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2/4 Reels

What’s a 2/4 reel you ask? There are often a number of different tune styles in the old collections that are given the name ‘reel’. There are tunes that we would recognise as reels today, with the ‘cut time’ or 2/2 time signature and two beats to the bar (think ‘Mrs Macleod of Rasaay’). But there are many others that just don’t work when played like this. Some have dense groups of semi-quavers and would either be impossible to play or sound horribly rushed at standard reel tempo. There are also tunes that have a little more space in them and sound sluggish when played a standard reel tempo, these are the tunes you will find on this page.

What to call this tune style? The tempo and feel seems similar to the way they play polkas in the south west of Ireland but I haven’t used ‘polka’ as the tune category as they are not common in Scotland and, as far as I know, didn’t even exist when the old collections were published. The name ‘reel’ was good enough back then and as some of the tunes were originally published in 2/4 I’ve gone with ‘2/4 reel’ to help distinguish from the other styles of reels.

Click here to return to the Auld Tunes page.