Hello everyone!!!
So, during the past year I have been keeping a list of the number of songs/tunes I can play on the whistle. After a year’s time I can play 31 tunes, 10 of which I’ve learned by ear. I was wondering how that compares to the number of tunes other whistlers have learned in year. I’m doing this poll so I can get an idea of how I’m doing compared to others.
Looking forward to hearing responses!
Sara
Oh, golly. Pre-salt lake city, I could probably think of 5 or 6 tunes off the top of my head when I wanted to play something. Post-SLC, that’s probably jumped to about 10 or 12. And all learned by ear.
I should add that I know how more tunes go, but haven’t tried to play them much. Could probably pick them out if it was a life or death whistling situation 
[ This Message was edited by: avanutria on 2002-08-01 10:43 ]
Hi Sara,
that sounds pretty good to me. I’ll have been playing (whistle) for about a year too, and I don’t think I have 31 tunes learnt.
What tunes do you have learnt? Do you play sets, or individual tunes.
I have about 8 or 10 slow airs, 9-12 polkas, 3 jigs/slides, 2 reels (dodgy) and four or 5 hornpipes that need work.
My time taken to learn a tune is improving though, so in another year I bet you’ll have over a hundred tunes at your fingertips, literally!
For a yaer before that I was playing Mandolin, and learnt about 40 tunes, but some of those are still wobbly, and I would have trouble playing them now.
Oddly, there’s very little overlap between my whistle and my Mando tunes.
“I suddenly heard in the silence of the night the low whistle…” Miss Helen Stoner, The Adventure of the Speckled Band (circa 1892) to Gary
[ This Message was edited by: Martin Milner on 2002-08-01 10:52 ]
That sounds good. Because of memory problems I can only play with music and can play about the same number but with very little ornamentation. However, I have to split my practise time between a 6 keyed flute as well. Wish there were more hours in the day:-)
31 tunes in a year isn’t bad..It’s about a tune every week and a half.
This is about my current average, also, just add more years. I took a large hiatus about a year before my son was born, which actually makes me average about a tune every 2 weeks.
Some tunes are quick to learn (I learned the song “The Mermaid” in like 5 minutes, by ear). Others take me longer–after two weeks, I still can’t quite play the B part of mooncoin jig at session without faltering. I got most of Off to California while playing with NancyF and her husband at SAMfest. It averages out.
I dunno how a tune every week and a half compares with other whistlers, but that pace seems to impress a lot of the non-whistlers at my session.
I don’ t know if the number of tunes you know says something about your progress. I am a quick but lazy learner, so after 7 years of ITM I know about 200 tunes or so. A friend of mine, who is a flute player, has been playing for about 3 years and knows about every tune you could think of and probably some more. Still, his playing technique is, well, immature and does not really stand up to his repertoire.
Christian
I’m not exactly sure what it means to “know” or even to “play” a tune. Everything I’m working on is in various stages of being known (sorta like those annoying web pages which boast that they’re constantly “under construction”). Over the past three months, I’ve gotten around 60 tunes lodged in my memory, roughly 10 of which I fancy I can play fairly decently. Of the other 50 or so, I can “play at” them without any “mistakes” (whatever that means), and reasonably up to tempo, but they’re not quite there yet.
That’s a good start!
Well, I’ve been playing for almost 3 years now, and as of right now I know probably on average…oh… (digs out resume/repertoire list) 169 some tunes? and probably about 10-20 of those that I’ve learned by ear (I’m just starting to learn to play by ear)… so if you rounded to 170 (make the math easier… 
) then divided by 3…it’d make it about 56 tunes per year.
However, you don’t always learn the same amount of tunes every year.
Sara, I’m like you about watching my own progress compared to others to see if I should be pushing myself more. I’ve been playing just about a year, too. People here say that a tune a week is good progress and I feel that way myself, so I set it as my goal. I’ve got thirty-five tunes down to muscle memory now, but some of them take a bit of rehearsing before I can play them all the way through without any note “typos”. A handful of tunes in my repertoire have at least five parts to them because my fiddler friend wanted us to learn them. Otherwise I may well have learned more shorter tunes…I practice at least an hour a day, usually over two, and I am very well aware of how much my ornamentation needs finessing! And only half of the tunes I know can I play as quickly as I hear them played professionally. Even though I think I should be spending more time practicing tunes I already know, learning new ones has become more and more rewarding as I learn each one faster and with greater understanding of Irtrad.
I am more comfortable posting to topics like this now that I know there is a separate board for the veterans…
Lisa
This thread reminds me of something I’ve started to do that I’ve been meaning to share, to see if it makes sense to anyone else.
After a couple of years of playing, I realized there were a surprising number of tunes I sort of knew, but a far smaller number I could really nail. I also had trouble keeping track of these tunes so I could work on them systematically. A list of tune names wasn’t good enough because I would get the names mixed up, or couldn’t remember the second part, etc. I wanted to avoid using books all the time, because if the music is in front of me I tend to rely on it too much.
SO, I put together a table in a MS Word doc with the following column headings:
Tune Name
Type (reel, jig, etc)
Key
Grade [A, B, C, D, or blank]
ABA
Source
Notes
In the “Grade” column I grade how well I know the tune, from a blank (don’t know it at all), to “A” (I play it as well as I play anything).
In the “ABC” column I put the ABC notation of the first measure of each section of the tune (two measures for Polkas). That’s enough to remind me what tune it is, or how the second part starts, and/or how many sections there are.
“Source” refers to books or recordings I own where I can find the tune.
Since it’s in a table, I can sort the list by tune name, tune type, or grade. I print it out each way, and keep all three lists in a notebook.
I think I now have over 200 tunes in this list (not many graded “A”). If I come across a new tune I want to learn, I add it to the list with the Grade left blank.
I’ve been working with this list just about a month now. It was a bit of work to set up, but I think it’s going to be a big help.
I would be interested in systems others have used to keep tract of and work on tunes.
–Jay
[ This Message was edited by: JayMitch on 2002-08-01 16:09 ]
I don’t really compare myself to others, but if you can play 31 tunes at speed and without errors, I’d think that’s pretty darned good.
Since I came to this a good bit older than most, with slow fingers and a minor hearing impairmrent, I figure anytime I can get through any tune I know without a glitch is pretty good. I used to keep track of how many tunes I ‘know’, but I long since gave it up. Even now, if I go with something I haven’t been practicing much lately, I often have to glance at a score for the first few nots.
Jay,
That is a very helpful little database format for me to begin using for my repertoire. Thanks so much for sharing it!
All,
When I first finish learning the notes and phrasing of a tune, I make a conscious effort to associate the first full measure with the name of the tune. I play those first notes over and over while saying the tune’s name in my mind and observing what my fingers are doing and hearing the notes. At least a couple times a week, as part of my practice, I just check my quick recall of all my learned tunes. I believe that if I keep this routine up, even after I’ve learned over a hundred tunes, I will have no trouble recalling them.
Lisa
And the winner is…
I’ve done a lot of exams and auditions in my life, but non was about how much you could learn in a certain time. And is there no difference then in learning 10 easy ballads or 10 difficult reels?(only technical speaking). Maybe people should just start posting there recorded tunes here, that could be interesting comparing, and give you the right idea of what you are doing.
Thanks for the replies, guys!
In my case, I make mistakes a lot of the time in every tune I play. It’s funny though, I can usually play the tunes I learned by ear better than the ones I learned by sheet music. I wonder what that means. I am constantly playing the same songs/tunes over and over to perfect them and work on any mistakes. I am even starting to work on putting pennywhistle to songs which don’t have whistle. I just recently put whistle to “Mississippi” by Train. Anyway, thanks for the replies!
Peace be the journey,
Sara
I’ve been playing the whistle for 4 1/2 months and know 25 tunes by heart. But I started playing Irish songs on the regular flute about a year and a half ago, though, then quit for a while, then started again in April and haven’t stopped since. 13 of them I’ve learned part by ear, part by music. It’s been fun!
Yeah, this one’s a little gray for me. I can, for example, play “Drowsy Maggie” from memory, but can I play it well, or even correctly? No, indeed. I can play a number of songs well from memory, some by ear, some by Chopin ,and can only estimate that it’s between 20 and 50. I’ve been playing for 3 years. Any simple tune I know well that doesn’t have too many sharps or flats I can usually pick out by ear and have down pretty well with an hour’s work, with very limited ornamentation. That makes the total inconstant.
On 2002-08-01 14:46, ysgwd wrote:
A handful of tunes in my repertoire have at least five parts to them because my fiddler friend wanted us to learn them. Lisa
Hi Lisa,
I’d be interested to know the names & nature of some of your 5-parters. Most Irish dance tunes have 2 parts, 8 bars each, whether they be jigs, reels, polkas, hornpipes or whatever. A handful stretch to 3 or 4(Merrily Kiss the Quaker has 3, Fainne Oir Ort has 4).
Are your extra parts variations on the theme? When I first joined an Irish music class (playing Mandolin), the teacher was giving out tunes with all his own variations built in, so a simple 16 bar tune became a complex 48 bar tune. This made them quite daunting, difficult to learn between classes, and frankly turned me off. I did not complete the ten week course.
When I later discovered the same tunes in their original formats without his added complexities, I was somewhat non-plussed.
Maybe I wasn’t good enough to be in the class, but there were others even less experienced then I was, and I felt the teacher would have done better to introduce us to simple 16 bar tunes first, and bring in the variations later in the course when we had mastered the skeleton of the tune.
I’ve always kept a written list of tunes that I knew. About 3 years in, I threw the list away, and started over (I felt I’d reached a milestone in my practice, and that the stuff I knew before just didn’t measure up).
I think my ‘new and improved’ list is about 160-something tunes and songs. I don’t mention this to brag, but to comment on my memory. About once every couple months, I go over the entire list and am amazed at the tunes I’ve forgotten to play in a while. “Oh, crud! I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of Inisheer!” for instance.
On 2002-08-01 19:36, ysgwd wrote:
I believe that if I keep this routine up, even after I’ve learned over a hundred tunes, I will have no trouble recalling them.
well, let’s see… I’ve only been playing for about a year myself, and not as much as I would have liked to, so…I’d say that I probably have about 8 down by memory, all of which I have learned by ear (since, for some reason, I can only read music when it comes to voice or piano. really weird) just got myself a quiet whistle (made by budding whistle-maker Colin Sherraden) so maybe I’ll get some more practicing in now that I won’t be annoying everyone as much 
Sara, you must be an absolute whistle fanatic to have that many tunes down. keep it up!