Now that I have enough tunes memorized to be able to play for a reasonable amount of time without having to repeat, I want to focus on making my playing sound “more Irish”. Having played recorder for 15 years at a VERY mediocre level, I am having trouble breaking out of the, well, very mediocre level that I got used to. I have had fairly good success at reducing the amount of tonguing in my playing - my recorder playing had a definite “toot.. toot.. toot..” quality to it.
Aside from cornering other whistlers and requesting lessons (tried that, they can run pretty quick. Helps if you give them wine first though), what resources would you recommend? I plan to re-investigate Brother Steve’s site. The Mad for Trad tutorial didn’t do much for me, I found it difficult to see what was going on. And I don’t currently know of any whistlers in the area of my school, which I am returning to next month.
Is your school in Rochester? If so, give this a try: http://www.irishrochester.org/
It’s the Rochester branch of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann. You should be able to find instruction through them.
Other than that, although it’s been said many, many times, intent, focused listening is a great learning tool. That helped me more than anything. I’ve had the good fortune to sit down with phenom players where I could listen and watch their every move.
I’ll see what I can arrange for a lesson for you with someone here in Seattle during your visit.
Beth,
I know this may be something you’re already doing. Play slow airs slowly. If you looking to ad to your tone, ornamentation technique, or other ability; you can start with slow airs. The give you the time to here shadings to the notes and ornaments you might not be able to pick out on a quicker tune. If you learn how to do a particular ornament, technique, tone control in an air, it will creap into all your fast stuff too. With that in mind Ireland 110 Best slow airs by Melbay will give you a large collection of tunes to work from.
Another thing is to take your a couple of favorite performances of slow piece, thing that don’t have a lot of ornaments, and play them a 70percent speed with some slow down software. I did this to one of my favorites and was suprised to find about 3 times as much ornamentation was there comparied with what I expected.
Do you have “121 Favorite Irish Session Tunes” taught By L.E. McCullough? This is a great resource not only for tunes, but he plays thru each tune without ornamention and again with ornamentation. I rip the songs I want into mp3’s then slow them down using winamp slowmedown.
Also once I learn a basic tune, I will try to find it in my CD collection and I’ll try to add some of the variation I hear into the basic tune.
–quote–
You can start by not thinking that you’re as an accomplished whistle player as you thiunk you are!
Go from square one… slow airs are the best place to start!!!
–endquote–
Two points:
First, I know Ava from chat. She’s about the furthest thing from being arrogant that anyone can be. She is consistenly sweet, and generous, and is a warm caring person. So I would say your comment is considerably out of line, as well as being misspelled.
Second, playing slow airs well is a very advanced art, and not the place I’d say you’d want to start learning whistle. A much better way is with simple single reels and jigs, played at a moderate tempo, with little or no ornamentation at first.
On 2002-10-18 16:24, avanutria wrote:
I want to focus on making my playing sound “more Irish”.
My first question would be, do you know what “more Irish” sounds like? What and whom are you listening to, how often, and how? Are you really listening “actively”, the way Roger talked about in a recent thread - not just having the tune on in the background, but listening intently, studying, focusing your entire attention on what the player(s) are doing?
Unless you have that Irish sound and style in your head, no book or teacher or web site will enable you to achieve it.
I’d suggest setting time aside for this kind of listening - the same amount of time that you spend practising, at least.
This time you spend listening will pay big dividends later. The wonderful thing about having the sound in your head is that you’ll discover how to do things accidentally as you continue to play and experiment - little revelations and insights, things that no-one has or could have taught you to do.
