For those who use printed music to learn tunes

Whistle
1

Hi All:
I am posting this thread to save a LOT of time and trouble for those who wish to learn session tunes via sheet music. I may be taken to task but that’s okay.

The whole premise is challengeable by those who advocate learning by ear only but let’s avoid that here as its been covered elsewhere. Just for the sake of this thread, say you want to learn a popular session tune so you can play it with others someday. That is where I am coming from. It should be enhanced by listening to records and live of course to re-inforce the nature of the tune IF they are available to you where you live.

My observations are based on several years of music book buying and comparing common tunes. I have huge piles of music, xeroxes of tunes and abc printouts. And I am tired of rummaging through them.

I generally support the music printing industry but am really frustrated by the editorial choices in the printing of Irish and Scottish traditional tunes.

The short answer is this: you are better off using Henrik Norbeck’s website tunes in abc notation to learn SESSION tunes for whistle than any tunebook. Period. It must be accompanied by knowledge of ornaments, brought to you by Brother Steve or other good explanations of rolls etc.. Double period.

The explanation (long answer): I started off with ONeill’s (Krassen edition) which many people own. Krassen chose to write out every roll, showing precise grace notes. He used a different notation for off-beat rolls, showing triplets but once again with precise cut and tip notes. If you do not understand what you just read, go see BSteve.

Anyway, the tunes LOOK very imposing and may scare you off. This is ALL WRONG!!! Session tunes may be fast but they should not look impossible to play and the sheer amount of black ink used in Oneills makes the tunes look more complicated than they are.

I have purchased a motley collection of tunebooks since then, INCLUDING the much-recommended McCullough 121 (?) Session tunes with the 4 CDs. McCullough notates rolls differently but his choices for off-beat rolls use triplets without cuts and tips. ITS VERY CONFUSING and does NOT jibe with what you will hear people playing. He went for simplicity but went off-track in my opinion.

If you take any common session tune, like Fermoy Lasses, you will find the abc Norbeck a lot easier to read and understand than any tunebook I have seen. The triplets that McCullough uses to substitute for offbeat rolls can confuse you because sometimes there ARE real triplets in session tunes.

I do not wish to diminish the value of McCulloughs CDs, though the reels are played so slow even in the “real” version that you may get wrong phrasing ideas compared to real-time session speeds.

I searched the archive before posting this and could not find this exact topic covered. Because a lot of very good players probably don’t read music much anyway, perhaps this has not been discussed. I don’t know for sure.

I I have had a great favor done me by many of you and I wish to convey this to others to save a lot of money and confusion. I certainly welcome correction by the more experienced but I feel strongly about seeing others wasting their efforts when it should be simple.

The value of tunebooks is that they may show you LESSER known tunes. But every book has its own approach and they are not consistent. McCullough’s old Tutor was much more sensible and showed rolls as symbols over notes. If I understand correctly, rolls should come to you automatically via practice anyway. This is all you need to see really unless there is some peculiar refinement I am not yet aware of.

If you remember that the ultimate goal is not to use music anyway, the shortest, easiest printed version possible makes the most sense. The more you do by reflex, the better it is in the long run and this whole tradition is based on playing by ear.

Other books simply don’t show ornamentation and assume you know them. The great Breathnach books ARE great but as Peter Laban and others pointed out, are not always standard session versions of the tunes that you will encounter but instead sometimes custom virtuoso versions. And Breathnach changed notation strategies after the first book.

Also remember that Norbeck references where you will find the tune on a record and which version is being played. He also covers all of the common session tunes, I THINK. This is invaluable. I challenge anyone to play directly from Oneils or McCullough with a cd version of a tune compared to Norbecks. So far, Norbecks is always a lot closer to what you hear. Not exact of course, but a lot closer. He has done a great service in his passion for trad music. I cannot vouch for the other abc tunesites like Ceolas as I haven’t compared them. Norbecks is indexed on line and I downloaded everything and cut and paste from my own hard drive.

So do yourself the favor and learn how to negotiate the abc process. The software is free as are the tunes. The process is covered elsewhere. Save time and trouble.

Best wishes to all.

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Thanks Weekenders. I appreciate the time you took over this suggestion and I will try the Norbeck site. I haven’t yet taken the time to really learn the ABC program and everything takes me a long time on it at this point, but I also have quite a few tunebooks of varying usefulness and still can’t find tunes I need.

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Norbeck Site: an URL would be useful… :slight_smile:

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As I am quoted here I have a little comment to make.

I agree with a lot weekenders carefully phrased above especially that the Norbeck collection is a very good and very useful collection, I am not too sure I am fully with him though on the ‘you see what you hear’ issue. Breandan Breathnach was the first collector who wrote down the music as he heard it. This approach enables the reader to gain some insight in the styles of the traditional players whose music was transcribed for the books. Truly what you see is what you hear’. And I admit I am in the comfortable position of having copies of some of the recordings used in compiling the music for these books. Breandan was always very liberal in his approach and provided ‘aspiring players’ [as he would call them, or us if you like, at the time] with material that he thought would help them along.
I think the first collection of Ceol Rinnce na hEirreann is the single most important collection available, for a number of reasons but most importantly for the repertoire contained in it. I wouldn’t say I play all tunes in the collection but nine out of ten wouldn’t be an overstatement.
From the viewpoint of seeing what you hear but not having access to Breandan’s private recordings [now available for reference in the Irish Traditional Music Archive in Dublin], the third volume of CRE is of great value as Breandan, to accommodate a new generation of players, transcribed the tunes in this collection from recordings commercially available [at the time, and most of them still are]. In this collection you will find for example exact transcriptions of a good few tunes from Mary Bergin’s first, then, LP. Just to name one relevant to whistling.
By the way, BB only changed the transcriptions for vol 2, by three he was back using the self invented half-moon [or nail clipping] symbol to indicate rolls.
As said above the value of the collections lays in the fact that they give an insight in playing styles and thus provide a means of actually learning the music [as opposed to just the tunes]. While the Norbeck collection gives you tunes. As Weekenders said SESSION tunes. I could go into a discussion here about what uilleann piper Jimmy O Brien-Moran recently described as ‘the perceived pleasures of the session’ but I won’t. Maybe another thread should be started on that one. Suffice to say that I don’t think being able to roll off the same sixteen bars three times before going into the next tune and doing that in the company of dozens of others doing the same thing, necessarily equals playing music. To learn ‘the music’ maybe you should look beyond the books of ‘session tunes’ it may be useful to use these sources to obtain repertoire but only after learning ‘the talk’ and ‘the grip’ [to once more quote Seamus Ennis].


[ This Message was edited by: Peter Laban on 2002-05-22 07:16 ]

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I agree that Henrik Norbeck’s tune site is a marvellous ressource. The (much-recommended) URL is as follows:

http://home1.swipnet.se/~w-11382/abc.htm

:slight_smile:
Jens

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By the way, for those who pooh-pooh sheet music, ABC files can also be used to learn tunes by ear, by converting them to MIDI files.

Admittedly, this is awful compared to a human recording or live performance of a melody; however, it's a great resource for praticing your learning-by-ear skills, if you have 2,000 session tunes which you can call up and play at random (and later convert them to sheet music to see if you got the notes right.)

Caj

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I completely and utterly disagree with the above, playing back abc files is absolutely detrimental aquiring this music. They completely lack the proper phrasing or internal rhythms vital to Irish traditional music. If you go this road you will never ever be able to play this music in any meaningful way.

The whole point of learning music by ear is the fact that you get the whole style and ‘language’ of the music thrown in for free [a process recently very nicely described here by Conal O Ghrada]. Playing back ABC files brings you ALL the disadvantages raised against learning from printed music.

[ This Message was edited by: Peter Laban on 2002-05-22 07:56 ]

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Very interesting, Weekenders!

Being a real newbie, I obviously hadnt picked up on the nuances you are emphasizing.

I will say that after several weeks of struggling with the sheer mass of JC’s Tunefinder (a momentous resource that sometimes returns 20 to 60 different files in response to a search for a single tune), I found that going first to Norbeck was much better, since, more often than not, Norbeck has what I’m looking for, he only has one or at most two versions of a single tune, and, in almost every instance I can recall, the version of a Norbeck abc tune is the version I’m looking for.

For example, when I was trying to find abc files for the tunes in Mary Bergin’s Feadoga Stain CD, searches in JC for one of her tunes returned a flood of results, while Norbeck had just one, and it was usually pretty darned close (minus the ornamentation) to what she was doing, or at least a lot closer than what some of the versions in JC’s.

I’m not dissing JC, Im just saying that as a newbie, its hard to assess the accuracy of abc files on the web (heck I could even do and post an abc file, and what the heck to I know?), and in my limited and humble experience, Norbeck is easier and has never let me down.

Thats why I laughed when I read your post, Weekenders, because I kinda bumbled my way to your same conclusion without having as detailed and extensive a knowldege of/experience with ornamentation as you.

As for the relative merits of L.E.'s 121, I’ll have to ponder this. I’ve been working with it extensively lately to learn basic tunes, and haent yet gotten to the point of tackling rolls. I would be intersted to hear more about the extent to which listening to the CDs is either helpful or counterproductive.

This is already looking like an excellent Matrix thread. I’ll let more comments come in, though, before I index it.

DAZED

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On 2002-05-22 07:19, Peter Laban wrote:
I completely and utterly disagree with the above, playing back abc files is absolutely detrimental aquiring this music. They completely lack the proper phrasing or internal rhythms vital to Irish traditional music. If you go this road you will never ever be able to play this music in any meaningful way.

I agree with Peter. I posted an ABC tune on the Tune-o-Tron at Concertina.com this week, and it just sounds really, utterly flat. Maybe it’d get a bit better if I plyaed around with it, but it’ll still not be a human being playing it.

Listen to a tune played off a CD and the whole thing comes alive. Go and hear it played live in a session, and it’s another level again.

ABC gives you the basic melody, but the basic melody is just possibly the least important part of Irish music. Hence the whole discussion about Polkas recently.

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just my 2 cents worth, which is worth, by the way, just exactly 2 cents!

As a fair musician who plays by sheet music and ear, I prefer sheet music which is just simply the melody without any ornamentation. (IMHO, not everyone should be playing ornaments in a group setting) That way as your skills with ornaments get better you can throw them in yourself…unless that is, you are trying to exactly copy someone else, but I prefer to have my own style.

One of the biggest things that helped me go from just reading music to playing by ear successfully is learning the pentatonic scales. If anyone is interested there are excellent explanations of this in the archives, just do a search.

Anyway, that’s my take on it, for 2 cents.

Deb

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Walton’s “Best of…” series (with demo CDs) are a great resource of plainly recorded and notated tunes. They are recorded a bit slower than usual tempo, so you can actually hear the notes, and the ornamentation is left entirely to the listener.

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While I sometimes disagree with Peter on what I perceive to be his die-hard ‘you have to be in Ireland to learn this stuff’ philosophy, I have to admit that I’m 100% behind him on this one.

Sheet music will give you the base notes, and midi will do the same. Neither will give you the ‘flavor’ of Irish music..the style, phrasing..that touch of soul.

Back when I was first learning to play, I used sheet music and midi files almost exclusively to try to learn tunes. In retrospect, I’m quite embarrassed about what I sounded like (in pubilc no less!). My hornpipes had no swing. My tunes had no phrasing. Jigs seemed one giant run-on string of notes that often seemed to have no ‘sense’. It’s only after spending more and more time with recordings of musicians and listening live that I started to get better at grasping the ‘language’ of Irish music.

Now, of course, it’s a lot easier to look at a flat piece of sheet music, or listen to a midi, and get an idea of what the tune should really sound like…but I needed to really listen to actual musicians before I started ‘getting it’.

Greg

On 2002-05-22 07:19, Peter Laban wrote:
…playing back abc files is absolutely detrimental aquiring this music. They completely lack the proper phrasing or internal rhythms vital to Irish traditional music. If you go this road you will never ever be able to play this music in any meaningful way.

[ This Message was edited by: Wandering_Whistler on 2002-05-22 11:56 ]

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On 2002-05-22 07:19, Peter Laban wrote:
[MIDI files] completely lack the proper phrasing or internal rhythms vital to Irish traditional music. If you go this road you will never ever be able to play this music in any meaningful way.

Uh oh! I once learned a tune from a MIDI file!!
Now I’ve lost all my ability to play Irish music!!
Come to think of it, sheet music doesn’t communicate proper phrasing or internal rhythms either.

Seriously, I said that MIDI files can’t give you what a human can; that doesn’t mean they are useless (much less detrimental) for ear-training exercises. A lot of ear training is just recognizing pitches and intervals.

Secondly, you seem to have misread: I didn’t propose MIDI files for learning tunes by ear; I proposed them for practicing learning by ear, i.e. gaining learning-by-ear skills. These include basics such as recognizing pitches, determining modes/tonics, etc. As far as I can tell, the real risk of MIDI files is that they might bore you to death. I certainly don’t see them actually reversing someone’s musical ability.

People also practice with metronomes, which are also completely mechanical and rigid, lacking all human nuances in rhythm. It is nevertheless good practice and doesn’t turn people into nonmusical zombies.

=Caj

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On 2002-05-22 12:19, Caj wrote:
People also practice with metronomes, which are also completely mechanical and rigid, lacking all human nuances in rhythm. It is nevertheless good practice and doesn’t turn people into nonmusical zombies.

Are you quite sure about that? :wink: I know a couple of metronome addicts and honestly I wonder whether that is why their playing is lifeless.

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Thanks everyone for adding to this thread with refinements and elucidations. Sorry for leaving out URL.

I did not mean to lump Breathnach’s work with the others mentioned. I treasure the two volumes I have and will never put them away! We had discussed Boys in the Lough earlier though as an example of what I mean. I love to play that version when I practice. But if I was to play that version in a session as a newcomer, it might not go so well for me to deviate from a more basic version. I believe most play the Michael Coleman approximate version which is close to oneills.

As for session playing being the end goal of playing this music, I agree that its not . What I play with the Weekenders is more interesting to me than what I might encounter in a session but I do like the idea of being able to whistle with people all over the planet and I want the closest thing to that common language. I perceive that Norbeck’s is pretty close to that.

And I think that many of Forum members would be happy just to be able to keep up with “three times through and on to the next tune”, as Peter mentioned. For beginning foreigners who aren’t in the position of living in a glorious centre of Irish music such as Miltown Malbay, it’s something to aspire to.

Its hard for me to disagree with the limits of abc midi files. I really don’t use that feature but I am lucky enough to have amassed a lot of recordings and am always on the lookout for records that have large numbers of familiar tunes. That’s how I came to my conclusions because there is a concordance of sorts with tunes like Kesh etc. Some of you might consider a thread for favorite renderings of good session tunes.

McCullough has the Legacy Jig, (I believe its the Tailor’s Wedding in Oneills) in his session book. This jig starts with three rolls, on g, b then high g. Its a distinctive start for a tune. Mc notates it as three sets of triplets. That’s the kind of deviation that I am referring to. It irons out and flattens the piece into a string of notes.

Once again, thanks for careful answers. It is clear from them that we are trying to help others, not engage in polemics or semantics.

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[quote]
On 2002-05-22 11:56, Wandering_Whistler wrote:
Sheet music will give you the base notes, and midi will do the same. Neither will give you the ‘flavor’ of Irish music..the style, phrasing..that touch of soul.

[quote]

I wonder if there’s anyone, on this message board or anywhere else, who actually disagrees with this.

One certainly needs direct, human contact with the musical tradition in order to learn it. But the lack of a human touch in a metronome or sheet music does not mean they don’t have value to a student, especially when developing general musical skills.

Sheet music/MIDI is really only seriously proposed as a supplemental thing for practice, rather than a replacement for actual exposure to real people playing the music.

=Caj

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Disagrees? Probably not many. “Is not aware of” is more the audience I was aiming to reach. When I was new, I wasn’t aware of the absolute importance in hearing the tunes played by real musicians. I mistakenly believed that since midi files were perfect computerized representations of sheet music, that they would give me perfect renditions of irish tunes. That belief led me to learn a lot of tunes that I later had to completely re-evaluate.

That said, I’m not in disagreement with you at all about the value of sheet music and midi files as supplemental tools. I often come down on the “there’s nothing wrong with sheet music” side of the argument..after all, I do maintain a website with over 600 pieces of sheet music and midi files myself! :wink:

On 2002-05-22 12:42, Caj wrote:
I wonder if there’s anyone, on this message board or anywhere else, who actually disagrees with this.

One certainly needs direct, human contact with the musical tradition in order to learn it. But the lack of a human touch in a metronome or sheet music does not mean they don’t have value to a student, especially when developing general musical skills.

Sheet music/MIDI is really only seriously proposed as a supplemental thing for practice, rather than a replacement for actual exposure to real people playing the music.

18

I almost always learn tunes from books, as I personally find it easier, and I like to rummage through old and lesser known books to find old and lesser known tunes. I haven’t yet mastered abc, though I do appreciate the simplicity of it, and have printed out dozens of tunes “for when I get around to learning the notation”, so I say. But never, NEVER try to learn tunes where the ornamentation is alkready set in place. OK, a roll here, a trill there perhaps. Some books I’ve seen, particularly those devoted to the repertoire of a particular musician, notate every little nuance of that musician’s playing. But that is that musician’s playing, it’s not necessarily going to be your style. Besides which, it’s difficult to negotiate these little nuances what with all these little grace notes, arrows, and other symbols. Better to learn a bare-bones melody, then ornament your own way. Besides, the session players aren’t going to know your particular ornaments learned out of a particular book, and what they’ll be playing will confude you, and you’ll confuse them. I’ve also made notations in some of the of the books Iown with what I decided would be my particular arrangement of a particular tune. A year or two later, I’ll pull out the book, and I’ll realize that I really don’t like the ornamentation I scribbled in there, and want to do something else. This isn’t a static music. Not only does it change, you’ll change, and your approaches to tunes will change. If you learn the tune, plain and simple, and then develop it your way, through studying tutorials, playing sessions with other musicians, asking questions, whatever it takes, then you’ll be on the right road. Ornamentation is self-expression.

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I see my thread is still alive, as continued by Tom and Ceil. I reiterate in response to that post:

My point remains that there are some nearly standard places where ornaments occur based on multiple versions I have heard and its a disservice to not represent them accurately. I think Norbecks does the best job while many tunebooks vary wildly. I had also pointed out that tunebooks provide new lesser-known things to play but I was referring to session tunes, that smaller body of commonly-played regulars.

Some ornaments are so fundamental to the tune that to omit them changes the tune too much. The very first note of Kesh is an example. I have seen it as a dotted quarter, a roll, or three eighths (gf#g). If you go to Norbecks, you will find a dotted quarter with a roll over the top.I haven’t heard a version of Kesh that doesn’t start with at least a sense of the dotted quarter or roll feel as opposed to just three notes. But its a big world…

In Norbecks, you have those “bare bones” but you also have a reminder of what you will eventually do and its pretty consistent. I like that. Look at McCulloughs and you will see three eighth notes (gf#g). It doesn’t seem to match up with recorded versions very well.. Even a stark beginner can play a dotted quarter then add the roll later (exactly how I learned it). But if he thinks its those three eighth notes, he will not do what most people do PRESUMABLY (and that;s a huge assumption on my part admittedly and I solicited Forum reactions for that reason). That was my point.

That is McCullough’s solution and I think its an unfortunate choice because it regularizes jigs into continuous strings of triplets beyond what they already can be without care. Jigs have to be seen as uneven triplets with a forceful onebeat feel (more with singles and slides) with phrases often shaped by deviations from those very triplets via rolls, extra sixteenths, even four figures, otherwise people play em too classical. That first roll in Kesh or even a dotted quarter makes it a completely different piece by opposing the later triplets.I just think beginners deserve a glimpse of what will be rather than to be misled then corrected later. I got really frustrated with sheet music that wasn’t on point then discovered Norbecks and wanted to save others this whole process.

I am editing in a note to point out that I wish no disrespect to L.E. McCullough as he is my first “teacher” of whistle via his tutor before I discovered everyone else. He has done wonderful things for whistlers. The premise of the session book though, is “hold your own with other players.” I always felt a little funny about that and I wonder if the whole project went askew on a questionable premise (cater to beginners so they’ll want it by keeping it simple).

Upon reflection, my point about reels is weakened somewhat because I do notice rolls omitted more. I played along with Virtual Session the other day and found rolls pretty much gone. But it didn’t sound that great to me without them. And since Peter pointed out the importance of the Breathnach Vol. 1, I went back to that and looked closer. He does use the shorthand of course but there are more session tunes than I thought. Their Erse titles fooled me and I didn’t look close enough! The cover price of over $20 per volume might discourage some though they are worth it, and once again, Norbecks is free.

Finally, the idea of doing whatever you feel like this year is great but might not fly in the various sessions. By yourself or in a performing group, as Peter pointed out, is probably where you make the most musical renderings ultimately but the stated goal of the thread was to drop into a session somewhere and fit in.

Headline: Mr. Ed found flogged to death (details at 11).


[ This Message was edited by: The Weekenders on 2002-05-28 00:18 ]

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Hi,

One other issue regarding ornaments in sheet music: different instruments can employ different kinds of ornaments. Some ornaments are simply impossible on a whistle, some are a bit ungainly, while some are natural but ungainly on other instruments.

If I see sheet music with ornaments, I’m much more likely to completely replace them when playing the tune on a concertina.

=Caj