…get good at the traditional stuff? I’ve been playing pennywhistles for a little over a year now and I can do all the basics and I know a handfull of modern tunes, but I still get jealous when I browse youtube and see people playing the fast irish music.
I know nothing about irish music at all, but I love the way it sounds. So how do most people go about learning these songs? Seems to fast to learn by ear, and I can’t read music fast enough to keep up with songs like that.
OK - I’ll be first…
PRACTICE!!!
I’ve been playing Irish flute for 2+ years, usually almost an hour a day, and still have some of the same problems your talking about! Trust me - it’ll come with practice… Oh yeah - more standard advice: listen to ITM as much as possible and get with others of like mind as much as you can.
Does that cover it?
Pat
play back a recording and use the player to slow it down
most, if not many, players are capable of slowing down the tune without changing the pitch.
many can change the pitch also, but it is separate from the speed (wha’ts nice if yer tuning is different than theirs)
ASD allows you to select a sub portion of the tune and loop through it with a user defined pause between loops
Best Practice is much like ASD
Audacity will do much the same thing, abet using different techniques, and it supports recording.
It is free & if you don’t have something that records and edits and is better…
VLC is a player. It plays most all media types (I haven’t found one that it doesn’t play). It will change tempo, it is free, it is not a resource hog
You have to be patient and listen to Irish music all the time to get it under your skin. That’s the key. Don’t get all linear about it and feel that you have to learn one tune at a time thoroughly. It’s much more fun to have a good number of tunes whirling around your head at any one time. I suppose. Hey, I mentioned by accident the key word. Fun!
Also, what you practice is what you will get good at. If you are dividing your playing/practice time too much between other genres then you might have difficulty coming alongside Irish music in a way that pleases you. The more your ear hears Irish music the more it will be able to discern what is going on and the better chance you’ll have of mimicking it on your instrument. Set a goal, focus on it, and have fun with it.
A song is something you sing; a tune is something you play. These people are giving the best advice. Listen to it all you can. The more you know a tune, the better. It is too hard to learn one that you don’t know. Go to the sessions around your city and listen, maybe even record (with the players’ permission). Also, it doesn’t matter how many tunes you know, it is how you play them. You can play 100 tunes and sound like crap, or 10 tunes and sound great. The people will respect you for those 10 tunes that sound great, but they will give you dirty looks if you play 100 sloppy tunes.
Also practicing with a metronome works great too. Slow and steady wins the race.
There is a lot of good advice here but I must respectfully disagree about metronomes. You must develop your sense of tempo and rhythm, which don’t always come naturally, by listening intently and interacting when you join in with other people. It’s a good idea to record your own playing and listen back. Or get someone else to listen back. Metronomes are mechanical devices and there’s nothing mechanical about playing Irish tunes with other human beings. You don’t learn to walk better by using a crutch.
I do agree with the first part, Steve. However, listening and interacting while playing with others at a session or playing along with CDs trains only part of the entire package. You learn to be a better listener and to adapt your tempo and rhythm to that of the other players. Very important skill! But what this approach doesn’t necessarily teach you is to play on your own at a steady tempo.
Particularly in sessions, I have often found that the entire group of musicians speeds up at the same places. I also heard first-class musicians run into tempo issues once in a while (even on CD) when playing on their own. So, if you only work on your tempo by playing along with others, you might pick up some bad habits or reinforce those you already have. It also only trains some kind of passive sense of tempo. I know some people who can play along with a steady rhythm because they listen to what everybody else is doing. But when playing on their own, their tempo becomes very unstable. Another negative aspect is that when you play along with others, you can get away with a lot of sloppy playing and you might not even be aware of it because so much else is going on.
And this is where the metronome comes in very handy as it makes it painfully clear where exactly you are prone to speed up or slow down (and these technical or melodic phrases will most likely be the same places most other musicians will have the same issues). You become more aware of those pitfalls and are able to control and avoid them better. The metronome forces you to play with more discipline and precision and you learn to control your fingers better. It’s definitely not a cure-all, but a very useful tool when used in combination with other approaches.
And “mechanical” has such a negative connotation. You might as well say the metronome has a rock-solid steady beat 
- something your music should also have. And there’s no need to worry that just because you practice sometimes with a metronome your playing will get all mechanical as well - we’re way too much prone to “mess up” and add our own “variation” to even the steadiest human tempo.
Ringo’s a metronome
he seems ta get by
Metronomes? Meh.
Find yourself a Clareman who plays accordion regularly for feiseanna and set dancing, that’ll set you straight.
The trouble is that when you rely on this too heavily as a beginner/intermediate musician, when you don’t already have the skills (brought to you by an increasingly discerning ear from hours of listening and playing) to know how to execute good rhythmic devices around the perfect click then your playing will most likely come out mechanical. When all you have is a click then your playing will be influenced (or lacking influence) by that bare mechanical click. Not saying metronomes are a bad thing but I really think there are much better options for improving your playing since our original thread question was how to get better at playing traditional tunes (not compete for 1st chair in the orchestra).
Pat has it! In my case it was a Clare woman on the concertina that opened up my ears. 
The first thing is to stop trying to play Irish music on a NAF. 
The next thing is to think about this statement
which contains the seed of the answer to your question.
When you play with a metronome you are not interacting with it. No way will this help you to play with other musicians in a session. That’s the first thing. Playing in a session is interaction which involves (at its best) all parties listening and making myriad minute adjustments. It isn’t going too far, I believe, to say that this is what provides most of the joy of playing traditional music. A metronome may well point out to you that you can’t play in tempo but it will not fix the problem. Playing music is an entirely organic pursuit, and a metronome can’t help you. You have to get involved and play this music in order to improve your playing skills. Metronomes and scales just get in the way. If you have the Irvine/Brady album, listen to the last tune on the last track, Little Stack of Wheat. Sublime playing of a lovely tune. Listen again. By the end it’s considerably faster than at the beginning. I’m still glad that there’s nothing metronomic about it.
Hey now, I play jazz on a naf, why not irish music? (lol sorry, couldn’t find a pic of me playing whistle)
As far as me knowing nothing about irish music, until I started playing whistles I had never really heard any. Then when I started looking for whistle videos on youtube, it was all I could find. I’ve been trying lately to develop a style of jazz playing and I’d like to get the irish thing down too, but usually I just play modern tunes. Nirvana and Beetles sound good on a whistle imho.
I’m a beginner of a few months, but here are my experiences:
I’ve stopped listening to any music except ITM, and I listen to it at least several hours a day. I’m trying to get an internal repetoire of tunes so that I can recognize them when I hear them, and can reproduce them vocally. Without that, how do I know that I’m playing ITM, rather than just noodling? I’ve found the local slow session, but have not made the time to get out there. I can only imagine that would do a world of good!
In addition to practicing playing the whistle, I’ll practice listening. I take a recording that I want to learn, play it on repeat and sing along until I can sing it smooth and precise. I currently using session recordings from comhaltas, and like them because they aren’t whistle recordings. I have to learn the tune and envision in my head how it will sound on the whistle. I break it down in my head into 2 and 4 bar phrases and make sure that I can clearly sing those. I make sure that I am hearing and able to sing a clear transition between the phrases (rather than just mumbling out two or three connecting notes as I slack through the repeat). I usually do this at normal speed, so I get the feel and essence of the tune, not just the mechanics. I find myself humming tunes all the time, even when not listening to tunes.
Once I am able to sing it with confidence, including transitions, WITHOUT the recording, I’ll pick up my whistle and try to play it. I still need to noodle it out, but by doing all this listening first, I’m spending about an hour to noodle out a tune, rather than the week it took me to memorize my first piece via sheet music. Additionally, I find that I can remember what note I’m trying to noodling, and don’t have to keep starting from the beginning.
Interesting (to me), I find that I start with an overly simplified version of the tune. My first run though of a jig will have a lot of repeated triplets… then after a few plays, that gets shaped into a little run or a turn. As has been mentioned elsewhere, the tune is stored in my head as sound.. not as finger positions or notation of some kind… so I don’t have to worry about being able to translate fast enough to make it come out right. My tunes start at about double the speed I could play them when learning from sheet music, with much better lilt.
I have taken to playing with a metronome at times, but not learning with it. I imagine the metronome being the pace of the rest of the session… I think that it makes sense to be ABLE to play with a rocksteady beat, so that any variations of tempo are intentional. I also think it gives great feedback for those areas where you are playing faster than your ability allows. If you suddenly slow down at a hard part, you should have played the tune slower to start with.
It feels a little obsessive, but in a good way. I’m always thinking about tunes and trying to immerse myself in the music. I find it is very fun and if I had extra hours in the day, I would keep doing more of the same.
after a bit you will be able to pick 'em out on whistle as quick as by voice.
It’ll take a bit longer to get to where you just pick up the right whistle for whatever key the fiddles went to. 
Me too!
But I’ll just take you up on this (people will start to think I have Obsessive Anti-metronome Disorder…):
I have taken to playing with a metronome at times, but not learning with it. I imagine the metronome being the pace of the rest of the session… I think that it makes sense to be ABLE to play with a rocksteady beat, so that any variations of tempo are intentional. I also think it gives great feedback for those areas where you are playing faster than your ability allows. If you suddenly slow down at a hard part, you should have played the tune slower to start with.
Playing with a metronome will actually prevent you from reacting as you would when playing with genuine, non-automaton human beings. I would also contest your implication that it can help you to play with a rock-steady beat. It may point to a problem one has, but if one has the potential to be even a half-decent musician one should be able to detect that by listening back to recordings of oneself. It just isn’t the real thing. It’s the same with playing along with CDs. Nothing wrong with that for picking up tunes (as long as you listen to plenty of other versions), and I did it myself for years, but once you turn off that CD and you’re on your own with it you find that the rock-steady beat you’ve been playing along with hasn’t helped your own sense of tempo one bit. That’s because, again, you are not interacting. I don’t much care for the notion that it’s valid to dissect this music into separate elements for practising or working on. The way to learn to play tunes better is to play tunes and to listen whilst you’re playing, and you can’t beat playing with other musicians. And I don’t understand why you need a metronome to tell you that you’ve slowed down at a hard bit. That should be obvious to you. The best metronome is the organic one in your brain that you need to train by playing, listening and reacting to music. Eventually you should be able to play without stamping your foot. My son’s classical guitar teacher, a man of international renown, wouldn’t let my son tap his foot or use a metronome, and my son is now an excellent guitarist. I can just about see a use for metronomes during the rudimentary stages of teaching someone to play an instrument, when they are wrestling with the technical issues of getting the notes and can be temporarily relieved by the click of the additional burden of worrying about tempo, but I can’t see a valid use for it for getting Irish music under your skin. Play, listen, enjoy.
Some of the best albums recorded are those recorded in the days pre-click track (or deliberately without one). If you listen closely then the tempo varies within the tune/song etc. This gives a more organic feel to the music. Anything recorded with a click track may sound sterile by comparison.
Hm… I believe I’m rethinking my opinion of a metronome for ITM. I come from an orchestral background, where metronome practice is a huge plus. I was thinking of it as a tool to help keep you honest… but listening to your own recordings would do the same and much more. Plus, ITM promotes extemporaneous play in ornamentation and rhythm, so why not tempo as well? I guess if you are playing reels for dancers, they might want a steady beat… but do the dancers follow the musicians, or do the musicians follow the dancers?
Dancers will soon let you know if you’re not keeping the beat! By not dancing, quite often…