I haven’t posted much after joining this forum, although I do lurk every now and then. Partly, I have been distracted by my string instruments. But I want to get better at playing whistle, and I figured I’d start by learning a bunch of tunes and playing through them. (And hopefully start to get better at ornamentation as I play and listen to a lot of ITM).
I know a handful of traditional tunes (probably less than ten); obviously I have a long way to go before I have an acceptable-sized repertoire. I also know there are thousands of tunes and probably most session players don’t know every single ITM tune in existence. To hold your own in most sessions, how big a tune repertoire would you have to have? 100? 1000?
You don’t need to play a note to hold your own in a session. I know a few hundred tunes, but still sit out 30-50% of the time. That’s why God made beer.
Thanks for the link. Didn’t mean to create an unnecessary duplicate topic, but I must have missed that thread (and all other threads pertaining to this topic) when I did my search before posting.
The thing is, the repertoire of good traditional Irish session players in amazingly vast.
How many are on thesession? Many thousands. Tens of thousands? I forget.
To try to get some sort of handle on the reperoires of some die-hard session players I went on thesession and did a search which ranked the tunes in the order of how often they were included in members’ tune lists.
Of the 100 most popular tunes I knew all but a couple.
Of the second hundred I knew perhaps 3/4.
I can play… I don’t know exactly, but a few hundred reels.
Yet I can easily sit for an hour at a session and listen to reel after reel that I don’t know. Oh, I’ve usually heard them all, and can have most of the under my fingers by the third playing (picking them up on the fly) but I may never hear those same tunes again for months or years.
The flip side is, I could (but never would) play for an hour, reels and jigs and hornpipes that nobody else knows, tunes that I’ve picked up at sessions over the last 30 years.
This always absolutely blows my mind when I think of the toil and trouble (not to mention cauldron bubble) for me to get a solid repertoire of about 40 tunes. Geezmareez…
Well, I guess if you have some, any number, that you can REALLY play up to snuff (will this kick off a thread on the meaning of this term?), that’s what really counts (says the master rationalizer).
I’m thinking size doesn’t matter, quality does. I can play maybe 100 tunes but I still can’t play reels at session speed; jigs, yes but even there I’m hanging on for dear life. If I met a guy who could only play 10 reels but played them well at speed, I’d definitly consider him the better player. Someone here mentioned having a teacher who exhorted them to “learn to play one tune 20 ways, not 20 tunes one way.” Most of my tunes, I can play one or maybe two ways. If I met a guy who could only play 5 tunes but could play them all 20 different ways, I’d consider him the better player. Finally, Panceltic mentioned above being able to pick up tunes on the fly. Once you get to that stage, I’m guessing numbers cease to matter because you essentially “know” an infinite number of tunes. Yes, getting a certain number of tunes under your fingers gives you a feel for the music and a base to build upon while making practice less boring as well. But the more important questions, IMHO, are tone, tempo, rhythm, variations, phrasing, articulations, it-sounds-good-to-those-who-know-the-music-and-to-my-audience and, lastly, speed.
After a couple hundred reels you pretty much have all the common patterns under your fingers, the motifs or kolena or building-blocks or traditional phrases out of which all Irish reels are built.
So to pick up a reel on the fly you don’t need to perceive all the notes in a note-by-note linear way but rather identify the various familiar phrases and string them together. So the order of phrases are unique to that particular tune, but the phrases themselves are not.
Most of the time a new tune you hear wholly consists of familiar phrases and are quite easy to pick up. Sometimes though a tune will have a phrase with an unusual twist to it, a phrase you’ve never played before. That’s the only time you have to get anything new under the fingers.
Most of the oft-used tradtional phrases don’t exist in isolation but exist in families, all the members of a family being interchangable. So as you go along you can grab any member of that family and stick it in the spot, any member of that family being equally “correct”. So as you play along the tune varies due to the natural workings of the system.
^^^great point. once you get familiar with any style (a certain brand of rock, blues, jazz, folk, etc) you get used to what to expect, and certain patterns that frequently show up. it makes it easier to sit in and play, even without fear that you might not know a certain tune (and it is 100% fine to just sit out as well). like sitting in a jazz session. part of the fun is playing a tune you haven’t ever played or even heard before with musicians you haven’t played with before, and something magical happens!
I keep a list of all the tunes I ever learned by heart. There are more than two hundred of them. But ask me to play one of them straight off, and likely I can’t. There are about thirty maybe, that I could play without some necessary practice. A dozen that I would be confident of performing at approaching session speed.
And recognising tunes? It’s shaming to think of the number of times I’ve heard something, asked what it was, and found it was something in my regular immediate-play repertoire. I just don’t have the facility.
an I thought it was to keep the monks around