Does anyone else have any good songbook or website recommendations for learning slow airs? I’ve been playing low whistle as an accompaniment for about a year and a half so I know a little ornamentation… I just wanted to start learning some actual trad songs.
You’re really best off trying to work airs out by ear. I’m someone who struggled with this, a lot, and bought the O’Cannain book perhaps for the same reason you did.
It’s the ‘best book of it’s type’, but my experience is that it’s type isn’t especially useful. His phrasing notations work great for the o’Carolan pieces he includes and not at all for the genuine sean nos slow airs.
You are far better off using recordings of slow airs to develop your learn-by-ear abilities. Airs are slow enough that it isn’t agony, even if (like me) you’re not a natural, and you’ll get the phrasing and the dancing relationships between note, grace, melody & phrase organically–you won’t have to think about it, it’s just there and you hear it. With Tomas O Canainn in front of me, I wasn’t doing that.
Start with recordings of pieces you like. If you stick to recordings of someone playing a D whistle, for example, you can be sure that you’ve got a hole & a finger for everything you hear.
I’m going to second learning by ear for slow airs as opposed to from a book. It seems, though, like you might be trying to learn slow airs as a way to get into the more “complicated” tunes. This is a common misconception. Slow airs ARE the more complicated tunes; playing them properly takes a lot of skill.
Instead of slow airs, you might want to start with some waltzes and well-known song tunes like Star of the County Down and Down by the Sally Gardens.
I have Tomas O Canainn’s Book. It’s a useful source. Many of the tunes I know by ear anyway, and it’s nice to have the dots. He does tend to be a little heavier on the ornamentation than I would prefer… but if you know the tune you can do your own editing.
I can totally understand how learning airs by ear would be preferable.
But my ITM collection doesn’t have many airs. The CDs that I have seem to consist mostly of jigs, reels, and hornpipes.
So, can anyone recommend particular CDs or artists to listen to, for lots of airs? (I suppose if I could get a table-of-contents listing for the books mentioned in this thread, and then I could search for those airs on TheSession, and that would give me a listing of CDs that include a tune by that name, but that seems a bit roundabout…)