I’ve been lurking for the better part of the past year whilst making the conversion from hard core recorder student to whistle player. Not abandoning the recorder but I’m finding that I pick up whistles far more often these days. And playing the whistle has improved my recorder playing, in terms of speed and articulation, far more than practicing ever did. I started with recorder because I wanted (at 57 years of age) to finally learn how to read music. The recorder was the perfect vehicle for that. The whistle seems to be better learned by ear but knowing how to read music has helped there as well.
I not only have a terminal case of WHOA but am recovering from a severe bout of RAD (recorder acquisition disorder) at the same time. RAD is much more costly than is WHOA btw. I have acquired many fine instruments through the guidance and help of fellow forum members. So I certainly will not blame my lack of progress on equipment.
Finally to my problem. Thanks to the collective wisdom of this forum, I have progressed from rank beginner to actually being able to participate in the occasional session. However, my schedule is far too erratic to allow me the luxury of lessons and I want to become proficient at this instrument. I practice for 1 hour or so virtually every day. My practice consists of 20 minutes of scales and dexterity exercises, 20 minutes of tone work (breath control and ornamentation), and the rest playing actual songs, beginning with aire’s or other slower tunes and working my way up to jigs & reels. I am not limiting myself to ITM but I am staying with it for now because there is such a huge body of material available.
What would you all suggest as the best way for me to improve? For now a fixed schedule is out of the question so an instructor is not practical. Should I alter my practice routine? Are there any pieces that are particularly useful for improving skill?
I only use scales and other exercises to work on specific problems. If you don’t have a specific plan, then your “practice” is kind of aimless and you won’t make much progress.
Pick some tunes you want to master, and work on them bit by bit. If the setting you want to play has a roll of E, and if you can’t play a roll on E, then you can’t play the tune. Being able to play through the 90% that’s easy is kind of pointless if you can’t handle the 10%. Master the hardest bits first and allow the rest to fall into place.
Becoming a competent musician is about the details. That, and rhythm. If you have a solid and refined sense of rhythm, then you’re good to go. If not, use a metronome. Hint: It’s not the short notes that most people have a problem with!
As you have found, it’s best to learn this music by ear. Just keep learning more and more tunes, by ear, and don’t neglect the ones you already know, and you will be amazed how fast you improve. Two new tunes a week seems reasonable to me in the early stages.
[Just noticed that I’m in the middle of a cross-post with H-P, who has a differing view. I would add, therefore, that you shold read and soak up all the answers here, and any other advice you get, and make your own mind up which way to go.]
I’m definitely NOT one of the gods around here, but I think playing in sessions is very good. You can see how other people play, get a better feel for the tunes, and get feedback, also. At least for me it’s good.
I don’t know that what I said is all that conflicting with what Ben said.
He says learn tunes by ear, and learn lot’s of them, and I said to focus on the difficult parts of them.
Being able to play a lot of tunes is pretty impressive, but not if you make a mess of all of them
I can only play a handful of tunes on tin whistle, but I can play them well. I’ve never been at a session, so I can’t speak with any real knowledge of that. It seems that many people assume that all sessions are populated by great musicians who are well-versed in the style.
I don’t know about that. If I were walking through the desert and came upon a giant saguaro with arms akimbo playing an enormous whistle, I’d be pretty awestruck.
Get a copy of Bill Ochs’ The Clarke Tinwhistle and work through it lesson by lesson. You’ll breeze through the how to read music parts, but it will be a BIG help in transitioning from classical/baroque ornamentation to celtic. Been there, done that.
Sorry, H-P, I didn’t mean to imply that what you said was contradictory to what I was just about to post - only that it was looking at it from a different direction, in a different light, some such phrase. One could, of course, do what I said and do what you said. Which is what you’ve now said …
… having said which, as a beginner, I think I would actually rather try out lots and lots of tunes, rather than focus entirely on just a few. And also maybe work on getting a few of them right, in the way you suggest, H-P.
I would say that only a third of your time spent on the tunes is nowhere near enough. 10 minutes of your hour would be enough for non tune stuff. All the breath control, tone and dexterity is in the tunes. Sure, if there’s certain things that are giving you trouble then work on them in isolation when they come up. For example, if there are couple of bars that are giving you trouble then play the tune and when you come to that bit play these bars in a loop for maybe 10 or twenty times then finish the tune. That gives your practice context. I think one of the most useful practice techniques for whistle or any other instrument is to play along with recordings. That way you are practicing rhythm, pitch, tone and playing with others all at the same time. I open tunes in quickplayer then set it to loop and play a tune maybe 5 -10 times in a row or until it’s ready for the session. Youtube is particularly good as usually the clips are not done to a click and you can learn to have natural rhythm and timing.
Interesting … I don’t like the playing along with recordings technique. I think there are a number of things that make it counter-productive. Firstly, because not all the sound is there (ie sound reproduction is still very limited), you can’t actually play the recording loud enough to be able to hear in the way you would with live musicians, whilst not perforating your eardrums. Secondly, I think it can have the same sort of effect as playing along with a metronome - people can tend to slow down … and then speed up in places to catch up with the recording, and this, for beginners, can happen without noticing, so that in fact they end up with not great rhythm, even though they think they have.
I totally agree about the proportion of time just playing tunes though.
A very different way of looking at it Ben and we have definitely different views there. Providing you are doing plenty practice on your own before hand I can’t agree that playing with recordings isn’t very beneficial. I think we’ll have to agree to disagree.
Fair enough. I have seen one dreadful result of same, but then, there may be many more that I just don’t know about ('cos they’re decent players, maybe, and I just haven’t stopped to think about it at the time). I doubt if we’d bother arguing about it in person. I suspect we’d be happy enough to just have a few tunes.
Hello
This is my first C&F post and I’m no whistle goddess (in my dreams maybe) but thought I’d throw in my two cents worth. I have been playing for just over a year and have about 20 tunes in varying stages of development - some up to or close to session speed. I have concentrated mainly on jigs and hornpipes and have focused largely on getting the melody, rhythm and tempo down. The articulations and ornaments are now starting to come in - taps and cuts are sounding more natural although it’s taking time. I listen to heaps of music and try to really learn the tune before attempting it with the fingers. My inner metronome isn’t as well developed on the whistle as I’d hoped - which I find odd as I’ve been a lifelong dancer but I think it’s probably got a lot to do with attempting to play things at speed when I’m technically not quite up to it. I spend hardly any time on scales - preferring just to get straight into the tunes. I can spend a long time going over tricky bits - I see it as trying to bushbash new pathways in the brain. I love hornpipes at the moment - such happy tunes.
I’m definitely not a whistle God, merely a sage. (Snickering in background) Anyway, just one note (not a pun), because I’ve done lots of stupid things in the past, and a few smart ones like studying with Bill Ochs and the like. However, beware getting overly rigid in your “practice” - 40 minutes on scales and the like daily sounds a bit much and might make you get tired of the whistle altogether. The hard part for many classical converts seems to be loosening up, i.e., getting the feel or the lilt of the music and not playing all notes exactly as written all the time; thus, the listening. Enjoy.
Philo (Who will now attempt to follow his own advice; very difficult sometimes)
Beginner comment. I think playing with recordings does help me a lot. There was a thread recently in which an (uneven) number of the local gurus seemed to come down in favour of headphones. For me using ‘open’ headphones solves Ben’s volume problem and even if it is not a stereo source seems to make it easier to hear myself against the recording. (but Ben’s earlier advice to play with other people as soon as possible was spot on and was the first thing a respected local musician said to me when I admitted to learning an instrument)
But what about this new tunes business ? With the tunes I have I feel a bit like one of those guys at the circus spinning plates on sticks. With a recent spin they may pass at a slowish session, but mainly they are wobbling and the distraction time on a new tune usually ends up with broken crockery somewhere behind me. No new tunes and something like bogmans’ 5 times through at a time moves things on fine. On the other hand new tunes are fun and each brings something different to get my fingers round.
We are all different, but what sort of balance, timewise, do people think is about right ?
I like the playing along with recordings too. Especially if you slow them down with audacity or the like. I do that frequently. But I play in a pipe band, and playing in perfect unison is part of the idiom. As far as hearing them goes, and earbud in one ear makes it easy to hear both the recording and one’s own instrument, without either being especially loud.
I get what you (Ben) mean about people speeding up and slowing down, but if a person does that with a recording (or a metronome) as a reference, is there any chance their playing will be more steady without such a reference? It does take work to hear where you (a generic you) are not with the recording, and it’s difficult to listen attentively to other musicians while playing.
That raises another good point – a person needs to be 100% focused on practice for it to be efficient – just going through the motions and not paying attention is another way learn to play poorly. It’s probably better to spend 10 minutes in focused practice than two hours playing around.
In my view, any time a person, especially a beginner, puts into playing sloppy (i.e., playing through a lot of tunes without really learning to play them), is not only wasted, but counter-productive. It reinforces bad habits and makes it take all the more time to eventually become decent.
It’s good to have fun too. But if a person’s goal is to transition through being a beginner to being competent quickly, then understanding the difference between efficient practice and playing around is useful – then make an informed decision and revel in the outcomes!
There’s a difference between becoming a musician and playing around with a musical instrument. I believe (without any real evidence) that the primary difference in outcomes between many people’s musical experiences comes down to how they practice. Just one “for instance”: There’s someone I know who started learning bagpipes before I did. From the same teacher. This person practices regularly, but never seems to get any better. Note that I’m not casting any judgments – but it is what it is.
I have a friend who was a classical/recorder geek like you (just kidding!) She was already proficient at the mechanical playing part so a practice regiment was not necessarily what she needed. In order to try and get away from the precises mechanical stiffness of classical music she bought a copy (free copies are also available) of the “slow downer” program. She selected whistle recordings and slowed them down so that she could get down to the nuts and bolts of the rhythm and technique of Irish music. Her favorite to listen to and slow down was a teacher on the Whistlethis website named Kilfarboy.
One could, of course, do what I said and do what you said. Which is what you’ve now said …