Mandolin in Ireland

I'm so far behind in blogging that I'll never catch up. And I'm not even going to try. It's not that there's nothing going on - just the opposite, there's so much going on that I don't know where to start. All my recent blogging effort has gone toward documenting our Ireland trip - and thankfully, I can now say that's complete. So it's back to writing about music.

I mentioned in my last post that I decided to take the mandolin to Ireland. That turned out to be the right choice. A number of people brought acoustic guitars, and they took up a lot of space in the airplane overhead compartments and in the bus. I'm glad I had my nice little easy-to-stow mando.

A couple of nights in the hotel bar, people got their instruments out for a jam session, and they were some of the funnest moments we had there. We were given a back area in the bar, and there were 5-6 musicians (plus a number of our tour-mates listening and enjoying pints of Guinness and Irish coffees.) I had my mandolin, there was a fiddler, and everyone else had guitars. We went around in a circle picking songs, and I've progressed far enough on mando to be able to follow the chords on most songs.

We were given a list of jigs, reels, and fiddle tunes to learn for the trip, and I always picked one of these when it was my turn. It was fun and sounded great, with the mando and the fiddle playing melody while the guitars played the accompaniment.

The other mando highlight was on the steps of Slane Castle. The band played one song at the end of our castle tour (as the castle is the site of a huge annual rock concert), and they invited all the musicians on the trip to join in. Don told me to grab his mando (as he was playing his guitar), and we played Whiskey in the Jar.

Oh, and of course I now have an "Ireland" sticker on my mando case.