So, due to unexpected illness, I had to stop going to my whistle lesson, (total bummer)which I’ve been doing for two years, and I was trying to find something that I could do at home to try and keep learning, and I think I hit on a pretty good combination.
-L.E. McCullough’s 121 session tunes, which I know slightly more than half of. Do other intermediate players find this one useful to practice with? I noticed that even in the fast version of each tune, his ornamentation style is pretty different than the way I was taught, but it’s still easy to learn the learn from. The backup, which you can turn on separately from the melody is really sweet sounding and useful for practing keeping up the tempo/drive when just playing by yourself. -
- Steve Kaufman’s 4 hour celtic workout, which I know signficantly less than half of. This one has kind of a “swing” to it? I don’t know, but I think they may be primarily old-time players? Anyway, also has the backup on a seperate channel, which is great.
Last but not least I got the Roni-music CD transcriber, which although the cd’s do one fast and one slow track, now I can adujust the tempo to whatever is comfortable.
So, I guess I’m done purchasing for awhile. hehe Hopefully it’ll keep me on track. It doesn’t really compare to having someone show me every week, go over tunes in great detail, ornamentation and being able to pour over old recordings where he was trying to teach me to listen for each element and different styles of playing, but hopefully I’ll be able to get back to that someday. In the meantime, I was interested in what other players have done when they couldn’t get out to lessons/sessions, or whatever. Have any intermediate players had good success with Scoiltrad? Thanks LA