Okay so I’m fairly new To the tin whistle. Have only been doing it for a year and a half and I’m only just now starting to make progress now that I’ve found some books to study.
I have started to Braille a few songs that I like so that I can reference note order if needed but mostly learning by ear. Something I’m running into though is that there are so many versions of each individual tune.
I have OCD which can be frustrating at times, but I can usually notice when it’s dictating things
The problem of having trouble getting by is what is the right tune setting. There are tunes in different keys which that I can understand but there are versions of tunes where just three or four notes are different and I’m having trouble wrapping my head around. What is the right one? I’ve been doing my best to try and go off the one that sounds right to me, but I don’t have the experience needed to make that call.
So my question is how do you choose the correct one? This is one of the problems I had with thesession.org. There were so many versions of each tune. It’s not a source I’m comfortable using much less navigating that particular website is a bit of a pain with a screen reader. I’ve been using learntinwistle.com and the Kings Street sessions tunebook as well as still referencing my Gray Larson books.
Generally speaking here isn’t really one right version of a tune although in certain circumstances, like playing with others, there may be one for that particular situation.
Mind you, that doesn’t imply it’s a free for all where anything goes, there are also many ways that are wrong.
Good players vary tunes with each playing, variation is the lifeblood of good playing. In other words, a tune is never a string of notes learned by heart, it moves, it shifts shape,it breathes, it goes in different directions. Listen closely to great players and you’ll get it, eventually.
I suppose this is where the old ‘learning by ear’ comes into play. You learn the shape of a tune and find, as I like to call it, different ways through it.
When playing with others you need to adapt tp find common ground. All that sort of thing. It comes with experience and being in the presence of good players.
Probably more than you want to hear at this point of your learning but there you have it.
You could choose the one you like best, or the one that best suits your instrument?
I nearly always choose the simplest. I don’t want someone else’s ornamentation written in, I want the bones of the tune so I can make it my own. Before I start learning I’ve already listened to several versions of it, so I have a sense of whether a transcript is a fairly typical account.
The one thing I do look into is the key it’s most often played in. I never feel I’ve really learned tunes until I’ve played them enough times with other folk, so I need to know that.
There are many right versions, but when you look for what they all have in common, that tends to be a kind of stardard, though the standard version today may not be the same as it was twenty years ago, or fifty, or a century. The “standard” can also vary by region. As you find more and more versions, you get a feel for what the tune is now and what it used to be for previous generations, and then your aim might be to create your own versions based on all the bits that appeal most to you, which may involve taking some parts of modern versions while restoring something of older versions where the overall feel went out of fashion but took with it some aspects that are worth reviving. The variety is a good thing, so make it your aim to accommodate it and not lock yourself down to any fixed standard. Let tunes meander like rivers. Think about the way tunes taken to America evolved differently and diverged into different species of tunes. They aren’t fixed.
What an interesting question! It made me realize I’ve never asked myself that, never consciously analyzed pieces for the most `correct’ version, because I never thought about there being a correct version. I’ve always approached it from the view of which one I prefer.
There is a group that plays music from very old manuscripts, and I enjoy their interpretations, but I don’t feel necessarily that theirs is the last word. If you are interested in knowing who they are, let me know and I will look that ulater. My cat is sleeping in front of the CD rack at the moment and I don’t want to wake her up, but I’ll be happy to find that later today.
I use YouTube videos for my playing with other people, and I just go with the version that I like the best and play with them. Or I may go with a version because I have a whistle in that key, or because it has notes in the range of my flute.
I will try different versions on The Session, and play the one that I like the best. I have the advantage in this of being sighted, so I can do that more easily than it is for you, but not impossible, either.
I have been thinking about your learning processes since you posted the other day. I will listen to a video about learning music and think about it from the perspective of someone who is not visual, and have realized with several of them that the visuals are for the most part superfluous. All that to say, I appreciate your posts because they make me think about the music from a different perspective.
I’ve also enjoyed the ideas of other people who responded to this question. Thank you for starting this interesting thread.
My original flute/whistle mentor back in the 1970s would stress not playing a tune the same way over and over, but mixing things up as you go along.
The great thing about the session is that it does usually give several alternate versions.
My advice would be to play through all of them, ideally memorise all of them, but not keep them in separate boxes, but rather get used to freely floating between phrases from the various versions as you go along.
Because not one of the several versions, by itself, is “the correct tune”. Rather, the total reality of a tune is the gestalt of all the versions any good player has ever played.
Often some of the settings will be in keys unsuitable for sightreading and/or playing on the whistle, and would need to be transposed. But generally there’s at least one whistle-friendly version.
Although it’s not so much wanting to “make it my own” as playing it the way that suites my instrument the way I play it for that music. One thing to bear in mind with versions from places like thesession.org is that some of the differences and many ornaments stem from what works well on the different instruments. What a whistle player would do may not be what a fiddler would do even when thinking of the same outline of the tune.
I generally prefer to learn a tune from a recording of a different instrument but not slavishly follow all the fine detail. Though I do try to following the detail in demonstrations or teaching examples for my own instrument.