Tips and Tunes for a (relative) beginner?

Irish Flute
1

Background: I’ve played Boehm flute for over 30 years, the last ten of them devoted solely to ITM and Celtic (sorry!) music. I had just ordered my first Irish Flute (A GLP) when I got sick and illness and injury kept me out of playing for something like two years. Now I’m playing again on a consistent basis and have been for a few months. It’s like learning a different instrument and I have some questions.

  1. Do you keep your right hand pinky (R4?) anchored at all times? My instinct as a Boehm player is to lift it when playing Ds, but I find the notes don’t come out as strongly. Still, it seems to get in the way if I leave it down.

  2. How do you keep from hitting the C key with R1 at odd times. I have a real problem with this, especially as I pick up the pace.

Also, what tunes would you recommend for a relative beginner? I’m getting bored playing the same things over and over again and I find my practice sessions go better if I sometimes break up the routine with something new.

Here are the tunes I pretty much know (some of them I can still only play pretty well on the whistle):

Reels: The Lady on the Island, The Tarlbolton, The Maid Behind the Bar, Drowsy Maggie, Cooley’s, Paddy Fahy’s, The Guns of the Magnificent Seven (hard tune but I love the title!), The Old Copperplate, The Gravel Walk, The Musical Priest. I used to know The High Reel, but I can’t for the life of me remember the B part…and those G sharps are a little too much for me right now.

Jigs: The Lonesome Jig, Apples in Winter, The Sporting Pitchfork, The Mist on the Mountain, Scarce O’ Tatties, The Pipe on the Hob 1 & 2, The Hag at the Churn, Lannigan’s Ball, The Lilting Banshee (I think this is also known as Ballinasloe Fair), The Connaughtman’s Rambles, The Kesh, The Strayaway Child, Castleton Conners, The Castlebar Races

Other: The Choice Wife, The Kid on the Mountain, The King of the Fairies, The Dawning of the Day, Off to California, The Road to Lisdoonvarna (slide), The Finnish Polka, The Kerry Polka, Polka gan ainm

It’s frustrating because I know I used to know more tunes than this. It’s amazing how much you can lose over an enforced period of inactivity.

Anyway, recommendations?

Thanks,

Caitlin

2

  1. no: down from playing A up, up from F down, in between A & F whatever
    if you can make sense of that :smiley:
    -OR-
    down when you need the stability
    up when down interferes with moving R3 fast enough (tapping an E)
    -AND-
    you didn’t say if there was an Eb key that the E wants vented to sound best…might be a factor, eh?

  2. never had a flute that gave me that problem, never seen a GLP

my right hand fingers are fairly straight
my left is very similar to my Boehm grip

FWIW: my R4 was broken about 12 years back and the middle joint only goes to a bit over 90 degrees
R3 is missing the tip, not much of an issue after 47 years
R2 is a bit long, I end up covering the hole dangerously close to the 1st joint

3

I have the same problem with R2. I can’t seem to keep it straight yet no matter how hard I try!

caitlin

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You definitely don’t seem like a beginner by any stretch, just someone out of the loop for a while. For tunes, thesession.org may be good memory jogger–go to the members page, http://www.thesession.org/members/, and click on the tunebook tab. This has an exhaustive list of tunes sorted by most downloaded into members’ tunebooks.

Hope it helps.

Jason

5

Thank you so much! That’s a great resource. I’ve already seen a lot of tunes that I know, or used to know. Bookmarking site now!

Caitlin