Bio: I studied music in college and was a high school band director for a few years. I left that trade and have spent the last 30 years in the trucking business. I have recently picked up whistling and am ready to begin building a repertoire of tunes. Some day I hope to gather with other lovers of Irish/Celtic music for some “group” play.
Question: If I’m going to learn some tunes, I figure they might as well be ones that I can play with others in a session. So where can I find a list of the “classics” or tunes that everyone seems to know when they get together for a session?
Go here, http://www.thesession.org/members/, click on “Tunebook”. Tunes are listed by most downloaded from the site. A fairly representative list of most commonly known tunes. Whether you want to play them at a session or not is another issue altogether.
The biggest problem with “standard” session tunes is that every session has its own standards. Oh, there are a few that are virtually universal (The Kesh, Silver Spear, etc.), but every session has its own character. My advice would be to find a local session and start attending with a tape recorder. You can also talk to the musicians. Most of them will be happy to tell you what tunes they like assuming they know the names .
Blazer, are you comfortable letting us
know where, generally, you are located?
If so, maybe someone in your area would
be able to give better info about what
tunes are common there. Maybe you could
even fill in your Location on your profile so
it will show up next to all your posts.
Thanks for the tips. I am in South Louisiana… Baton Rouge. We are pretty heavy on the Cajun music down here, but I have not run across much Irish yet. Someone else e-mailed me a list of a dozen songs, so I feel like I’m off to the races now. With hundreds of tunes on thesession.org, narrowing that down to a few dozen would be a good start.
A couple of problems with this request: 1) The tunes everyone plays are different in different places. 2) Those tunes that are well known nearly everywhere are often tunes folks at sessions would prefer not to play.
There is a solution though. Find a local session. Go to listen. Take a recorder if you have one (ask if you can record just to be polite). Take a notebook. Write down the names.
I’m all for the record-your-own session approach. But if you’re just looking for a pointer to a few tunes to get started with on your own, there’s nothing wrong with a list.
The tune list at thesession.org is fine, but don’t put too much faith in the transcriptions. Pick a tune, then go to the CCÉ Foinn Seisiún site (1 and 2), find the tune there, and use the recording as your guide. Or just go directly to Foinn Seisiun.
Actually, be careful of any settings you hear or find any place other than the session you are actually hoping to one day play. While a number of tunes have settings that are nearly universal, other tunes tend to have many different settings and some of these settings don’t necessarily go together (in an extreme case, the settings could be in different keys).
Yes, be very careful. If your setting is different, they’ll beat you with shillelaghs and bodhrán tippers, then hand you over to the surly pipers to torture you with dental floss and cheese wax.
There are also the online whistle lesson resources, where you can learn a few good tunes along the way.
I’m not too worried about that, but playing a tune in G when everyone else knows it in D, or playing two parts when everyone else is playing three, or playing all the parts of a many-parted tune in a different order, that stuff I worry about. It’s easy to have four or five musicians meet, all knowing mutally incompatible versions of the same tune.
Yes indeed every session is different and you really need to go to your local session and learn their repertoire and their versions.
I did the sessiondotorg tunebook thing and discovered that I know all but a couple of the first 100 most common tunes and all but around a dozen of the 200 most common tunes… but I can sit for an hour at our local session and hear nary a tune I know. Fact is, the total session corpus in incredibly vast… there are tens of thousands of tunes on that site, are there not?
Oh by the way, another way to get an idea of the “commoness” of tunes is to search the tunes of sessiondotorg by the order of when they were added. You’ll see a body of tunes that date to when the site began and another group a bit later, a few hundred tunes which indeed seem to be among the most commonly heard session tunes.
Thanks again for all of the advise. I’ll be checking out the resources you listed and looking for some LIVE examples here in my area. I’m also looking for some good tutorial materials for the finer points of embellishment as well as some good CDs of exemplary whistle artists.
I’ve been learning whistle since early 2009 and thought I’d share two resources I found useful for good live examples.
Ryan Duns has a well-respected tin whistle course on line here: http://tinwhistler.blogspot.com/ I didn’t get a lot from the lessons but I did find helpful his many videos playing Irish tunes up to speed. Being able to both hear and watch someone do it is helpful.
Comhaltas has some wonderful videos of Irish music for each traditional instrument. Go here and click on “Whistle”: http://comhaltas.ie/music/programmes
.