All,
I only know two songs, the ones listed above. And was wondering if you could help me pick new tunes to learn that are easy like those. It’s funny how an incredible instrument makes you just want to learn more and more…
Thanks,
Tony
I don’t think it’s a bad idea to buy a primer for tin whistle (I started with the Mel Bay book) because it’s good to start with basic things like long notes and tone, scales, etc. Or, a book like Timbre the Flute Tutor is a nice starting book, too. The first has quite a variety of musical styles including a decent number of slower tunes, whereas Timber focuses more on Irish Trad (jigs, reels, etc.).
Disclaimer - I don’t know how well the new Gray Larsen book would work for a newbie.
Eric
I too started on tunes like those. I would say “She Moved Through the Fair” is another good one to try, as are a few slow O’Carolan tunes.
These are good for learning the fingerings and how to make a clean tone, but don’t help much with dance rhythms for jigs and reels. As soon as you feel comforable, try moving on to an easy jig like “Jimmy Ward’s”.
Eddie
Star of the County Down
Foggy Dew
Two things you haven’t told us that would help.
Can you only learn by ear or can you read?
Do you want to play ITM mainly or exclusively or do you want to play folk and/or popular songs quite generally?
I’m learning to read music. I can’t quite sight read, but I’m getting there. And right now just about any folk/traditional song will do.
Thanks,
Tony
Tony, if you are just planning on just playing traditional music, then I wouldn’t waste much time learning to sight read. I find sight reading to be deterimental, because it doesn’t help me memorize a tune. I see the notes and my fingers play them, but they don’t stick in the grey matter!
It is worth learning to read the music, but I wouldn’t worry about becoming proficient enough to play from sheetmusic in real time. Traditional music is fundamentally an aural tradition, I’d focus on listening and learning by ear.
I use a software package called Transcribe</a](http://www.seventhstring.demon.co.uk/xscribe/">Transcribe</a)> all the time, it’s very helpful in slowing down and isolating difficult passages. There also is a free plugin for winamp that can do something similar.
A great deal of trad music is also passed around in ABC</a](http://www.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc/">ABC</a)> format, you may want to become familiar with it.
That said, if you want to learn to sight read, by all means do so. But don’t think it’s a requirement.
Above all else, enjoy yourself.
Eddie
Amazing Grace
Simple Gifts
Oh Shenandoah
The Ash Grove (Welsh)
Believe me if all those endearing young charms
Loch Lomond
Streets of Loredo (Irish tune, really)
Sweet Betsy from Pike
Sleep my child and peace attend thee,
all through the night…(Welsh)
Greensleeves is a bit more difficult,
involving some half holing.
Also a bit more difficult but
worth trying, Beatles, I will
Yesterday
Very lovely and not so difficult, the ballad:
Just the way you look tonight
The Ewan McCall ballad:
The first time ever
(Gets you nicely up into the second octave)
The Sea shanty, Fiddler’s Green
The Battle Hymn of the Republic
Quite a few Christmas carols,
especially god rest ye merry gentlemen
Jamaica Farewell, the old Harry Belefonte number
Much fun is Favorite Things (from the Sound of Music).
Yeah, and it will last you a lifetime once you start trying to play it like Coltrane. 
I try, God knows I try.
I think Jim’s got the right idea, here: at the very start, when you are first struggling to bring the flute under your control, it doesn’t matter what you play half so much as that you play, every day, and that you start finding things in it that you enjoy.
The issue of reading music, especially sightreading, has pros and cons.
On the pro side, why not read music? If you can, you are not limited to learning tunes only from other musicians or from recordings, you can take advantage of the vast repository of music found online and in tune books, and if you later want to play any other kind of music, the inability to read music will be a vast liability.
On the con side, I suppose there is the argument that if you start training your ears from day one to pick up tunes on the fly, you are that much further along towards being able to pick up new tunes in real time such as in a session. Also there is the fact that you cannot notate Irish tunes exactly as played due to limitations in the notation system, so that lots of newcomers to the music play tunes very wrong by strictly following the notes on the page.
There is an another argument to be made for sightreading, though it doesn’t really apply to beginners. When you get to a certain level, you can pick up a book like O’Niells, and start reading through it, and you start seeing that many of the tunes are put together from the same “building blocks,” for instance the little “egdg” rocking pedal found in so many good reels for flute, and you learn what these sound like. So when you hear a tune in session, you aren’t trying to figure out “ok, that sounds like maybe an E, then issat an A or a G?”…instead, you hear it and think “ok, that’s that same old egdg figure that’s in so many reels,” and you’ve got that part down.
The best way I know of to learn those building blocks is in reading through large collections of tunes. That way your brain gets two kinds of reinforcement for what it’s learning: the sound of the figures, and the visual representation of the figures on the page.
Also it can help you learn the art of variation, as you come to know that this figure and that figure both do the same thing, so as a variation you could use this one or that one…
–James
Keep this stuff coming!!! I was kind of scared at the beginning… Well maybe scared isn’t the right word… apprehensive. I’m 35 and picking up an instrument… What was I thinking?
Now I feel like I still have a long life to enjoy this so I want to learn as much as possible. The instruments that I dinked around with before I learned songs by ear. It took forever to work out the song, but I suppose that since I can still play most of them today, that’s good. But I’d like to now be able to read the song so I can pick it up quickly and then the more I play it the more I play it like I hear it not what’s written. Make sense?
What I’m really trying to do is learn the instrument as well as I know how to whistle, and I mean no instrument whistling. I don’t know what the notes are or anything when I whistle, I just whistle the song. I’m hoping the more and more songs I learn that maybe the flute will just be an extention of my lips and I’ll play it like I whistle…
I don’t think I’m making sense, since I don’t quite understand what I’m trying to say. But basically I want to learn as much as I can…
THANKS!
Tony
On the face of things, knowing how to
read is a good idea. It in no way prevents
one from listening to music. I wish
I could read better. The more ya know,
the more ya know. Best
Yes, it does make sense.
I think you’ve got your head on pretty straight, and you’ve hit another point about learning by ear squarely on the head.
Most Irish trad session tunes are played at 200+ bpm. At this speed to a beginner it’s a musical blur.
I know a pretty good flutist, I won’t put a name here, who plays perfectly well but doesn’t play the tunes exactly right. You can hear in his playing he’s picked these tunes up in session, but there’s no nice way to say this, there are just wrong notes in his playing.
And I’m very sure those wrong notes came from learning tunes in session, at speed, and its very possible that in session he’s playing along at a decent clip and doesn’t even hear that what he’s playing is wrong. Although I suspect the musicians around him may wince a bit.
So if you do learn trad tunes by ear, it really helps if you have a recording and a way to slow it down, if nothing else to make sure you get the notes right.
And that’s a real advantage to written music. It can’t accurately display the timing or phrasing of Irish music, but it can at least show you the notes that are played, getting you one step closer.
That’s how I see it, anyhow–there will be those who disagree, including some musicians I have a deep respect for.
–James
Just to show I don’t always jump down James’ throat on every topic , I agree with all you’ve said here, James. Knowledge is not a dangerous thing, it’s knowledge.
It’s true, if you don’t read music, you’re not alone in ITM, and if you have trouble stepping away from the notes at some point, you’re not really playing ITM. But tunes learned in sessions at top, noisey speed can ruin the traditional learning experience a lot faster than a transcription of a tune. Many of my first tunes were written out for me by Jack Coen, who taught himself to read and write music, to no denigration of the tradition; rather, I have some rock-solid settings to tunes that would have taken years to figure out – as it was, between tapes made at slow speed and those transcriptions, I had well over a hundred tunes under my belt in my first year. Having them become a part of me, of course, took far longer than that, well after I set both tapes and notes aside, but cycling through these tunes through the years, as I added new tunes from other sources, brought about a foundation that this aging, ex-rocker would not have had in any other way.
Regarding what tunes to start with in the first place, assuming you want to play ITM, work on a simple hornpipe, jig and reel first – get those feels into your head and fingers. Playing Irish-y melodies is nice, but it pulls you away from the rhythmic aspect of Irish playing, which is what usually takes the longest to learn. Whistle books, or, better, O’Neill’s 1001, are your best sources (the latter one you’ll likely never outgrow).
Gordon
Yes, there’s sort of an ambivalence here.
The irishy tunes are what I most enjoy playing,
in fact, but you’re right: they pull you away
from rhythmic playing that’s the hardest
to learn.
Just spent a long while today playing Bach
and Mozart, nothing terribly hard
but very beautiful. Sometimes
I feel that ITM is a sort of ghetto
in which I don’t want to get stuck;
othertimes I feel that, like it or not,
the best stuff
for flute is there and I need to
learn it, not avoid it…
O’neils 1001? Do you have a isbn or full title?
Thanks,
Tony
The O’Niells books are available as a free download (PDF format) here through the efforts of list member John Atchley:
http://www.guitarnut.com/folktablature/oneills/index.html
–James
Some very good thoughts on this thread. I most heartedly agree with Jim and James, reading is a good tool, as well as listening, each have different aspects for one learning a tune. I use both, plus the various software that slow it down or speed it up etc.
And like Jim, I like stretching my mind to other music besides ITM, it keeps the creative juices going and sometimes will offer insight into how play another tune. I feel sometimes that if I find a tune to difficult at first, I will work at it then put it to rest for a while and in most cases the tune comes out on its own.
A friend and I have worked out a duet (whistle/flute) with just knowing the simple melodythat we could remember from memory to Scarborough Fair. It works for us, put neither of us can transcribe it without a lot of anxiety.
Could question.
MarkB
Agreed on the pros and cons of sight reading. I’m one of those sight readers who was classically trained to “play it like you read it and don’t mess around”. So, a little over hrumphde years ago I quit the clarinet. Soon took up the chromatic harmonica and started picking up stuff “by ear”. Really hard for me – and still is – for the above indoctrination.
HOWEVER, I sight read a load of tunes till I hit some I like then “repititio et monetus studeorum” (repitition is the mother of study, or something like that). Repeating them over and over by reading then memorize, then add my own “stuff” and declare it as mine. Admittedly harder than those who read no notation and do all by pickup BUT better than those who read not.
Ya gotta do whatcha gotta do!
Play on.
BillG