>>Snail,your wish is my command,how many do you want,and how much do you pay.

A little incongruous. If you know so many, Dick, why didn't you do something about it rather than asking Bryan to sort out a problem he hasn't got? Closest to flaming I get.

My grandmother when she got quite old used to drive her Morris Minor (the one with the dull metallic thud when you hit the body work) around South Woodford and accidents used to happen all around her. She was never involved in an accident. If there had been such a thing in the 70's and 80's she would probably have posted to threads on forums entitled 'Why are people such bad drivers?'

>>There's a regular Irish tune session at a pub near me; massive thing, twenty or thirty players in perfect time, reeling off tunes by the yard. I know some of the tunes they do, more or less, pretty much, but I've never sat in with them; in fact the thought of sitting in with them makes me go hot and cold all over. Nobody's told me I'm not good enough for that session - in that sense (the sense Bryan's objecting to) nobody's discouraged me. I've still been discouraged, by the sheer quality of the playing - and I suspect that a lot of the 'non-improvers' we've been talking about would be similarly discouraged if they turned up at the Lewes Arms.

20 or 30 people rarely play in perfect time. The impression is that they do. The nature of that big a session is that you can get involved with no worry that you could ever spoil anything. I'm off to a local session tonight on a much smaller scale. They won't hear me if I play quietly and they will if I play loudly. I'd get involved if it's that many people because you can't go wrong. The essence of a session is that people join in. Not like a folk club at all.

Most Irish tunes have very few chords. And most Irish tunes will work with you droning on the root note (if you have a guitar for instance). So if it's the Irish Washer Woman in D drop your bottom string to D and just play in time on the D note. There are a lot of people who would think you are a very creative player and applaud the fact that you aren't bringing in any fancy stuff. And it works of course :)

If you want to be really flash start from the root note of the tune and play an octave backwards against the tune and you won't be far off

Once your in it's easy and you have enough sense to know when to play and when not