A word from Randal Bays about sessions and the tune list ... 

Click here to download the 2026 guided session tune list.

We want everyone to be able to play in sessions at Cascadia Irish Music Week, so we will have two kinds of staff-led* sessions; “Guided” and “Free-range”. The guided sessions will be led by members of the teaching staff, working from our list of tunes and keeping a slow to moderate tempo. So if you know most of the tunes on the list, you should be able to take part. 

Other sessions will be high-level (“Free-range”) sessions in terms of repertoire and tempo, also led by members of our teaching staff. If you're not quite ready to take part in this kind of session, don't feel bad about just listening. Relax, have some fun and let the music get into your soul... it's how we all learned it. 

* There will also be plenty of informal sessions that pop up throughout the week, in dorms and public campus spaces. You are encouraged to join in, or host your own! 

A note about repertoire and our tune list..

Please keep in mind that this list is only meant for the “Guided Sessions”.  And please, please don’t let this list be a source of stress… it’s meant to relieve your stress. If you learn just a few of the tunes on this list you’ll be guaranteed to be able to play in the guided sessions.

When you're learning, it's hard to know which tunes are the ones that people might play in a session. Bear in mind that a session is not a performance venue, but a place where the musicians play together and refresh their memory of the tunes. So to take part, you have to have at least a basic repertoire of common session tunes, and without some guidance it's hard to know which ones to spend your time learning. 

For years people asked me for a "basic tune list", but even a basic list would be huge. This year’s list of 50 tunes is one I came up with and it's a totally arbitrary selection. You could easily come up with several more lists of the same length containing nothing but standard tunes that most Irish players know. Others have come up with their own lists, equally valid, and I especially recommend the series of books and CDs put out by Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann (CCE), called Foinn Seisun (Session Tunes). 

Remember, the point of this list is just to narrow the repertoire down for our guided sessions, so that everyone will have a chance to play. It's a good starting place and the more sessions you go to, the more tunes you'll learn. 

Randal Bays, Fiddle teacher and Artistic Director 

P.S. If you want to read lots more about my opinions :-) on Irish sessions, have a look at www.randalbays.com/sessions.html