MichaelR says chording is non-traditional in Irish music.Well, chording goes as far back as the music has been recorded, for a start; unlike the current fashion for DADGAD playing which I would guess comes from the London folk scene of the 60's.Anda quick trawl through O'Neill's, for example, will show that the most common way of constructing the B part of a fiddle tune is to follow the exact harmonic strucure of the A part. Which would seem an odd way of going aboutthings, unless the musicians were thinking of the harmonic structure of what they were playing.I would go further, and say that traditional Irish fiddle tunes without an obvious and clear harmonic structure (by which I mean easy to put piano or guitar chords to) are extremely rare. Wonderful, beautiful, sure, but very very rare.Irish music, as you would expect,fits smack bang into the northwest European tradition of dance music. Overwhelmingly harmonic( for the last few hundred years, obviously I am not talking of the distant past).