Yesterday I went to a performance by John Creaven, a flute and whistle player who grew up in County Galway. His playing is superb - relaxed and with great respect for the tune. I also bought his CD “The Story so Far”, which has 15 tracks all on flute (E flat and D) with some bouzouki accompaniment by Dennis Cahill. I’d highly recommend it for listening, and also for learning tunes from, as his playing is very approachable, and he has some very flute-friendly tunes.
Dave Copley
Loveland, Ohio
Dave,
I have not had the chance to hear John play in concert but I have his CD and yes, it is great for flute tunes. My only regret is that all the tunes except for one, are in Eb and my flute is in D. If I want to play along, I only have an Eb whistle. But that’s ok too!
Otter
If you want to play along with the E flat tunes on a “D” flute, you should be able to use one of the sound manipulation programs (Goldwave, or The Amazing Slowdowner) to slow the track down to 95% of its original speed. It will then be in tune with the D flute, and also a little slower for learning. I recall there was a discussion in the C&F whistle pages about these programs, so an archive search should dig up the information and web addresses for download.
Dave Copley
Loveland, Ohio
OK, this is A bit off topic, but a chance to plug my favorite tune-learning tool, “Transcribe!”, at:
http://www.seventhstring.demon.co.uk/xscribe/index.html
This is almost the perfect tool for learning tunes IMHO: it allows easy looping of sections, simple marking of the tunes to divide into tunes in a set, A and B sections, etc. If you get really stuck and want to cheat, the spectrum at the bottom will identify a selected note for you. You can re-tune and speed up/slow down independently. It works with .MP3 files, has a built-in mixer and equalizer, the list goes on…
It’s great, and the first thing I reach for when learning a tune. $40 shareware. I have no interest except as a happy user.
I’ve used this to learn Eb tunes of the first Matt Molloy album. Needless to say, I used the ability to re-tune AND to SLOW DOWN! 
John
[ This Message was edited by: johner on 2002-05-05 17:34 ]
I tried to get this CD thru Celtic Grooves but Phillipe said that John was getting married and is no longer pressing the CD.
Does anyone know how to contact John personally or maybe another way to get a hold of this CD? I have been trying for a month now.
I think you can get it from Ossian (ossianusa.com). John Creaven may be hard to contact right now, as he will be moving from Michigan to England in the next couple of weeks. If you can’t find one anywhere else, please let me know, as he may have left some extras with someone in Cincinnati after his weekend concert.
Dave Copley
Loveland, Ohio
Perfect!,
Just ordered it thru Ossian. I’m glad they had some copies.
Hey - John lives here in Ann Arbor - we don’t see him often at the local sessions because he gets such good gigs in Chicago. He and Stella are both aces - great people. Please say hi to him for me if you run into him - he’ll be missed if he moves overseas.
Also good to know he finally got an album out!
jane