hello all, ive been playing whistle for on and off (mostly off) 20 years now and ive finally graduated from butchering the tetris music / titanic theme / star of county down to trawling you-tube for tunes to learn.
My main resource so-far has been http://www.tradlessons.com/ and the ever chearful Michael Eskin. The main problem with this is it dosent teach me how to plug the sets together, so i thought i would throw a list of the stuff i know up, and if your feeling bored you can name (and link, if your feeling really bored) some tunes to start tieing them all up
my list:
The Cat’s Meow (by Joanie Madden) (D Maj) (jig)
Toss the feathers (E minor, reel)
the coach road to slago (G, jig?)
The wind that shakes the barley (reel, D maj i think)
The Banshee (G major, reel)
Morrisons (e dor, jig) (favourate at the moment)
The Silver Spear (Dm reel)
one whos name ive forgotten but its its a big D maj Reel.
The Old Torn Pettycote (reel A min)
The Knotted Cord (Junior Creehan’s Favorite) (reel) (some wierd mode or other) - just ‘polishing’ this one off.
how meny tunes should i get down before i quit sitting in my room annoying my flatmates and head into the big wide world of sitting in a pub annoying punters?
Get outta the house now. If you have a fear of playing in front of people, start small. Start in the woods, move up to cemetaries, graduate to busy highways, visit the Wal-Mart parking lot at 2am, work your way up to a festival. If you only stay in a place long enough for one song, you only need to know one song. If you make a mistake, ignore it. No one will notice or care. If they recognize the tune and question you, claim it’s a variation taught to you by your immigrant grandfather from Clare County. If they are from Clare County, say he was really from some other county. I don’t know anything about Ireland.
Hey, I’ve played gigs like that. Hellooo … anybody out there … ?
Welcome to the Chiffboard, Chris.
There’s no right answer, really. Regular session players have a tune repertoire of anywhere from a few hundred tunes to several thousand.
A different approach is to reverse your thinking. That is, not “what tunes do I need for a session”, but rather “what tunes can I learn from a session”. Just go. Don’t expect to play much at first. But take a recording device and, with permission, capture the tunes and sets. Ask about the names. Then work on those. Each session has its own favorites, and before long you’ll feel like a regular and grow your knowledge from there.
Meanwhile, note the tunes on Tradlessons and WhistleThis. Go to TheSession.org[u]members page[/u] and click on the Tunebook tab. The first few pages there are all golden oldies, and will stand you in good stead.
Chris,
You have plenty of tunes to make a trip to a session and start talking to the musicians at least. Different sessions will have different standards, but most will be friendly enough to encourage you to play a tune or two that you know.
Another thought is to look around. In some areas you can find beginner sessions where they generally expect you to only have a handful of tunes under your belt and the pace of playing is slow enough to make it easier to learn the tunes.
