History

A Brief History

Maynooth GAA Club and Con Gill's Travellers Rest See Jonathan's Backstory.

Byrne's Pub in the Square, Kilcock, hosted our Thursday night traditional music session for nearly 10 years. Aidan and Rita kindly set us up in the little snug on the left of the bar. Unfortunately this made it difficult to gain the attention of bar staff. Not a problem - we attached an old push bell to the wall using BluTak and underneath was affixed the legend - "Push for Porter".
Rita was surprised on spotting this new fixture and enquired as to when it had been installed. The bould Jolley declared that it wasn't bloomin' working anyway and promptly moved the contraption onto another wall! Rita could only laugh and returned with a tray of porter - on the house! We were never left dry after that. Aidan and Rita retired after Halloween 2002.

Brady's Bar in Maynooth opened its doors to us rambling minstrels and Declan and Tony welcomed us in. When they started to renovate the entire place it was time to go rambling again.

The Dowdstown was our next Thursday Home - it was renamed Straffan Lodge and finally Straffan Court. We had many happy times there until they turned it into a nursing home but we managed to escape in time.

The Newtown Inn with its lovely mirrored snug was our very happy Thursday home for 12 years until The Pandemic put a stop to everything.

ZOOM Sessions at home kept us going during the Covid...and added greatly to our list of songs - and quite a few fresh tunes as well.

Currently we have our Thursday Session in McMahon's Snug.

The Music

The tunes are nowadays in .mp3 format, although I used MIDI versions previously, as they were very light on resources, being basically text. Mostly I used to provide three tempos for each tune as an aid to learning the tricky bits.
Those midi versions are still available and you can access them by clicking on the "Show Midi" button, top of the right.
As Midi doesn't work on many mobile phones I added an .mp3 audio version.

The tunes in sets are given in sheet-music format and also in .abc format.

I usually write out the tunes in .abc and then I use ABCNavigator2 to convert the .abc files to sheet music.

A far greater selection of Irish Traditional Tunes may be found at Henrik Norbeck`s abc site and if you wish to play them or convert them to MIDI you may do so using his ABCMUS program.