Irish tune books abound, but does anyone know of a book that contains American tunes appropriate for whistle (written in D and G)?
Thanks!
Micah
Fiddler’s fakebook has a lot of nowhere-specific tunes in it. The Portland Collection is big for the maypole fools erf I meant Contra dance devotees.
The Fiddler’s Fakebook, mentioned by Brad, has a lot of American old time session favorites in it. You can get a few from Rich Crew’s Tunebook which is online. http://www.math.ufl.edu/~crew/tunebook/Tunebook.html
There’s also the Phillips Collection of Traditional American Fiddle Tunes published by Mel Bay. It has a lot of tunes in it. American musicians like the key of A more than Irish musicians do and you will also find tunes in C and F sometimes. Try Chinkapin (Chinquipin) Hunting at the online tune site in A. Chris Norman recorded it on his Man with the Wooden Flute album. He’s also recorded some others such as Liberty, Bitter Creek and Leather Britches. Another good one from the Crew site is Caterpillar Sittin’ on a Sweet Potato Vine. It works very nicely on whistle.
Steve
Micah:
I went to Ireland a year and a half ago, heard some traditional music there, fell in love with the sound and bought a whistle. The whistle came with a little songbook of traditional irish tunes. Since I had never played any musical instrument, could not read music, didn’t know of any traditional sessions in my area and soon discovered that I was not very good at learning irish traditional music by ear, I was stumped for a while.
After a bit I figured that, if I learned to read music, I could at least start with some simple American or Christmas tunes that I could practice since I already knew how these should sound. I did some searching on net and found a number of sites that had MIDI sound files of familiar American songs. Now, I know that purists will tell you that MIDI files are crap and don’t come anywhere near the real music. True enough, but that’s not the point. The point is that MIDIs are small files that are easy to download and can be “decoded” back on music scores with readily available software. I use something called Midi Studio. It’s available from www.magix.com. There are a number of other programs that do the same thing.
To use it, you just download a midi file and then open it with the Midi Studio program. The really cool and most important thing is that you can change the key signature of the piece and tranpose it into any key you like. Obviously, D and G are the keys you want though not all the music will sound right or transpose into a range that you can play on a whistle. However, there are a lot of pieces that transpose just fine. After transposing the piece, you can print the score and save the transposed version as a new midi file and even use it to play along with at varying speeds that you can control through the program.
For me, this was a very useful way to start. I taught myself how to read music and used the transposed scores of some familiar tunes to start playing.
I should add that, while the cost of the software (around $40 if I remember correctly) wasn’t cheap, it has allowed me to collect a farily large number of midi files of both American and Irish traditional music. In fact given the number of both Irish and American traditional tunes in the public domain, (thousands) in the long run this may be a fairly cheap way of building a respectable library of scores. Again, I should caution that these tunes as played by a computer are no substitute for real performances live or on CD but, are a great way of getting the score for music. And, if you’r like me and are just not very good at picking up a tune by ear, they can be a very useful learning tool. Using these, I have passed from the raw beginner stage and am now going back to learning real irish traditional music.
Since I am a computer geek by trade, that was my way of getting started. My apologies to real musicians who may think this is a horrible suggestion.
peteinmn’s MIDI collection reminded me of a MIDI site which has a bunch of old time tunes in MIDI. There’s also something there you can download called a Karaoke player. It says you can change tempo with it. I don’t have it. Anyway, here’s the address of the site.
http://hetzler.homestead.com/TOC.html
Steve
I think Tadpole Tunes online may help.
The Company of Fifers and Drummers Vol. I and II (not vol. III)
http://companyoffifeanddrum.org/store.html
The Fifers Delight, by Ralph Sweet
and
The Bread and Butter of Jamming
and
Complete Music for Fife and Drum, both by Walt Sweet
http://www.sweetheartflute.com/instruction.html
Lots of American (fife) tunes on line at:
http://www.fifedrum.org
Ryan’s, annotated by Patrick Sky (well-known folkie of the '60’s), and published by Mel Bay. It’s dance tunes, not folk songs. Some really nifty tunes in it.
As Jim Mc said, fife tunes work really well for whistle. I like the American Veteran Fifer book too.
madfifer9
member of the Whistler’s Resistance
I have the Fifer’s Delight, too…many, many great tunes. Its the primary contradance book around here.
OH try Googling ‘Kitchen Musician’ and see what you get…the links from the Kitchen Musician will get you all sorts of goodies.
i believe ralph sweet actually published one. i do not have the info at hand, but pm me and i will look it up.
meir
Ryan’s Mammoth Collection was originally published in the 19th C and eventually published again as Cole’s 1000 Fiddle Tunes. So if you come across a Cole’s it’s essentially the same book. It was published again in the 1990s as Ryans. There are a lot of interesting northern-type tunes in the book and interesting settings of familiar Irish, Scottish and English tunes. There are hornpipes and clogs which I doubt that you’d find anywhere else. There are also a bunch minstrel tunes. Often these are called jigs even though they are in duple meter. In the minstrel era any dance tune could be called a jig. If your’re a tune book junkie, as I am, you’ll probably find it very worthwhile.
It’s probably worth noting that the Mel Bay collection and Rich Crew’s online tunebook which I previously mentioned are both oriented toward Southern and Appalachian tunes while books like Ryan’s and Fifer’s Delight are more northern.
Steve