Suggestions for a beginner jam?

[Gelsenbury]

OK, I know that there are plenty of relevant sites out there, and I am looking on them. But I have a request that could be resolved much more easily on the basis of someone's experienced advice:

I'm a fairly new mandolin player (just over 1 year of practice with no prior experience of similar instruments), and I play a mini-jam once a week with two friends who are pretty good guitarists. One of them also reads notation quite well, the other one relies mostly on tab or strums chords.

I'd really like to introduce more folk into our sessions, which currently rely quite heavily on strumming along to old rock/pop songs. This is fun for a while, but wears off quickly for me. The problem is that we need to find something that we can all play.

So, against this background: Can you recommend any nice folk tunes that might sound nice for mandolin and two guitars, in tab or standard notation, preferably with chord accompaniment, not too difficult and not too fast? We really enjoy the Coleraine jig, for example, which we play much more slowly than usual, but which still sounds great slowed down.

I'm sure there are loads of suitable tunes out there, but they're hard to find.

[Jill McAuley]

Lots of tunes with soundfiles/notation/chords over at the BBC Virtual Sessions:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/r2music/folk/sessions/

Cheers,
Jill

[HddnKat]

Nice link- thanks Jill. It's hard to find that sort of thing here locally - Bluegrass and Old Time are king.



Lots of tunes with soundfiles/notation/chords over at the BBC Virtual Sessions:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/r2music/folk/sessions/

Cheers,
Jill

[Gelsenbury]

Thank you Jill! This is a great resource. Many of the tunes are too difficult for us, but I'm convinced that we'll play a lot of material from the site you recommended.

[John Kelly]

Have a look at www.thesession.org for loads of tunes available in both abc and standard notation and most with midi files to let you hear the melody. Nigel Gatherer's site over here in Scotland http://www.nigelgatherer.com also has good material and he can offer stuff for beginners to advanced.
I have tunes up on my YouTube channel which might give you some more ideas, having mainly mandolin or octave and guitar backing; many of them have come from the Mandolin Cafe Song-A-Week threads. Look for them under TheOldBores channel.
Hope this helps, and good luck with the jamming!