My wife is starting to learn how to play Irish tunes on her fiddle. She is learning from the Mel Bay book Complete Irish Fiddle Player. I have noticed that some of the tunes that I have learned on whistle is in this book but the fiddle version is slightly different then the whistle version. That being said when we play the tune together, it sounds great. So this leads me to my question. I want to get her fiddle tunes. Getting tunes for the whistle is easy via the web (thesession.org…this site…so on). But I have not seen a site dedicated for fiddle tunes. What book can I buy that has most of your Irish session violin tunes in it?
I haven’t got them myself, so can’t comment on just how good the actual books are, though the content looks ideal to me … But the real beauty of it is that you can also listen to actual sessions playing the tunes that are in the book. You just have to go to the link I posted above, click on one of the three books and, somewhere along the line, you get a recording of a session playing it. Magic.
I think the Comhaltas stuff is good for building a basic repertoire, but the notation often differs from the recordings and that can be frustration for a beginner using the dots. I’d get the CDs and get some “slow downer” software for your computer and try to work them out by ear. The books are useful to a point…less so on their own without the recordings.
Another fiddle book: The Irish Fiddle Book by Cork fiddler Matt Cranitch, published by Ossian. Available with a CD. Goes into detail about bowings and ornaments, good if someone already plays some fiddle and knows the basics. Includes a decent collection of 101 tunes at the end. Available on Amazon and other places.
Of course, I’m sure you know that there are basically no fiddle tunes vs. whistle tunes per se. A chune’s a chune, though some fall better on one instrument or other. On a source like TheSession.org, the setting is often influenced by whatever instrument the transcriber happens to play, and how they play it. You can sometimes tell the fiddler ABCs by written-out trebles (bowed triplets), double stops, rolled Cs and Ds, etc. And wind player ABCs by rolled (cranned) bottom Ds, rolled As and Es, Bcd triplets, etc.
Instrument-specific imitation is good and important. But if don’t restrict tune learning to only the same instrument you’re playing, you open up many more possibilities.
I really like the “Irish Session Tunes” series by Ossian- I have the “blue book” and the “orange book” which have CD’s included with them. They are designed to be used for fiddle playing, with the tunes in sets. I use them for whistle as well. There is also a “red book” which is for fiddle but has no CD and the “green book” which is I believe supposed to be for whistle- but all four work for both fiddle and whistle/flute. The tunes on the two I have are quite good and the accompanying CD is excellent and clear.