Very much a contender for most popular - or at least most played - Irish tune of all time, Drowsie Maggie is in every beginners tune book. It is not necessarily the easiest tune to play, but it is a fun one and definitely has that sound of what people who don't listen to folk think folk sounds like. Who Maggie was and why she was drowsie are questions we will likely never know the answer to, but what we do know is that the tune is a reel, which means that is in 4/4 (four beats to a bar) and is played straight rather than swung. The main characteristic of this tune is the rocking back and forth on a pedal note which is a technique we will come across in several tunes (Tam Lin and Irish Washerwomen off the top my head) and makes the tune run along at a good pace without having to play very fast.
Here is the notation and mandolin tablature for the Folk Orc version, as with all traditional music, there are several versions out there, all slightly different.
The tune is in the key of D Major or E Dorian, you may occasionally hear this referred to as D Modal too. The only important thing to know is that it uses the notes D E F# G A B and C# but the tune centres itself around the E note (the note being used as a pedal note in the A section). Good practice with learning a tune is to learn the scale first, it puts your fingers in the right place and if you have learnt the scale well then you will spend less time looking for the right notes as you play it. Try playing the notes of D Major over the backing track, start by playing them in order but the feel free to play around with them and improvise a bit too.
You could play the notes across the range of the tune, which means you would start on a low D and play up past the next D an octave above right up to the top A which is the highest note in the tune. This is what that looks like in notation and mandolin tablature:
Here is the backing track, if you want to practice the scale without the lead instrument then skip forward to the 3:00 minute mark.
Once you have the scale down (it doesn't have to be perfect), give the tune a go. Initially just try to get one bit in, don't try and play the whole tune first time, maybe aim to get bars 1 and 3 in before anything else. Enjoy.
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