Tunes for the Oxford Beginners Session

These are tunes chosen for the monthly Oxford Beginners session.

The Oxford Beginners session is an opportunity for all inexperienced musicians to gather and play together. The tunes, all popular in the folk session repertoire, are chosen because we think they’re tunes that even those who have only been playing for a few weeks can have a go at. They don’t require a fast tempo, and the range of notes is limited. But they’re still real tunes, as played at other sessions.

The first tunes listed are those we think are especially easy. Start with those!

The tunes are drawn mostly from the Cry Havoc session repertoire. Others are taken from the Oxford Slow Session.

See below if you'd like to print a book of these tunes.

Click on the tune title or first line music for a page showing the dots for the tune and giving links for downloading the tune in various formats. If you don't read music, or you'd like to work on practising learning tunes by ear, or just playing along with the tune, click on the learner icon for a page where you can listen to the tune repeatedly, either at the full playing speed or several slower speeds.

When changes to this site are made, the issue number is incremented. This is issue 432.

The tunes

Printing

You can download a PDF of a booklet of these tunes. There is an A5 landscape book with one tune per page, a 4x5in portrait book suitable for use with an eReader like a Kindle, Nook, Kobo etc., and an A4 book with two or more tunes per page.

If you have a printer that can do duplex (i.e. print on both sides of the paper), you might like the A5 booklet. Print this onto A4 paper using both sides of the paper, and fold in half to make an A5 booklet.

You can also now download a PDF of the Bumper Booke. The Bumper Booke contains all the Session tunes and all the Morris tunes in a single book. There is an A5 landscape book with one tune per page, an A4 book with two or more tunes per page, and an A5 booklet for printing on A4 paper and folding in half.