Here's a selection of tunes we like to play for Bal dancing. We've picked tunes that we hope are fairly simple to pick up and not too difficult to play, but have a lot of scope for experimenting with harmonies, interesting chords and generally messing around. We've written chord suggestions for most of the tunes, but these are just suggestions. Neither of us really speaks French or Dutch, so apologies in advance for some interesting attempts at pronouncing tune names.
Tunes in this style tend to be in more interesting keys than English/Irish tunes. We've included the tunes in original keys, but don't hesitiate to ask us to play them in different keys if these don't work for your instrument. This website makes transposing to any key really easy.
We'll aim to play the tunes at a speed suitable for dancing, but on the slower end of that range, to give you a bit more time to get your fingers round the tunes and find spaces to experiment. If there's keys or tunes that your instrument can't do, please let us know when you join the session so we can accomodate.
We've made some recordings of some of the tunes, available in this Google Drive folder. The code behind this website, including abc notation for the tunes is on GitHub. If you have any feedback or questions, have found a typo or generally just want to chat with us, email band@flyingcat.dance.
This site is powered by our tunebook javascript library, if you'd like something like this for your band, get in touch!