Recording new music

Hello everyone,
I have been kept busy recording lots of new music…
Na Mooney’s
I have been recording with my family Na Mooneys these last few weeks, commissioned by our local Donegal Earagail Arts Festival, which we are very excited about.
My brother Gearoid has a great way with words and has written a beautiful poem which my sister Anna has composed a musical melody to accompany it.
Anna, my daughter Nia and I sing it with accompaniment from everyone else.
Then the rest of us, Ciarán, Nia , Caitlín and myself, have composed a few tunes which we will be debuting very soon and showing you the process which we worked on this during this pandemic and staying socially distant as well.
We have been recording in our local studio owned by Manus Lunny, whom we now have adopted as one of the clan (he doesn’t know that!).
We are recording now instead of our week-long workshops which we were supposed to host as part of this year’s Earagail Arts Festival. The workshops had to be postponed until next year because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Hopefully next year, we will be able to host you in our lovely home area of North-West Donegal and show you the roots of our music!
New commission
I am also very excited to have been commissioned by Aoife Nic Chormaic , producer of RTÉ Radio 1’s premier traditional music programme ‘The Rolling Wave’, and the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA), to compose a piece of music along with a few other traditional musicians, which will be transmitted during the July or August .
I will put it on my web page here as well.
An Cathaoir / The Chair
This week, I have been busy with an RTE television programme , recorded last Tuesday.
It’s called An Cathaoir, which means The Chair.
The concept behind it is that you sit on the chair and talk about pivotal memories in your life that have affected you or inspired you.
It was a challenge to choose the memories and put it all together, I hope it will be of interest to others.
Basically, it is me blabbering for half an hour and they show archive footage of the various events!
I’ll let you know when it will be broadcast.
On another subject…
Now after the first few weeks here, learning the fiddle, how are you enjoying the lessons?
I’d love to hear from you on how I could improve the lessons or any other pointers for my next recording session of new classes which I hope to get working on soon.
Don’t forget to spread the word about my fiddle lessons , please!
Thank you again for being part of my Donegal fiddle class and circle.

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An Cathaoir / The Chair sounds like a really neat concept! Looking forward to watching.
The video lessons are wonderful and appreciate being able to adjust speed and download the audio. Re: new tune suggestions, Is The Big Man Within/Tilly Finn’s 🙂
Hi Mairead!! I am really enjoying the lessons. I am reviewing old tricks and I am learning new ones too. It’s the best fiddle videos that I ever watched. Thank you!