Contact

Guest Book

Hall of Fame

History

Library

Links

The Music

Notices

Play List

Where and When

The Five Reel Set:

This set of five reels is one of the most popular sets of Shetland tunes.

These are traditional folk tunes, so every version you encounter will be subtly different. 

The syncopation of Donald Blue in this set and Faroe Rum in the Faroe set display one of the features of the Shetland music style.  Another phenomenon is the use of modes other than major or minor.  These put Shetland in the middle of Scandinavia, if not geographically, then certainly musically.

Here is an mp3 of the entire set, as performed one Sunday afternoon at Donald's place.  The tunes have the traditional internal structure of AABB.  Each is played twice, ie AABBAABB.  The order is as follows:

In "Sleep Soond in da Morning", Morag Brown helpfully points out that in bars 1 and 3, she plays a G natural instead of the G sharps written here.  The source material seems to be evenly divided on this one.