Monday 30th October 2006

What's been happening in the sessions recently? Well recently the sessions have been banished to alternative venues for a one-off. Neither were very conducive to nice tunes. For our regular Wednesday night session, it was the function room upstairs which is cold and gloomy - a world away from our beamy snug downstairs. Andy made a welcome return but only briefly. Still not well so we wish him all the best and hope to see him when he's fully recovered. There were only the banjo players left at the end (Paul, Jez, John and myself) so we played a selection of what we iked. Funnily enough, it was the other Irish session which got moved as well. This time from the Anchor Faversham to the Three Tuns Faversham. Once the darts match had finished and the juke box went off, we played some tunes and had a reasonably good time, but it was a poor substitute for the Anchor. Nice to see Adrian again.

The English (or mixed lumpy) session in the Bear though was fine. It escaped all the venue changing gloominess of the Irish sessions and a good time was had by all.

I've added a load more session tunes to my site now at http://www.banjolin.co.uk/tunes and written a 'tune finder'. You can search for tunes with certain snippets of text in the title, or restrict the list to types (Reels, Jigs etc), origins (England, Scotland etc) or which session they're played in - or any combination. It's really quite flexible and doing it made me realise how many tunes are up there now. It's heading for 300 and they're all available as abc format, NoteWorthy Composer or as combined score and tablature images in either gif or pdf. Some of the tunes still have no name (such as 'Prior to the fire' and 'The French Tune and The Swedish Tune') so if anyone knows a title I'd be grateful. I've used the fiddlers companion quite a bit to check origins - http://www.ibiblio.org/fiddlers/FCfiles.html.

No news yet on the Yew Tree at Barfreston, and some talk about alternative Sunday sessions and a Friday night session. More news when it happens. Let's see what this week brings ...