Greetings to one and all,
I’ve been playing whistle “seriously” for a year now, and I’ve developed a good tone and can play well (a dozen or so tunes) I’m wanting to join in a session, but I need to learn alot more IrIrad session tunes. I have learned
some airs by ear off recordings, but I’m finding the fast stuff hard to learn by ear… Any suggestions as to which of the (session tunes) books are best? Thanks, Scott
Since I do not read music, I cant help you with a book, but some time ago a C&Fer suggested Transcribe software which enables you to slow down an MP3 to any comfortable speed.
It also allow you to adjust the key (by semi-tone) and maintain tempo. Since I only play whistles in D this is great for playing along with tunes recorded in some other key.
http://www.seventhstring.demon.co.uk/xscribe/
I found it is one of the best learning tools I have ever worked with.
Hope this helps.
Chris
The best thing to do is go to a regular session near you and listen for a while, get to know some of the players and ask them what they play and get recommendations from them. Every session is somewhat different in every city.
If you aren’t in area that has a regular session then you might try L.E McCullough’s 4 CD and book set “121 Session Tunes.” He plays the tune slow on one track and at speed on the second track. I have used these.
MarkB
The best book is the book of get your lazy butt to a session, man! 
Take a tape recorder with you.
But if you must have a book… i’ve found the settings on Mel Bay’s “Irish Session Tune Book” to be mostly useable. Most books, that one included, suffer from fiddleitis and you may need some experience to whistlefy the settings.
The best settings on http://www.thesession.org are better than what you get in books, because they come from real sessions. How to tell which ones are the best? Good question.
Another good pick (probably the best) is Geraldine Cotter’s tinwhistle tutor and CD. It’s all whistle, all the time, very good for learning. Click in this blue line to be teleported to thewhistleshop.com, where you can get it. You will want the book and the 2 CDs.
Good luck! It’s hard in the beginning, but it gets easier and easier as you do it.
By the way, it’s much easier to learn tunes in a session context than from a recording. Pretty soon you’ll grow out of those slow airs, at least for a while. Sessioning is so much fun.
g
While bringing a tape recorder to your local session and learning the locally played tunes is the recommended practice, a very good book is the “Smoke in your Eyes” collection of session tunes from Seattle. You can get a copy from the Dusty Strings music store in Seattle.
Of the many books out there, I have serious reservations about McCulloughs 4CD-tunebook because he notates all the rolls as triplets and doesn’t show cuts etc. On jigs, this is terribly confusing to someone who is listening to a trad record and looks at the sheets.
But in a way, that outlines the problem with sheets to begin with. Just an approximation, without stress accents and ornaments that are at the heart of the commonly played tunes. But once you start to get a handle on tunes, you might feel a little cheated by what you first saw there and wonder how many others have to go through that process.
Also be aware that the chords in the McCullough are not always whats being played on the demo discs and that further diminishes the teaching value of the set. i just don’t even look at that book anymore for the reasons above but I have other resources, including my ears and have developed enough fluency to cop off the records. Others suggest it rather forcefully, perhaps not remembering that for a beginner, its a feat to even hear everything thats going on. But you should push yourself in that direction. I copped an Altan tune off a record once because I loved it so much but it was only later that I could do the ornaments that I was hearing.
If you are gonna use sheets, I would make a list of tunes you want, download from Henrik Norbeck’s website via his index and learn from there. You’ll have to learn to use abc but its all free software and pretty basic. Within the info fields are the discs he got then from. So you can track down the record and hear good versions of the tunes.
http://www.norbeck.nu/abc/
Even though its best to just listen to live or discs, I have yet to find one listening CDs that has “all” the session tunes you might encounter so you have to get a half-dozen discs to amass your listening examples. I have a cheezy TimeLife Reels and Jigs of Ireland (a gift from someone) that has some of the most commonly played tunes in a fast and artless manner but with popular ornaments. The Na Connery’s disc has many session faves in blazing speeds with innovative orchestrations and the artists are first-rate. Keys are sometimes non-standard on the NaConnery’s.
Of the TimeLife thing, every tune on that disc can be found on McCulloughs set so you can at least compare them.
Thanks to everybody who took the time to give me advice.
I guess it’s time to get busy and work harder!
Scott
As already mentioned, the only way to get precisely the tunes played at your local session is to record the session. That said, there are many tunes that pop up in lots of places and if you know 50 to 100 of them you’ll be almost certainly be able to contribute to a session, even if you spends a lot of time just listening. I often find someone mention here a slide or polka I’m learning as one their band is practicing. There is a lot of concensus as to which tunes are the most fun to play. Another point is that many reels and jigs resemble eachother closely in places and you might well find that you don’t really have to learn tunes from scratch a lot of the time.
The Weekenders pointed out that transcriptions are often not true to the recorded demonstration disc. Even musicians recording demonstration discs can’t break the habit of launching into spontaneous variations—either that or the transcribers are lazy. I have a conertina book in which no double or triple stops are notated even though they can be heard throughout the demonstration recording. Since I feel that this is a feature of concertina playing that one needs advice on to master, this is very unfortunate.
There is a tune book … from memory it’s called the Red Book … which I rather like because it comes with rather good acompnying CDs by Matt Cranitch. The CDs are Take a Bow and Give it Schtick. Oh, and Cathal McConnell has a nice instruction book and CD on Homespun. No wonder there’s confusion though: he actually calls rolls triplets when he’s demonstrating them.
Here’s a collection of tunes that are on the Ceolas.org web site.
Download the whole thing in PDF. Contains 62 tunes on 25 pages. Divided into categories.
Many of the tunes that our local session plays are in there.
“Session Tunes - Collected and Written by John Walsh.”
http://www.ceolas.org/pub/tunes/abc.tunes.ps/sessionTunes.ps.gz
Good luck.
Mike
I also carry them, kevin is a friend of mine, great book.
This is not a bug, it’s a feature. The best thing about 121 FIST is the way L.E. has managed to pack in three versions of most tunes. It is a great tool for learning. (The worst thing is writing out the rolls as eight-triplet combinations – that’s just insane.)
Several books, L.E.'s amongst them, admit to this and I don’t object so long as they do admit to it. Not to write out small decorations like trills in a concertina book doesn’t worry me; not to write out double stops seems to me like leaving out something essential. I agree too that it is better to write the melody simply and say ‘play with such and such feel’. But if a book is going to do that it should discuss how a certain ‘feel’ would be more accurately notated to give the beginner help in learning to play with that feel. It’s much better for a book to say ‘play with swing feel’ and write straight eighth notes than write out triplets with rests for each middle note. But books do owe us an explanation of their departures from strict accuracy I think. If I buy a book of Irish tunes to learn how to play in the/an Irish style and something is written out over simply and we are told to ‘play in the Irish style,’ then I think the book should tell us what that is.
I agree with Wombat but only up to a point, htere is some consensus about how to write a tune, any departure from that is confusing.
Too detailed notations though can lead to them become ‘set in stone’, that could be a reason for some writers/teachers to omit certain things. Double stops on the concertina are things thrown in as the fancy takes you. Now, my son goes to Noel Hill these days for concertina lessons and I noticed Noel does play double stops, encourages the pupils to use them but will not necessarily teach them, leaves it to the pupil to pick them up. There’s something to be said in favour I think.
The same applies to books of tunes, a certain general understanding of the music is assumed, Wombat mentions Brid Cranitch’s Red book, I have only briefly leafed through that one at the launch this summer and the notations struck me as bare bone ones, which I think is fine [and obviously Wombat does too]. They are bare enough to be adapted to various styles by individual players.
Ofcourse when talking about tutorial books are a horse of a different colour compared to collections of tunes.
The Yellow and Blue books by David Taylor with music written from Na Piuobairi Uilleann’s set dancing tapes are worth looking at too by the way.
edit: I was actually at the launch of Brid Cranich’ Blue and Orange books but I assume the Red one is along the same lines. This colour coding, is it supposed to make things simpler?
Psychologically speaking, a notated roll with a little tilde over the note is much easier to anticipate ever playing than a black mass of notes or a lack of distinction between ornaments and actual melody notes.
The former is the problem with the Krassen Oneill’s. He notates the upper and lower neighbors of the rolls, presumably for fiddlers to use the exact cut and tips.
The result is a mess to a beginner just looking over the book, especially given the eventual speed the tune will go. Of course, then, if the beginner hears how people really do it, they will go back and realize that, hopefully. But its intimidating at the outset. I think a beginner can grasp an off-beat roll better as the two eighths-quarter combo than two eights followed by a triplet, in terms of eventual rhythmic impact.
As for the McCullough, he writes out the rolls as cut triplets, making everything look very evenly valued, and making it impossible to distinguish what is melody and what is ornament. On reels, he puts a little 3 over offbeat rolls to indicate them, but not on jigs. I am convinced that some people on this Board, not having easily available cds or exposure via lessons or live, think that double jigs are very continuous sets of unbroken triplets. Because if you only look at the McCullough, that’s what you will think.
For example, the Legacy Jig, which is a notable tune because it begins with three rolls in a row, is notated as three triplets in a row. I have a ton of Irish records, but I don’t have Legacy on any of em. Had I not seen it somewhere else on music paper and/or learned by feel that jigs often have pronounced rolls in key places, I might think that is the way its played. Same with Morrison’s. So then, if there really is a commonly played triplet, you don’t know whether to roll it or not, except by feel and exposure.
He explains in the intro that these are bare bones and that if you don’t know how to interpret what you are seeing, buy his other video. Right.
How hard would it have been to throw a tilde over the first set of triplets on Kesh (I mean, Kerrigan’s, which is what he titles it) or Morrisons?
With all due respect (and the guy has my respect), I would have entrusted that a beginner could handle that. I hope he will re-publish it that way someday. The tunes in that collection certainly are very popular choices tho.
I know. Picky, picky, picky…But a lot of people on the Forum refer to this book and I think beginners deserve the knowledge. I don’t think there should be a tier of those who “know”, versus those who don’t.
I always appreciate the advice I see posted here, but in my opinion much of it is inapplicable to a beginner. There’s a world of difference between a beginner and an accomplished musician with regular access to good sessions.
Speaking from my own experience trying to learn tunes, I would say that my priority is to (1) have a clear, slow, unornamented recording of a tune, preferably of a single instrument, preferably a whistle, and (2) to have some version of sheet music for the tune so that I can follow along with the recording, and resolve anything I can’t discern by ear. (I don’t really care if the sheet music differs in some ways from the played tune; I understand that it’s only a guide, and at any rate my local session probably plays something different from both 
In this respect, 121 FIST is very good. You can isolate LEM’s playing on one channel, and he’s pretty good in keeping the first version of each tune unornamented. Also, in my experience the tunes he plays really are among the most common US session tunes.
Compare that to, say, Cotter’s book, which has complex, less common tunes. I haven’t heard the CD to go along with the book, so I can’t comment on whether the tunes are played as slowly and clearly as LEM (but I’d guess not).
Anyway, I guess my point is that clearly you should go to sessions, listen to recordings, etc., but if you were for some reason stuck in an Artic research station for a year with only a tinwhistle and one book/recording set, you could do worse than mastering 121 FIST
– Scott
IIRC, I was confused for some time because LEM notes some rolls as two cuts, e.g., he’ll notate a roll on B as A-B-A.
My practice when learning a new tune – and I’d recommend this to any beginner – is to go to the Tunefinder or the Session and look at the various versions of the tune you’ll find there. Wherever you got your sheet music – LEM or your local session book – it’s likely that it includes ornaments and variations. Looking at other versions of the tune will give you a good feeling for possible variations, and helps identify the basic “skeleton” of the tune that underlies all the variants.
Obviously you can do the same thing with recordings.
– Scott
I was very confused about the comments on L.E. McCullough’s book, because I also have a tunebook accompanied by 4 CDs from him, until I noticed that it’s a different one: The Complete Irish Tinwhistle Tunebook (it has 125 tunes). I find the notation very honestly bare-boney. Compared to the same tunes’ notation at thesession.org, it uses less triplets and more dotted quarters with wiggly signs above, to indicate the “something could happen here”.
I actually don’t play rolls or ornamentation on all of these, as I’d be practising only rolls and nothing else then. However, could someone who has both books give a short comparison? The one I have is (c) 2002 Oak Publications.
Sonja
I’m not sure if this suggestion was already posted, but I like “Ireland’s 110 Best Session Tunes” - really good book; comes with two CDs.
Cheerio.
That’s a really good one, as is the “110 Best Tin Whistle Tunes” book and CDs, which also contains a number of well-known session tunes.
I think this is the wrong way of looking at it. The Legacy Jig starts with a G B high G pattern on the first three beats. They can be played as rolls, yes, but they can also be played GF#G BAB GF#G or as quarter-eighth note patterns or as just plain dotted quarter notes, or any combination thereof, all with equal validity. G B high G is the core of the tune, and anything else is just an ornamentation you hang off of it.
In 121 FIST, LE consistently notates this sort of thing in jigs with the three eights pattern (middle eighth down a step, or maybe up if the first note is D). It wouldn’t be my first choice, but it is a reasonable way to write down the jigs. All that is lacking is a nice paragraph in the front of the book explaining what he is doing.
As for whether or not you can substitute a roll, I think you can always substitute a roll for that note pattern. They are really pretty much the same musical idea. (And note that if you listen to LE’s recording, he uses the eighths on the slow version, and throws in a bunch of rolls on the fast version.)
Now, the way he notates off-beat rolls in reels drives me mad… don’t know what he was thinking.
It’s interesting that LE’s book of his own tunes is full of rolls… Perhaps because it isn’t targeted at beginners?