101 Folk Tunes For ALL Instruments - Learn Slowly By Ear

These well-known Tunes are played live. Each is repeated very slowly for 5 minutes to help you learn & memorise easilyThe recordings are from Sidmouth Folk Week over 2025/4 and made with encouragement from the course leader Jeanette. I interview her so you can understand the purpose, legacy and context.

I thought there were 99 but now I reckon it's 101. She has been running these workshops for a few years to teach people how to gain confidence playing folk tunes and to increase their repertoire so they can then go to 'normal speed' sessions aka 'darned fast playing. ' I went to all of these classes personally and you might even hear me trying to learn the tunes in the background although I did try to be very quiet about that.

The way the sessions run I think is really excellent, you just play the same tune over and over for five or seven minutes at a slow speed, and from what I could see everybody in the room got better and better at the Tune and did slightly begin to speed up towards the end, which is no bad thing. Some of the tunes are repeated and they were played on different days so just play all of them including the repeats as you will get a slightly different feel each time. This is about 12 hours of study or at least I was in the classroom for about 12 hours learning these songs so I think you should get a great workout here on any instrument and thoroughly enjoy it.

They have produced a book to go with these songs and I will put a link to where you can purchase it if you wish to although really the plan is to learn all this by ear not reading.