Paddy O’Brien was born in 1945 near Daingean, Co. Offaly.  There was plenty of music around him growing up and he developed a keen ear from a young age.  He started playing the accordion when he was about 11 and even at that early age that he showed his interest in collecting tunes, often recording tunes from the radio.  He moved to America in the 1980s and continued to play music and gather tunes there.  His first Tune Collection was published on cassette in 1995 and featured 500 tunes – 350 reels and 150 jigs.  This was re-issued on CD in 2002, and followed by Volume 2 in 2004.  To the 500 tunes already published this volume added a further 500, broken up into 150 jigs, 120 hornpipes, 100 polkas, 100 reels and 30 slip jigs.  As if this wasn’t enough he published Volume 3 in 2013 and added a further 500 tunes to the corpus.  This volume has a wider variety of tune types, including 150 reels, 44 slides, 16 hop jigs, 29 slip jigs, 13 slow airs, 80 jigs, 30 set-dances, 50 single jigs, 43 harp tunes and 45 marches.  The full collection comprises 1,500 tunes, of which 650 are reels.

The collections are available directly from Paddy himself and comprise 33 CDs in total, along with three books.  For each tune the book contains a paragraph of text that tells the reader where Paddy got the tune from, who played it, where he heard it, along with interesting details about versions and titles.  This treasure trove of information was a go-to resource in the library of the Irish Traditional Music Archive for tune information in the days before the internet.

The missing piece of this wonderful collection has always been the transcriptions of the tunes themselves.  Thanks to the generosity of Mark Bickford, who donated both time and finances to this project, the notes of all 1,500 tunes in the Paddy O’Brien Tune Collection are now available.  This collection features all of the sessions standards and more, including unusual tunes, different settings and 285 compositions, of which 47 came from the pen of Paddy O’Brien himself (and 17 from his Tipperary-based namesake).

The Paddy O’Brien Tune Collection is the cornerstone of ITMA’s new PORT interface, which will, in time, house all of the 12,000+ interactive scores in the collection.  This new interface allows for more detailed searches, including searches based on key signature, tune type and number of parts.  It is powered by the online platform Soundslice and a script written by fiddle player Danny Diamond from Atlantic Arts.

If you spot any errors in this beta version please let us know by emailing info@itma.ie along with the URL(s) of the tune(s) in question.

ITMA would like to thank Paddy O’Brien for his generosity in making his collection publicly available for free;  Mark Bickford for his financial backing of the project but also for the many hours of transcription that he has put in, and Urszula Waszkiewicz and Hanna Bondar for their help in transcribing the tunes.