I know is going to sound rather silly, but I have a question. When you say that you practise scales, what exactly do you do? Do you just go up and down the D major scale, jumping octaves 
? I tried doing that for a while, but found it quite unexciting, so I reverted to practising tunes that I know. Could someone post a regimen for practising scales, and what I should be focusing on when Iām doing it? Thanks!
~nash
I go up and down the D scale, then up and down the G scale, then up and down the E minor scale, etc. Iāll do it straight a couple of times, then try trilling each note and/or cutting each note. Gets the fingers moving in different patterns.
Redwolf
Scales to music is like Times Tables to Mathsā¦a sort of necessary evil for fluency. Same with arpeggios.
Trisha
Try playing exercises around scales and arpeggios. So, for exmple, up two steps back one, on the way up, and down two steps, up one on the way down. This one starts off like this: d f# e g f# a g b ā¦
Another one goes d e f# g e f# g a f# g a b ā¦
This sort of exercise gets you used to the most commonly repeated finger movements youāll need to know and ensures that you practice all of them without skipping the hard ones.
neat exercises, thanks. Have any more?
Iāve got the Bill Hart book Stronger, better faster,
which is helpful.
Good for warm ups and working on fludity, smoothness etc.
This is just standard stuff I learnt to do in every key on sax, guitar and so on. There are literally dozens. Once you get the hang you can make up your own. Any good jazz book for any instrument would contain loads of them. There is a well known cornet tutor that players of all instruments tend to use because it is so good and thorough with this stuff ..I wish I could remember its name but someone else might know.
Hereās another good one. Play bottom d, then second octave d, bottom e tehn second octave e and so on ā¦ OK, now do this in the patterns I suggested in the last two exercises. See what I mean ..I just made these up ..
scribble scribble Thanks a lot for the ever-prompt replies! Wombat, what you said was SO correct! I find some parts of tunes particularly confusing for my fingers (like a F# D or d cnat d .. or the last part of Banish Misfortune). I find that I can play the rest of the tune really fast, but when I come to these parts I slow down or sit through them 
. I think such scale exercises will help me focus on these problematic parts. Do you people have more such exercises for practice?
~nash
Well as Trisha said, arpeggios are good too. So, for D play low d, f#, a, second octave d, f#, a, third octave d. Play Em (e, g, b) G (g, b, d) A (a, c#, e) Am (a, c, e) and bm (b, d, f#). Play arpeggio sequences like D, Em, G, D and D, A, G, D and G, Am, D, G in teh first octave and in teh second octave but, if you canāt fit all the notes in, go down to play a chord rather than up.
These patterns contain stock phrases in dance tunes and again you get to practice systematically so you donāt leave the hard bits out. You also learn the structure of the tunes you are playing so youāll recognise waht chord you are on from the notes you are stressing in the melody.
Quite a few of these exercises involve octave jumps and it is good to practice these both tonguing and not tonguing. If you think of a tune like Harvest Home, itās very easy if you can manage quick octave transitions but very hard if you canāt. In fact, itās largely built out of elements contained in the exercises Iāve suggested.
When I was learning violin, scales included, up and down the key octaves, bowing exercises, arpeggios, finger techniques, etc.
For whistles, I would imagine scales (fingerings for each key), arpeggios, triplets, ornamentation on each note, etc.
So I do all that? Naw.. 
Brass Tactics by Chase Sanborn
(is one)
Another exercise to get you going is cran and roll scales. Play a d cran followed by an e roll, followed by an f# roll all the way up to a b roll and repeat in second octave.
Ah, pratique les scalesā¦
Iām not good yet at les rolls, so hereās a down-scaled bentley:
All kidding, of course. Iām getting bonkers practicing my scales on the Stratowhistle. Chromatic, fer shuuureā¦ just try and get smooth through that Ab scale, or F#ā¦
Scales:
DEF#G AGF#E DEF#G AGF#E DEF#G AGF#E Dā¦
EF#GA GF#ED EF#GA GF#ED EF#GA GF#ED Eā¦
F#GAG F#EDE F#GAG F#EDE F#GAG F#EDE F#ā¦
GAGF# EDEF#ā¦
AGF#E DEF#Gā¦
I do these for D, Em, G, Aminor and major, Bm (I think, Iād have to look at the book) high D and Em.
also DEF#E DEF#E DEF#E D
ā¦EF#EDā¦
ā¦F#EDEā¦
ā¦EDEF#ā¦
doing that pattern on every note from D to g, playing Cnats and not C#
There are a lot more
If youāre interested, there is an inexpensive book available either through a fiferās website, or I can get you one. Drop me an email if youāre interesed.
Iām having trouble tracking down Bill Hartās book Stronger, Better, Faster. Anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks,
Terry
Maybe if you do a search; itās been discussed here,
along with where to get it.
I can get it, Terryā¦and will send it out at cost plus shipping. Contact me at tyghress@aol.com if youāre interested.
Let me just point out that practicing scales/arpeggios is not part of the musical practice of Irish traditional music and furthermore, it is an alien concept to IrTrad musicians raised in the tradition. The concept of learning/practicing exercises before one can play the actual music is strictly a Western European art music practice, and one that people mistakenly try to import from that practice into traditional music (and this is true for other types of folk music, not just IrTrad).
Your first approach was the authentically correct one-learn the tunes (easy ones at first!) as an Irish person would (that is, holistically). And listen to as many IrTrad recordings as you can-this is much more important than learning scales or āexercises.ā A good rule of thumb is to practice one hour for every ten hours you listen.
Thats an interesting point Janice makes.
And this is a good topic youāve started Nash.
I like to bridge the two (the technical with the
inspirational)and practice in modes -esp.
using a dominant motif of an appropriate raag
to colour the scale.
Never fails to inspire.
This way you can catch the compositional elements
of many melodies. Quite exciting.
(One day I was doing pentatonic Pahadi Raag in G
and suddenly I found myself in Danny Boy
having never played it before.
When I looked up Danny Boy I noticed it was
basically the Pahadi pentatonic scale ā G A B D E.
Though Danny Boy has 7 notes, the additional F#
and esp. Cnat are so little used they can be
considered grace notes. Without them you get
the nub of it but, of course, with them the song is graced!)
If you ask me itās a matter of approach and attitude:-
Each time, in every note played
A new song is hiding
Finders keepers !
This was the original post, right? Now Janice, how do your remarks bear helpfully on this question? This is the whistle board, not the ITM board. Iām not trying to be mean, I just think youāve gone OT.
Even if we do assume that nashradus and others are primarily interested in folk musics, I fail to see how doing exercises could do any harm. Can anybody tell me what harm it is supposed to do? It isnāt a substitute for learning tunes. But who ever thought that it was? I would guess that most of us who do do exercises would only spend a small proportion of our time on them and would only do them occasionally, or as a regular part of our warm up. Iām all for them, but I only do them occasionally. So many dance tunes consist largely of fragments from the patterns we were writing out, strung together in interesting ways. So how could learning those patterns not assist with ear development and improving muscle memory?
There is a distinction between learning an instrument and learning to play ITM. I play quite a few instruments. If I learn a tune on whistle, I can usually play it, with only a few stutters, on anglo concertina straight away. This isnāt magic, itās knowledge of scales and muscle (mainly finger) memory. Incidentally, I hardly ever practice scales on concertina but this isnāt a virtue and it doesnāt mean that I donāt āthinkā scales when Iām playing and learning tunes. I donāt think consciously as I play, I just know where I am, as when I walk or drive to a friends houseāsometimes I couldnāt describe very well how to get there but I could take you there in the worst weather. Peter Laban and others recently reported several traditional players transposing a good part of their repertoire on the fly to fit with flat pitch pipes. What they were demonstrating was not āIrishā technique, it was a general knowledge of scales and intervals. Even if they couldnāt tell you what a scale wasāhighly unlikelyāthey still know scales.
I was certainly under the impression that most (all?) teachers of Irish music tell you to practice ornaments, and not always in the context of songs. I have commercial and informal tapes of lessons of some pretty high profile players to prove it.