I’m a brand new “whistler”, not a drop of musical experience of any kind, but having a gay old time with my new Feadog D. It came with a beginner book, so i’ve got a good start…
I wanted to ask if there were a forum out there on the net somewhere where one could exchange whistle sheet music or finger codes with other whistlers, somewhere where a good natured volunteer might choose to listen to a clip on utube when asked and scrawl out a few notes while he’s doing so…
I’ve got access to all the traditional stuff, which is beautiful, but I find myself hearing songs everywhere now and being seized with the desire to try to play it on my whistle…the theme to titanic for one…I found sheet music for it for a flute, but holy cow…it may as well be written in arabic…its all greek to me and resembles not one iota the simple language thats in my beginners book…
I know , i know, i should experiment, trial and error, its simple enough to transcribe by ear…but its not, its simply not in my blood yet, music is hard, and while i’m not lazy…I just want to play…
I just spent 40 minutes trying to transcribe the music of the theme song to the tv show Lark rise to candleford. A viewer would recognize the melody it if he heard me play it…but its wrong…its definitely wrong.
I totally get what you’re saying! I’m a newbie whistler myself, and while I know trad Irish music is typically learned by ear, I’m just not that good at it yet. I try, but it’s so frustrating. Good luck!
http://www.thesession.org/ This is a great place to learn tunes. You can look at sheet music, or hear it if you learn that way. That is where I learn most of my tunes.
Welcome. I play everything but ITM on my whistle. I’ve played other instruments (keyboard and guitar) since I was a kid by using sheet music. I was quite shocked that I could pick out songs by ear on the whistle. I started with Christmas carols, folk, children, classical, and church songs. Once I had a song in my head, as long as it was a simple tune, I could play it by ear. You might just want to give that a go yourself.
Is there a way to hear the tunes on thesession.org? I can find the sheet music/abc and a discography, but haven’t found a way to hear the tunes played. Am I missing something?
You have to create an account on thesession.org and login.
Then, when you bring up a tune you will also have a Download
tab next to the Comments tab. If you click on that, there will
be a link to download the tune as a MIDI file.
To add to fearfaoin’s reply, you can cut and past the ABC to the converter at concertina.net, and listen to the midi file there, if you like just as at thesession, and you can save the sheet music as a pdf file, too.
There is also ABCExplorer (free download open-source software) if you want to work offline. View, edit, play ABC files. See as music notation in PDF format, print, organise…
Promotion over
No, I have nothing to do with ABCExplorer, except that I find it very useful.
I’m kind of curious about this part. What is in the
sheet music that you don’t recognize? Are there
weird ornamentation markings or note values you
haven’t seen before or what?
