Explore Irish traditional music through tune data, visualisation, ABC notation search, and practical session tools.
Trad Tune Explorer is an independent project for Irish traditional musicians, learners, teachers, tune collectors, and researchers. It helps you explore tune relationships, common session tune sets, recording pathways, ABC notation melody fragments, repertoire overlap, and tune flow patterns using data derived from TheSession.org.
The Project
Trad Tune Explorer was created to make Irish traditional music data more explorable, visual, searchable, and practically useful for musicians.
Tune Flow Analysis
Discover which reels, jigs, hornpipes, polkas, slides, marches, and other tunes commonly lead into or follow one another in recordings and shared session sets.
Practical Session Tools
Quickly recall tunes, search ABC melody fragments, compare repertoires, identify missing set tunes, and explore tune settings commonly played by musicians.
Community Exploration
Explore how the traditional music community contributes Irish tunes, sets, recordings, sessions, events, venues, comments, and tunebooks over time.
What You Can Explore
Trad Tune Explorer provides practical Irish traditional music discovery tools designed for session musicians, learners, teachers, tune collectors, arrangers, and researchers.
Irish Session Tune Transitions
Discover which reels, jigs, hornpipes, polkas, slides, and marches are commonly played together in recordings and real-world Irish music sessions.
ABC Notation Melody Search
Search traditional tunes using short ABC notation melody fragments and discover related tune settings, variants, and repertoire connections.
Tune Set & Recording Analysis
Explore tune pathways, tune flow patterns, repertoire overlap, session tune combinations, recording sequences, and commonly shared tune sets.
Popular Trad Music Tools
These tools are designed to answer practical questions that come up when learning, arranging, remembering, or exploring Irish traditional tunes.
ABC Melody Fragment Search
Search for tunes from a short ABC phrase when you remember only a fragment of the melody.
Recording Follow-on Trees
See which tunes most often follow a selected tune in recording data and common tune sequences.
Recording Lead-in Trees
Work backwards from a tune to discover common lead-ins and session set starting points.
Artist Pathways Explorer
Explore artist connections, tune pathways, and recording-based links between traditional music repertoires.
Fast Tune Recall
Quickly recover tune names, search repertoire clues, and find likely matches while practising or playing.
Visual Search Hub
Start from one place and choose the best tune search, tune flow, recording, or repertoire tool for your question.
About Martin Wells
Martin Wells is a Sun Certified Java Developer with over 20 years of professional experience spanning financial services, shipping, European agencies, automotive, tourism, and real estate domains.
His primary focus has always been server-side architecture and development, with strong emphasis on scalability, maintainability, software quality, and practical business outcomes.
Throughout his career he has worked with Agile delivery models, microservices, event-driven systems, distributed architectures, REST APIs, asynchronous processing, CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise integration systems.
Alongside enterprise software engineering, Martin has a long-standing interest in traditional music, tune learning, tune discovery, and session culture, which ultimately led to the creation of Trad Tune Explorer.
He is a guitarist with a mainly self-taught background rooted in classical guitar, and later studied jazz guitar with Venezuelan guitarist and composer Antonino Croce. His interest in music theory, tune structures, improvisation, and repertoire discovery strongly influenced the analytical and exploratory nature of the project.
Professional Experience Highlights
Selected technologies, architecture styles, and domains worked on during a 20+ year software engineering career.
Architecture & Design
Microservices, layered monoliths, event-driven systems, hexagonal architecture, CQRS, SOA, DDD, UML, design patterns, enterprise integration patterns, Agile/SCRUM/Kanban, and RUP.
Java & Backend Technologies
Java, Spring Framework, Spring Boot, Kafka, JMS, REST APIs, SOAP/WSDL, JPA, Hibernate, MyBatis, SOLR, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, OpenShift, Jenkins, and CI/CD pipelines.
Industry Experience
Experience across automotive, finance, European agencies, shipping, tourism, real estate, pensions, and enterprise portal systems.
Selected Companies & Projects
Worked on projects and systems for organisations including SEAT, AUDI, JP Morgan, EUIPO/OHIM, Northern Rock, Clearstream Banking, Lloyd’s Register, and others.
Roles included senior developer, architect, technical lead, systems designer, consultant, freelancer, and business partner.
Frequently Asked Questions
A brief explanation of how the project works and what it is for.
What is Trad Tune Explorer?
Trad Tune Explorer is an independent traditional music analysis and discovery project focused on Irish session tunes, tune transitions, tune sets, recordings, and ABC notation melody search tools.
Can I search tunes using ABC notation?
Yes. The ABC melody fragment search helps identify related traditional tunes and tune variants from short ABC notation phrases.
How are tune relationships calculated?
Tune relationships are derived from recordings, tune sets, repertoire overlap, and tune transition analysis using data derived from TheSession.org.
Is this affiliated with TheSession.org?
No. Trad Tune Explorer is an independent project. It uses data derived from TheSession.org and aims to complement and support the wider traditional music community.
Contact
Questions, feedback, bug reports, collaboration ideas, and feature suggestions are always welcome.
Email: martin@tradtuneexplorer.com
Data & Attribution
These tools use data derived from TheSession.org and its community contributions.
TheSession data is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence. Trad Tune Explorer aims to complement and support the wider traditional music community by making tune relationships, tune sets, recordings, and session patterns easier to explore.
TheSession Trad Tune Explorer is an independent project and is not officially affiliated with TheSession.org.
The PostgreSQL database schema used by TradTuneExplorer is available on GitHub: tradtuneexplorer-search-db .