0:00 - Introduction to Luke Daniels
2:34 - What makes a session successful: number of players and responsiveness
4:05 - How fragile good sessions are and the importance of natural flow
6:30 - A memorable incident: a disruptive pub session in Milltown
8:46 - The story of a plastic bag and unwelcome gatekeeping at a session
10:31 - Giving feedback to fellow musicians and managing social interactions
13:04 - The impact of recording in sessions and respecting musicians' boundaries
25:14 - How beginners should approach joining sessions and tune repertoire
35:41 - The regional differences in session styles and tempo considerations
41:25 - The balance of structure and freedom in improvisation and etiquette
42:54 - The mystery question: playing in different keys and tuning considerations
Conversational Transcript
*[This is an edited conversational transcript, lightly shaped for readability while keeping the spirit of the original conversation]
What does an Irish music session mean?
Tara:
Hello Luke Daniels, how are you?
Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. It would be great to hear your opinions on session etiquette.
Luke is an accordion player who grew up in Reading in the UK. He has been living in Scotland for the last fifteen years and is currently moving to the Highlands of Scotland.
Luke:
I am in the Highlands now, actually.
Tara:
What does an Irish music session mean to you?
Luke:
It is an opportunity to connect with my playing in a way I probably would not get to do on a gig, as a rule.
There is a lucidity and fluidity to playing music that you get in a session, when you have long forgotten whether anyone is listening to you or not.
You might be two or three hours into it, physically two hours into a kind of workout, and you are in a good place.
If it is a good session, it can sustain you. It can sate you and keep you going for weeks.
I have had sessions that kept me going for months because they were so good.
That is why it is so frustrating when someone comes in like an alien object and disrupts the flow. Usually it is temporary, but occasionally it can obliterate a good session.
I have seen it happen.
What makes a good session?
Tara:
What makes a good session?
Luke:
Not too many players.
Everyone using the majority of their brain to listen to what other people are doing.
Another ingredient would be people prepared to react in the moment to what is happening.
It is like when you see a comedian on a panel show. You can tell when they are being naturally funny, and when they are resorting to a routine and delivering jokes they have told over and over again.
In a session, it is the same.
You can tell when someone is showboating something they have played time after time, or something they have practised a lot.
The beauty of a good session is that you are reacting to what everyone else is doing.
At any given point, someone may need to take the lead. But you can still take a chance and dive into a tune that popped into your head two seconds earlier, and see what happens.
See what key you end up in.
That is the best thing about sessions for me. Doing that with really brilliant musicians is a treat, although a rarity.
The fragility of a great session
Tara:
I wonder what makes it so rare?
Luke:
A lot of things have to be in place.
And it is fragile.
You could ensure it by excluding people from sessions, but that is the wrong thing to do.
It has to happen naturally.
You just have to hope the ducks line up in a row.
And if they do not, or one of the ducks falls off the wall, you have to roll with it.
Festival sessions and common repertoire
Tara:
Sessions at festivals can be both things. They can be the best sessions ever, even if they are bigger than we might usually prefer, because there is that giddiness.
Luke:
The difference at a festival is that you might be bringing together musicians who do not play together all the time.
They are feeling around for common repertoire in real time.
Occasionally, I hear someone suggest a first tune, and then if they are not confident, they suggest a second and third tune as well.
In terms of unwritten etiquette, for me that is something you do not really do.
You do not even announce the tune. If you want to play a tune, play the tune and see what happens.
Tara:
It can feel like a lack of confidence if you have to announce the tune because you are hoping someone else will back you up.
Luke:
I would not hold it against anyone.
I have probably done it myself at some point. If you are in a session and do not feel confident, you do not want to be left going into a tune on your own.
If you are not confident doing that, announcing the tune is a way of avoiding that.
But it is best to fly by the seat of your pants.
Tara:
Can you remember a session that went really wrong?
Luke:
One of the earliest ones I remember was in Miltown Malbay, years and years ago.
I was only about fifteen or sixteen. There was a brilliant session happening in one of the pubs.
Someone came in, a randomer, and pushed through this very busy pub. The people listening were curved around us, and he pushed his way into the middle of the session, squeezed into a non-existent seat, and made space for himself.
He did ask, “Is it okay if I sit in with you?”
But by that stage, nobody was going to say no. He was already there.
Then he pulled out this big stick with nails hammered into it and bottle tops attached to the nails.
He proceeded to almost conduct everybody by banging the jangly stick against the floor.
He lasted about fifteen seconds.
The musicians did not have to do anything. The people listening dispatched him pretty quickly.
The accordion in the plastic bag
Tara:
Did you tell me something about your accordion? You came to a session with a plastic bag.
Luke:
Yes. I was the victim of some pretty poor session etiquette.
Maybe it is understandable.
I think it may have been the same year. I got the bus over to Miltown from Victoria coach station and stayed with family friends. I was flitting about from pub to pub on my own.
Eoin O’Neill remembered it years later. He said people were saying, “Who owns him? Who owns that child?”
I spoke to my mother about it because I have children now. She said, “We could not have stopped you. You just went over.”
I walked into a session in Mullagh, and for some reason I was carrying my box around in a Tesco plastic carrier bag.
I did not have anything else. Maybe it was a travel thing. I did not want the extra weight of carrying the big old case, even though it was only a little Hohner Black Dot.
I sat down in a session, and one of the musicians leading it took one look at the bag and thought, “Belter.”
Maybe that would have been excusable.
But he did not let me play a note.
He leaned in and said, “I do not think you want to play in this session. You will not know any of the tunes. It is best if you do not.”
I wilted and folded off.
All I would say is, I would never do that to a kid.
I would bring him in.
How good musicians respond to young players
Luke:
I was at the Ullapool festival recently, having tunes with Fred Morrison, the Scottish piper.
He was playing one of those evening sessions with lots of earnest middle-aged amateur pipers who had been up for the weekend to learn from him.
He was being grand. He was okay.
Then this young lad we had brought along started to play. He was a great player.
Fred came alive.
He instantly saw the lad’s hands and said, “My God, he has good hands. Great hands.”
That is the kind of response you would like to see to any young person.
Regretting giving feedback
Tara:
Have you ever been on the other side, where you had to give feedback?
Luke:
I made a terrible mistake once.
It is the only time I have ever done it, and I learned from it. I felt awful.
I used to arrange music in the Reading Irish Centre. We got bits of funding to do different things with older people there.
There was a session on a Friday night, though Irish music was not popular at the Irish Centre in Reading.
They used to insist on keeping the jukebox on. If anyone put a song on, we had to stop playing, even in the middle of a set.
There was a group of old bodachs who came in to play cards, and they hated the music. They were forever putting music on the jukebox so we could not play.
I thought the reason might be that the session was not good enough.
So I brought a really great fiddle player over from Ireland to join the session. We paid for him to come over for a weekend, do a couple of lessons, and let people hear the real stuff.
We walked in on the Friday night, and for weeks there had been nobody at this session. Then, on the night I brought the fiddle player over, a guy turned up with an electric fretted bass and an amp.
I did not know him from Adam.
I thought, “God, this is going to ruin the whole thing.”
So, to my shame, I asked him not to play that night.
It turned out he was actually a really good bass player and had played with loads of folk musicians. I knew him by name, but not by face.
I felt like a bit of a dick for doing that.
At the same time, you can be forgiven for the conclusion you draw, in the same way the person who turfed me out of the session might have thought the plastic bag was not a good sign.
Session etiquette outside Ireland
Tara:
Sessions outside Ireland, are they more vulnerable to breaches of session etiquette?
Luke:
People are people everywhere.
There was outrageous lack of session etiquette at a session recently. I will go into it.
I do not understand why people see someone who is clearly known, clearly a professional musician, someone who has done gigs most of us can only dream of, and then think, “What would be really good now is if I got my phone out and filmed myself singing a passable version of a Mary Black song for my Instagram feed.”
They sit in the middle of the session so everyone has to stop.
They are not coming in to communicate anything with the other musicians, who have been communicating with each other for the whole evening.
They just want their Instagram moment, and then they go.
That is abuse.
It is a lack of respect for someone who has spent their entire life becoming a really great musician or singer.
It is thinking you can share a space with them just because you get a notion.
Flow
Tara:
I was thinking about the table we were playing at recently. The table was huge, and it got in the way. Objects can disrupt flow too.
Luke:
The word flow kept coming into my head.
Lack of etiquette is anyone or anything that disrupts flow.
That could be someone with very little musical ability coming in and doing something. I have no problem with someone who cannot play the instrument very well sitting and playing along quietly.
What I do not like is when someone comes in and does something where everyone has to stop and listen to them.
The obvious parallel is conversation.
I started a job with Amey as a graduate engineer, and I have team calls with experienced engineers working on the Kingston Bridge in Glasgow.
It would be like me unmuting my mic and saying, “Everybody stop talking about this. I have a poem about bridges that I want to read to you. In fact, I am going to sing it, even though I am not a singer.”
You just would not do it.
So why would you do it in a pub?
Tara:
Some pubs feel like great places for a session, and others do not. The environment makes a difference.
Luke:
When I was teaching, some of the most successful music projects I ran were in really nice spaces.
Beautiful rooms. Inspiring buildings.
Children often achieved more if they were coming to a nice space every week.
Maybe it is the same for a session.
Tara:
During the Fleadh in Letterkenny years ago, there was a pub that became a great place for music.
At the end of the week, after we had played there for days, we started packing up late at night because we thought the staff would be fed up with us.
The owner came over and said, “I know it is late, but the staff have not really had a chance to hear any Irish music properly. Would you stay on for another ten minutes and play a few tunes just for them?”
I have never experienced that since.
It was lovely.
Trying to recreate something natural
Luke:
I remember doing a TV thing in Galway about ten years ago.
It was one of those music programmes with different musicians playing in different corners of the pub. They had members of the public drafted in to stand around drinking free drinks for the afternoon.
This young director was not on top of the scheduling. We were still going at nearly midnight. The musicians wanted to go home. Everybody wanted to go home.
They locked the doors and would not let anyone out because they needed people standing around looking like they were having a great time.
That should be natural.
But it is okay to let go of it and think, “This is just what it is.” The situation may not be where you are going to play your best.
There is no point giving yourself a hard time trying to recreate something that is supposed to happen naturally.
Tara:
What is your opinion on people recording at sessions?
Luke:
I am not averse to getting the phone out.
I might record a tune once through. Not make a recording that could clearly be used, but a reference.
If there is a tune I really like, I will get the phone out and record it once through. Usually it ends up being the B part and then the A part because I was not quick enough to get it from the start.
That is fine. It gives me a reference.
But it is different when someone comes in and sets up microphones and records everything.
There was a guy called Steve Moran, known as the tapeworm, who used to record all the sessions in Miltown. He was a lovely guy and very popular.
At the end of his life, he had an unbelievable archive of sessions recorded over about forty years.
It was a great thing to do.
But people did bristle a bit when they saw him coming because it adds extra tension.
Some older musicians were nervous about being recorded because they thought it would take something from them.
Videoing sessions for social media
Tara:
What about people recording video and putting it on their socials?
Luke:
Not on.
Totally not on.
If I get paid to play in a pub and sign a contract saying recordings can be used, then fine.
But if I am out doing my thing on my own time, having a session, then no.
If I came around to your birthday party or Sunday lunch and filmed you, then posted it on Facebook, how would you react?
It is a grey area because we are in a public house.
But imagine there was a birthday party in a pub, people sitting at a corner table, and someone was telling a good joke or having a conversation. If I stood beside them, filmed them and posted it on Facebook, how do you think they would react?
At the end of the day, I do not worry about it too much because you cannot control everything.
Advice for joining a session
Tara:
What advice would you give to someone who wants to join a session and is worried, maybe starting out or improving?
Luke:
If there is a session in your town, you could go once just to listen.
Record a tune, just once through, and learn it.
One thing we take for granted is the sheer number of tunes that turn over in a session.
People do not realise that we do not necessarily know all those tunes. The skill is being able to tip along to a greater or lesser extent.
Ideally greater.
I am not a big fan of people tipping along and only playing half the tune.
If you are not going to pick it up within a few rounds, then maybe do not bother. Record it and learn it at home.
Even though it is a session, I am always asking myself: if I play now, will this sound better?
If I cannot make it sound better, I will not play.
Tara:
I think similarly. When joining a session, I ask: will I enhance this session by joining?
If the answer is no, I frequently do not join.
Luke:
Yes. You are listening the whole time to what it sounds like as a whole.
There is also the opposite reason not to join.
I walked into a pub in Belfast on Monday night looking for a tune. I made sure nobody could see the box and walked out thirty seconds later.
I had read the room straight away and thought, “I am just going to go home.”
I found a lovely session the next night.
Tara:
Different nights have different strokes for different folks.
Luke:
Yes.
When I go to a session, I am not looking for the craic as such.
I am looking for a little environment where I can connect with my religion.
Tara:
It is like a religion. We are like a little cult.
Listening within the music
Tara:
Do people listen enough?
Luke:
Totally.
The best advice I have been given by musicians of many kinds is that music is about listening.
You spend enough time listening to yourself when you practise.
It is a hard skill to develop, but whatever is happening sounds better if everyone is listening to everyone else.
It also induces that non-thinking state of mind that can be so enjoyable.
You are not thinking about what you are doing. You are just listening and reacting.
You are not reacting with your brain. You are reacting in a less thoughtful way.
Tara:
That is an area we have not touched on enough before: listening within each other.
Luke:
It sounds counterintuitive to say it is great because you are reacting to music in a less thoughtful way.
But when it is done right, you make the right choices.
You are not thinking about what will sound good, or what will impress people.
You are just reacting.
Spending time in that state of mind is good for you. That is what I look to get from sessions.
Children, mistakes and fearlessness
Tara:
Maybe children figure that out more easily. Adults might not even have it in their realm of thought.
Luke:
Children are often fearless when they play in public.
There is a point with children where if they make a mistake, people go, “Aww.”
Then the next day, or the next week, the same child makes a mistake and people go, “Ooh.”
It is not fair because there is no warning of that change.
I have seen it with students. They suddenly realise what they imagine is at stake.
Of course, it is an illusion.
The young kids can see the truth: it does not matter.
Then we start investing in the idea that you cannot make a mistake in public, that you must be flawless.
That inhibits creativity. It inhibits everything music should be.
Then you spend forty years trying to get back to that place as an adult.
The contradiction of session etiquette
Tara:
That is the whole thing about session etiquette. There are no clear lines. It is grey areas and nuance.
Luke:
Most of what we are saying is contradictory.
We are saying you have to adhere to a strict set of etiquette rules, but also that the whole point is to be free and do what you want.
Both are true and can be true simultaneously.
That is why it is such an interesting topic.
Luke:
I was once at a folk music conference in England.
A successful singer was asked to lead a discussion group about how to be successful in the music industry.
She came up to the whiteboard and wrote in big marker pen:
“Don’t be a dick.”
That is a fairly good rule to live by in sessions too.
Tara:
I had thought that these conversations might lead into me writing a book about session etiquette.
I had considered calling it How Not to Be a Dick in Irish Music Sessions.
Luke:
It does not have to be completely rude.
It could mean, do not just be a Tom, Dick or Harry. Be better than that. Think about what other people need.
Luke:
I was thinking about flow and levels of etiquette.
There is the basic stuff: if someone is playing a session, do not do something that demands everyone else stop what they are doing and listen only to you.
Even the best player in the session is not playing in a way where everyone has to stop and listen to them. So why would you do that as an interloper?
Then there is the middle-ground stuff: bodhrán players, guitar players, volume, adapting.
There is nothing wrong with tipping along, although that is very hard to do on pipes.
Then there is top-level etiquette: what instruments are in this session, and what tunes would bring the most out of those musicians?
What can I give them to help them play their best?
For example, if you are playing with an uilleann piper, do not play loads of tunes in B flat. Do not go near F or G minor unless they want to.
Then there is tempo.
I have seen players completely misread the feel of a session and squash their tempo onto it. It is very hard to get that back.
Some very good players do not engage with tempo as much as groove.
That is where you want good music to sit.
Regional bounce and style
Tara:
Do you think there is a different bounce outside Ireland than inside Ireland?
Luke:
Sometimes I get worried in sessions in Ireland, and particularly when I go down to London, where they have their own style.
I played sessions in Glasgow for years, and if I go to London, I worry that initially I am unable to stop playing in a different style.
When you play tunes in Glasgow, there is a way you naturally play to fit with everybody else.
If you played the way they play in London, it would be doing the same thing in reverse.
It is hard if you are used to playing faster or more directly.
If someone has the nyah, it is quite hard to stop doing it.
I have had sessions going the right way, and I have had to work really hard not to destroy that for someone else.
Tara:
Maybe it goes back to listening. You are listening to the others.
Luke:
Listening is a great general rule.
But whoever you play with most, you pick up their rhythmic ticks and habits.
Even listening as hard as you can, your fingers play that way because that is how you have trained them.
Over time, nothing is unchangeable, but it is hard to stop.
It really shows when you are playing with someone who corners everything differently. You can end up riding roughshod over their nice phrasing.
Tara:
So listening to phrasing is really important too.
Some people at different levels may not even be aware that phrasing is a thing.
Luke:
It is an amazing skill to play in time with another human being, let alone to get the phrasing to match.
Master musicians can sit down and make that happen quickly.
Great musicians who play together a lot might achieve it over a long period of time.
The clockwork music machine
Luke:
I did a project in 2016 that involved programming a clockwork music mechanism called a polyphon.
It plays a large steel disc, like a sophisticated music box.
I worked with an electronic engineer to get this clockwork mechanism to play in time with digital samples.
You realise how incredible it is that our brains adapt in real time to a shifting tempo.
The clockwork mechanism ebbed and flowed. Sometimes it was faster, sometimes slower, depending on the wind of the handle and the mechanism.
Its speed was never uniform.
We found a way to make it work, but it showed how incredible it is that even a beginner can clap in time with music.
Try getting a computer to do that.
It is an incredible skill that we have developed.
Tara:
So AI will probably not be able to take over.
Luke:
It is a good question.
AI might identify a BPM and align itself with music that is on a grid.
But if something is changing and ebbing and flowing, we do that without thinking. It is very hard to get a machine to do that.
Playing on the middle of the line
Tara:
When musicians connect together, their bounce, rhythm, tempo and speed knit together. It is like a dance. Your ears are dancing with each other.
Luke:
Yes.
When it is really flying, you start to pull the envelope too. You are playing slightly out of time with each other, just to the point where you have to pull it back again.
I used to play with jazz musicians who talked about playing on the “O” of one, or the “E” of one.
You are still in time, but moving around it.
Tara:
When I was in first year in secondary school, I wanted to do woodwork. I was the first girl to do woodwork in this area.
The teacher used to say that if you draw a line and cut, you cut down the middle of the line. Not the right side or left side, but down the middle.
I have always thought of music like that too.
Luke:
That is a great analogy.
Sessions in different keys
Tara:
The mystery question from the previous guest is:
What opinion do you have of sessions where people tune their instruments to a different key?
Luke:
That is a really good question.
I kind of like them.
I know they are exclusive.
There is a great story about James Byrne and Dermot Byrne travelling down to Sligo for the Fleadh and turning up to an E-flat session. James Byrne apparently did not even tune the fiddle up, and Dermot just played the B/C box as he would.
I would like to inhabit a world where that happens and we just play in E-flat.
I think it is a shame that with such fantastic musicians, we do not engage with more keys like that.
Maybe we could just have sessions where we do not tune up and play in those keys anyway.
Tara:
There was a concert where Dermot’s D button broke, or something like that, and the rest of the band tuned up to E-flat and he just played as normal.
Luke:
We have all heard the stories. It is only when you see it in real life that you think, “Oh. I see.”
Tara:
Thank you so much, Luke. You have been a pleasure to chat to.
This conversation with Luke Daniels keeps returning to one word: flow.
For Luke, a session is not just a place to play tunes. It is a place where musicians enter a shared state of listening, reaction and freedom. When it works, the music becomes less deliberate and more alive.
That is why disruption matters.
A person does not have to be a bad musician to damage a session. They may simply misread the room, force their tempo, demand attention, film without permission, interrupt the musical conversation, or insert themselves where the flow has already found its shape.
Luke’s point is not that sessions should be closed.
In fact, some of his sharpest memories are about how badly it feels when a young player is dismissed before being heard. He knows that side of it too.
The real question is not, “Am I allowed in?”
The better question is: “Will the music sound better if I play now?”
That question asks for humility. It asks for listening. It asks the musician to consider the whole sound, not just their own need to participate.
Luke also names something important about advanced session etiquette. It is not only about avoiding mistakes. At the highest level, etiquette becomes generosity. What tunes suit the musicians here? What key will help the piper? What tempo allows the groove to live? What can I give this room so that everyone plays better?
That is a long way from a list of rules.
It is closer to musicianship.
At its simplest, Luke’s advice may be this: listen hard, protect the flow, and do not make everyone stop for your Instagram moment.
Or, as he puts it more bluntly, do not be a dick.
*Produced & recorded by Tara Connaghan and edited by Anita Alvarez Santos
https://lukedanielsmusic.com
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