Practice guide
Irish Session Tunes to Learn First
The difficulty at a session is not learning tunes, it is holding them. Players routinely learn two hundred tunes over a few years and find they can confidently start about thirty. Everything else lives in a state where you can join in halfway through if someone else leads, which is a different and much weaker kind of knowing.
Start with the tunes that actually get called
A relatively small core turns up at sessions everywhere: Cooley's, The Kesh, Out on the Ocean, The Butterfly, Drowsy Maggie, The Musical Priest, Banish Misfortune, Si Beag Si Mor, The Silver Spear, Britches Full of Stitches. Learning twenty of these well is worth more than a hundred rarities, because these are the ones you will be asked to join or to start.
Learn tunes in sets, not alone
Sessions play tunes in sets of two or three, and the changeover is where things fall apart. A tune you know perfectly in isolation is not the same as a tune you can enter cleanly from the last bar of a different one in a different key. Practice the joins specifically, they are their own skill.
Being able to start it is the real test
There is a large gap between joining a tune already in progress and counting one off yourself. Starting requires the first phrase from nothing, the right tempo, and the confidence to commit before anyone else is playing. Practice starting from silence, because that is the moment that actually arrives when someone nods at you.
Why the traditional repertoire suits spaced review
Session tunes have no lyrics, are largely public domain, and are almost purely structural: two eight-bar parts, each repeated, with the difficulty living in ornamentation and in remembering which of four similar B parts belongs to this tune. That kind of memory decays in exactly the way spaced review is built for, and it is the one part of our catalog we can publish in full rather than describe.
The short version
Twenty core tunes you can start cold beat two hundred you can only join. Practice the starts and the set changes.
Common questions
How many tunes do you need to hold your own at a session?
Around thirty you can genuinely start, and a wider pool you can follow. Regulars will often know several hundred, but they built that over years and they also lose tunes constantly, which is why the good ones keep revisiting old material.
Should I learn from notation or by ear?
Both, but do not let notation become a crutch you never put down. A tune you can only play from the dots is not a session tune yet. Use notation to learn it and then deliberately practice it away from the page.
How many songs can you actually start?
Free, no signup, 60 seconds. Twenty-five songs every working player is expected to know, and one honest answer each. Most musicians are surprised by the gap.
Take the Recall TestOr start a free library: 3 collections of up to 15 songs, no card required.
More guides
The real arithmetic for a three-hour bar or brewery gig: how many songs, how many sets, how much padding, and why the number you can actually start cold is smaller than your list.
Why lyrics vanish under performance pressure even when you know them cold at home, and the practice methods that actually make them stick: retrieval practice, spaced review, and rehearsing the recovery.
Repertoire decays on a forgetting curve like anything else you memorize. What actually goes first, why you usually discover it on stage, and how spaced review keeps a large set playable.
A practical system for keeping 60, 100, or 200 songs performance-ready: triage by confidence, review on widening intervals, and stop spending practice time on songs you already have.