CDs for Geraldine Cotter's Traditional Tin Whisle Tutor

[Bloomfield]

Rather, you’ll suffer from the uncommon syndrome of having the beginning being the weakest part of the piece.

But, kidding aside, I think the backwards trick is good, esp. for memorization.

DISCLAIMER: Don’t use sheetmusic. It’s DANGEROUS.

[Jeff_Guevin]

@Bloomfield Trying to Start a Fight

DISCLAIMER: Don’t use sheetmusic. It’s DANGEROUS.

Yeah, yeah. I really should have learned all those sonatas and concerti by ear. And those damned papercuts!

[Bloomfield]

@Jeff Guevin

@Bloomfield Trying to Start a Fight

DISCLAIMER: Don’t use sheetmusic. It’s DANGEROUS.

Yeah, yeah. I really should have learned all those sonatas and concerti by ear. And those damned papercuts!

If you play sonatas and concerti on whistle, by all means use sheet music.

[Jeff_Guevin]

@Bloomfield

@Jeff Guevin

@Bloomfield Trying to Start a Fight

DISCLAIMER: Don’t use sheetmusic. It’s DANGEROUS.

Yeah, yeah. I really should have learned all those sonatas and concerti by ear. And those damned papercuts!

If you play sonatas and concerti on whistle, by all means use sheet music.

I’m soooo close to taking the bait. But instead I’ll get back to work.

[Azalin]

That’s funny we’re talking about Geraldine Cotter, a friend of mine just came back from Willie Week and she had Geraldine Cotter as a teacher. I can’t wait to get her recordings of Geraldine.

By the way, one of my heroes, Mike McHale, was giving sheet music to his students in East Durham. The strategy he adopted is to make sure the students learned the tune as fast as they could. I really don’t agree with the way he was teaching but who am I to say that!

[Jeff_Guevin]

I guess when it comes down to it, anyone who is serious enough about playing will have to take responsibility for their own aural development. Giving a beginning student sheet music won’t condemn them to never being able to learn by ear, though it might be wise to include a caveat along with it.

[anticDevices]

@squidgirl

@anticDevices

My experience, however, was that my tune playing became much smoother & more confident as a result of practicing the exercises. I feel I spend less time & energy concentrating on twiddling correctly when I’m learning vs. just playing the tune.

First, I’ve gotta know – what on earth is that creature in your avatar?

And thanks for the detailed description – that definitely sounds like something I’d be interested in. For some reason, I find it far less stressful to practice stuff like this in isolation, just as finger exercises floating in space, than to have to stumble out of tune-learning mode into frustrating fingering mode.

For example, I’m one of those people who find it quite soothing to work on stuff like scales, arpeggios, going up and down the notes of various chords, etc – the chord work has been particularly rewarding because later I run into the same patterns in tunes and think “Aha! I recognize you!!” But I’m finding that I like music theory in general – it triggers the same pattern-recognition circuits that made me enjoy studing abstract math.

Up till now I’ve been creating my own exercises by stopping whenever my fingers trip over some section of a tune, and copying that series of notes into a attractive little staff-paper notebook I’ve dedicated to collecting troublesome phrases. When I’m in finger training mood, I repeat each of these finger-tangling phrases ad nauseam, and the rewarding thing is how nice & easy the older ones become as I work through my collection from beginning to end.