go with these songs and I will put a link to where you can purchase it if you wish to although really the plan is to learn all this by ear not reading.

Overview
Section 1: Introduction

Lecture 1 Introduction to the course for all instruments

Section 2: Slow Tunes

Lecture 2 Slow tune video playalong

Section 3: Slow tunes in the same order but in a continual loop

Lecture 3 Slow tunes again in the same order but continual in a 30 minute sequence

Section 4: Faster tunes in a real live pub session

Lecture 4 Princess Royal Live

Section 5: Orkney Tunes from a session I went to in 2022

Lecture 5 Wee Billy Sings His Final Tune

Folk music is for all Folk and All instruments