Gargoyle,

I'm not quite sure what you mean by downbeat in #1. Down up down is the common picking pattern for a 6/8 jig but other patterns are used effectively, eg. I know a good playet who prefers to use down down up most of the time.

The important thing with the 6/8 jig is that you can split it up 123-123 or you could say your emphasised notes fall on the 1st and 4th beats of the bar.

Remember though that not all tunes in 6/8 are jigs. There are 6/8 marches for example.

#3: The DT contains little in the way of jigs, reels, hornpipes etc. The most comprehensive resource for finding tunes is http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/findtune.html .

Other resources worth looking at if you want tunes by type are Richard Robinson's Tunebook and Heinrick Norbeck's abc site.

As you will have noticed, most of the tune material is in abc. You will find a more complete listing of sites with abc collections, most of which are tune collections at the abc homepage.

Opinions may vary but I see no point in trying to make the dt into a tune (without words) resource as well as a song resource.