I have been getting along for 5 months now on a Daye practice set, H.C. Clark and Na Piobairi Uilleann tutorial videos. I have about 14 tunes in my book, meaning I can sit down and play them from memory. As I am eager to continue to learn more tunes and techniques I am wondering if anyone would advise just holding steady on these 14 tunes and really working them with more attention to melody and ornamentations. Or maybe to continue to learn more tunes with the idea that the more I learn the better off the playing gets overall. What did you all do at this beginning stage?
Thanks
Matt
There’s no point learning new tunes if you’re playing them badly, so if you think you can improve them, continue to work on your existing tunes before launching into learning new tunes.
However, you don’t have to stop learning new tunes. You could still learn, say one new tune each month.
By the way, 14 tunes is a good tally after only 5 months.
It doesn’t matter what you’re playing – if you’re getting better you’re moving forward. 
I agree with PJ – a combination of the two is good. Me, I choose certain tunes so I can work on certain things.
But if you want some new tunes, check out http://source.pipers.ie/Gallery.aspx?id=36 and see where that takes you.
Have you recorded yourself yet? That might help clarify things, too.
Some musicians, particularly non-pipers, whose single source of meaning in life is attending sessions, may judge your musicianship on the number of tunes you can recognise and play along to. You may then feel pressured to learn as many tunes as possible as soon as possible. But you’ll end up knowing stacks of tunes, but your piping will not have improved much at all.
Recognise early that piping is a very different kettle of fish compared to other instruments, and that a small repertoire played (piped) well is a much grander goal than a head full of tunes that you can belt out in a lifeless manner.
In a nutshell…hold steady
I think that expanding your repertoire is a good thing because you may learn something new that you can go back and apply to tunes that you already play - a lot of what you discover you can do with a tune feeds into your overall playing - another thing to bear in mind is how similar different tunes can be in what they demand of you in terms of sequences of notes that seem to repeat themselves again and again
Bugged the livin shyte outta my family, neighbors, cane dealers, hardware store clerks, and pipemakers 
I think, maybe 13 (?) years on from finally getting my hands around a real uilleann pipe (after numerous orchestral woodwinds, ghb and more)…that many of the finer points, that make a top notch piper, adherance to authenticity, & acute stylistic details I labor over now could have been avoided, had I paid more attention to them at the early stages. HOWEVER, I simultaneously feel that the acquired facility, emotive expression, tradecraft & fluency on the inst may not have grown to full artistic maturity today; had I gotten bogged down in persnickety beginnerish pedantic technique worries.
so theres both sides of the coin as far as i can tell. Truly an Appolonian/ Dyonisian crisis. your choice of it. 
I remember when I started out, I listened to ITM all the time. When I got to a point where I just HAD to learn that friggin’ tune that kept swimming in my head, I couldn’t do anything about it - I just sat down and learned it.
Michael Eskin has a nice website called Tradlessons.com that gives some good demonstrations of tunes… slow and with a good view of what’s going on with the chanter.
I think you go with what feels good to you, all the while strengthening your skills, go for it. Get to a Tionol, too… it’ll stretch you out and help reinforce those good habits and make sure you’re on course.
Hey, wait… there’s a Tionol coming up in October in NY! Ya can sign up still!!!
K
Try Scoiltrad
and Errant Elbow
http://errantelbows.podbean.com/category/reels/
Nice one Chas - sums it all up for me - me I’ll go for the Dionynesian any day
Ged
Thanks for the comments all, they are most helpful. I listen to so much piping, sometimes I feel compelled to attempt to learn the tune or some part of the tune. I need to work on all aspects of playing and by no means are the tunes I have now perfect, but they are getting better. I think I’ll be holding steady.
Cathy I missed you at Tionol in St. Louis. I asked several people to point you out but no luck. I left right after the afternoon workshop to head back to Cincinnati. Michael gave us some great tunes to work on. Are you still gathering the last Saturday of the month?
MAtt
Play lots of tunes badly. Why stop at 14? 
That’s what I do.
Ged,
Thanks for the links, some new places to hang out.
Cheers MAtt
Soooooo well said!
I see a good deal of beginning pipers who are basically running with scissors (confession: that was, and can at times be, me). Often they have come to the pipes from whistle and/or flute and play the chanter like they are playing a whistle or flute (confession: I know I did). And some are just lazy and try to cover their lack of serious study of technique by throwing out the old saw “Well, I’m really more of a traveling-style piper” which tells me they really have not listened very well to the giants of “traveling-style” piping.
I have often said that the session is the death of piping. In most of your sessions you have a group of people playing faster than they are really capable of playing. I have worked (and continue to work) hard every day to gain and retain my piping skills. Sitting in on a (too) fast set of reels in your basic session and you may be forced to simply junk all that technique you worked so hard to gain. I usually sit out those situations. I know it’s hard not to get caught up in the session dynamic, but, as has been said (by my biggest piping influence) “every time you play…you are practicing”. Which translates freely to “every time you play you are learning”. That includes learning and practicing bad piping habits.
(last confession): Looking back, I feel I came to the session scene (as a piper) about 5 years sooner than I should have.
I think I (musically) made a hash of things in those early years and did not represent the pipes in a favorable light. I strive to do better…
One needs to keep at the forefront the Pipocratic Oath: do no harm.
I feel like pipers talk about piping like it’s something special and unique, apart from all the other irish traditional instruments.
Everything Tom says applies equally well to all the other instruments. The best is when you find a session that’s at your level and can all progress together.
Now Nico, you know full-well about the piper’s exceptionalism 
The main difference between pipes and the other instruments (in this context) is the binary nature of the beast: it’s either full on, or full off. No sneaking in, no noodling. You are bare, exposed, without a net, and totally all-in committed with the pipes.
t
Hey, Matt! Oh, I’m sorry I missed you in St. Louis! I was definitely around. I was so around I was all over the place.
Yes, we still get together once a month, on the third Sunday. Our next session will be September 16th. David Copley’s been coming down occasionally – have you met him yet? Maybe you can ride together?
Me, I feel like there’s a unique combination of the two approaches for everyone. A lot of it is based on what makes you want to play pipes in the first place, AND on what your goals are. Do you want to be a good piper? Then you have to do the work and that involves a lot of alone time and attention. Do you just want to hang out? Be my guest, but don’t be surprised if you hear yourself one day and go “Wow, I suck!” (And worse, when you complain about it to your friends and they go, “Yeah, you do.”) But a lot of people are perfectly happy in that space. As long as they don’t mess things up for everyone else, it’s their journey and I’m OK with that. It’s not life or death, after all (though it may feel like it).
I listen to tons of piping and, like Kathleen, just HAVE to learn certain tunes, either because they sound awesome of because I think they’ll be an interesting experiment. So I find the journey of learning them very educational in itself, and that whatever I get from them often improves my piping. For example, I may never have sufficient guts/chops/suicidal urge to play Mulhaire’s out in public, but working on it is improving my 2nd-octave facility, which could carry over to other tunes one day, or, at a later date, make my next attack on Mulhaire’s more rewarding (for now it’s merely hilarious – and that’s okay, too).
I think my favorite advice came from Michael Cooney, who said something like “Sure, go to the occasional session, play too fast, play a bunch of tunes you don’t really know very badly, drink some beer and have some fun, but don’t make that your only source of playing … and don’t let yourself think that makes you a piper. If you want to be a good piper, you have to go home and do the work.”
True, I even seem to have made my better half think there is something to it!
In fact this may be one of its advantages in a session situation. Since you are exposed, sometimes even louder than the rest of the session, you should always be able to hear yourself. One of the problems in loud sessions with quiet instruments is that you think you’re playing great, and you don’t hear your mistakes. The point is taken though, that pipers who play badly, and loudly, should be more aware of their responsibility. Honestly though, in my experience it has been people who don’t think they are loud or who play other, more obnoxiously loud types of pipes, that have been more of a problem.
Cathy, your post, and Michael’s advice, also apply equally well to all other instruments. And Tom, noodling is hardly ever not obnoxious or disruptive… quieter instruments just think it isn’t.
Yep, and and not just Irish trad instruments, but any instruments (or at least many instruments).
I think the uilleann exceptionalist meme - whether sincerely believed as received wisdom or a kind of group solidarity thing or simply tongue-in-cheek - severely underestimates the amount of sheer, equivalent technique that sits behind truly good players of other stuff.
A sort of Dunning-Kruger, perhaps: Overestimating one’s own achievements and challenges by underestimating those of others, because the focus is on your own, and maybe simply not knowing, or having little interest in, what’s behind the rest. It may be easiest to make the technical counter-case with fiddle (not to mention fiddle exceptionalism!), but really any instrument could be an example.
From the perspective of a non-piper who, for reasons of insanity, sometimes hangs around with pipers … My whistle playing sits on top of 50+ years of orchestral and renaissance/baroque wind playing, with more overlapping years of whistle and trad study. And anyone who thinks every bit of acquired technique and knowledge doesn’t inform the toots from my whistle is just not thinking, if all you see is some guy “only” playing whistle.
And the thing is, I hear similar depth of technique and care in every good whistle player, regardless of the formal or informal path that led them there. Except maybe for pipers playing whistle like it’s a chanter.
Guitar may be an even better example, as an instrument many pipers love to hate. When I teach/play trad guitar, right hand technique may involve flat picking, strumming, damping, rotations, attack angle, attack position, alternate picking, cross picking, harp picking, harmonic picking, economy picking, lazy picking, circular picking, finger picking, apoyando, tirando, rasgueado, mixed pick and fingers … And that’s just part of what’s happening with one bloody hand, not to mention a thousand fingering details on the left and all the harmonic theory needed to improvise progressions and countermelodies.
But all an exceptionalist might see is a guitar thumper.
As for the on/off thing, just try noodling the wrong guitar chords or noodling badly in the whistle’s 2nd octave in session …
I’m ragging on Tommy because we’re friends and we can always settle things like men at the next tionól by thumb wrestling or something (my guitar grip will come in handy!). But really, uilleann exceptionalism and its echo chamber is a pet peeve.
As for poor Matt the OP …
But a head full of tunes you can belt out well and full of life is an even grander goal.
I agree that steady on is good advice, especially at the beginning. But it’s only half the picture. The Apollonian half.
I’ve seen pipers who can credibly play a favorite, maybe famous setting of a tune note for note and twiddle for twaddle. But when faced with something new outside a controlled learning environment they’re stumped and silent. That hardly seems right, either.
Repertoire is also a part of the trad aesthetic. The value of living human repositories is obvious. But also in that every tune you learn can inform every tune you already know or will ever know. And the more tunes you really know, the greater the cumulative effect and the ease of acquiring more tunes. The whole really does become more than the sum of its parts.
We all have showcase tunes we’ve worked on in particular detail which can really shine as our “reference” settings and reminders of what we’re truly capable of. But unless those pieces are also models to leverage the technical and stylistic details into one’s overall abilities as a compleat piper, you’re missing a big part of the benefit IMO.
And the session as the bane of good playing is something of a red herring. True, the goals of session playing may be far more complex, with perfect performance only one of many competing goals. But to acquire session skills you need to … play sessions. And I’ve not met any good session players who intentionally toss their skills out the window just because of a session setting. Though copious pints of the black stuff may have an interesting effect. 
Cathy’s quote of Michael Cooney does seem about right to me.
You might not “toss your skills out the window,” but I for one have gotten fed up of the kind of thrashing session where you just raggedly beat out the tunes against a wall of arrhythmic drummers and guitar-botherers, where any technique or subtlety just gets lost in the noise as you find yourself hammering out nothing more than a series of notes. I don’t think they harm your technique so long as you’re playing at home, or with more sympathetic and tasteful players, and in fairness, they’re probably quite good at training you to adapt your playing to others. That’s a different skill than just playing tunes the way you play them.
I don’t know if it’s a piper “exceptionalism” thing or not, but I have run into quite a few ostensibly experienced pipers, more than other instruments, who cannot adjust their playing to someone else’s swing, speed, and phrasing for love nor money. I call this “piperitis.” Drives me nuts. Same with chronically uneven, ragged phrasing. I’ve seen more – again, ostensibly experienced – pipers with real difficulties controlling the timing and the phrasing than players of other instruments. Not that it doesn’t happen with other instruments – it does – but this issue seems more common for pipes. I don’t know why.
I think sessions where there is no room for subtlety, where there are multiple accompanists (once I was at a very sad session where there was 5 bodhrans, 3 guitars, and 2 bouzoukis - and only 3 melody players… yes, all of them tried playing at once) or just 10s of people, are the type of session Tom was warning against, with good reason! Because you can easily fall into terrible habits that way.
On the other hand, a smaller session, or just one with more listening and quietness, can be a great way to work on your skills - work on keeping them in a group, work on adjusting to fit in, and so on. Which is what you (tSS) said.
As far as more “ostensibly good” pipers having trouble adjusting, well I think there’s a few things at play here. As a piper, other pipers will catch your attention more, so there’s most likely an element of selective surveying going on. Pipers are also much fewer and further between, so there are just less good ones. Accordion is in a similar boat at most Midwest / Southern Ont sessions I’ve been to (the Boston / NY / Washington DC has a disproportionate number of good ones!) And I think many pipers do follow the advice of “stay home for five years, work on technique, then go to sessions” - so you get pipers who are good… but can’t adjust.