Don’t get me wrong, i’m very satisfied with my repertoire of nearly 40 songs, but some song just come natural and others i’ll never get the hang of.
But this doesn’t happen with jigs&reels. And i can’t figure out why. I know a human voice is an instrument on it’s own, but still it doesn’t make much sense to me.
What exactly happens when you try to sing them?
Tries, but just Kant.
I think it’s subatomic. Like certain vibration sequences don’t mesh well with your throat.
Unless something falls outside your vocal range, it’s more a matter of practice than anything else.
Redwolf
Nothing, they’re like French to me, the energy i get when i try to sing these song is blocked, doesn’t flow, so practicing these makes no sense. But the ones i can sing, i sing in sessions.
Well, my repertoire is getting up to fifty. I’ve noticed that I really need to practice some of them more. I need to work out a schedule.
In my case it’s hornpipes. They just don’t come naturally. Slip jigs - great, I can pick them up easily. All except that Kid on the Mountain, which has been a bugbear for years. Jigs, okay, Reels, no problem. Hornpipes: crunch!
Nobody can do everything. And if there was someone like that, they’d be in danger of being assassinated. At least I’m safe from envy.
far from if you can lilt nearly 50 tunes, i can’t $^ù$ lilt at all!
Just be glad you can sing even one song. 
Well, don’t you see certain paintings or read certain books that mean alot to other people but don’t seem to mean a lot to you and vice versa? I think music is the same really.
When I took piano lessons years ago, my teacher would play a number of pieces for me and then I would think about which few I wanted to work on. I guess the ones I picked were the ones I liked best, but also I think they were the ones that made sense to me. I remember having to work on a piece once that I simply did not understand and apparently could not understand. Perhaps I could have learned, maybe I was not mature enough. But as it was, it was a complete flop. It was not any kind of music at all the way I was playing it.
It seems natural to me that your temperament—whatever that is exactly—makes you gravitate toward some songs and not toward others. The ones you gravitate toward would be the ones that say something to you, that you feel some understanding for. I don’t know. I am not explaining it well, but it doesn’t seem at all surprising to me.
Some pianists play music especially by one composer sometimes—wasn’t Rubenstein known for his playing of Chopin? There was something in that particular composer that matched his temperament or feelings I would think.
This is something counterintuitive that was pointed out to me a long time ago. The tunes you don’t understand/can’t follow/can’t make sense of are the tunes you need to learn. They take a long time, and its usually a bit of a fight, but eventually you will have knocked a new attitude/outlook/POV into your head, and expanded your understanding a wee bit.
Not every step on the journey is a smooth one.
djm
I’m learning as much dance music as i can, and i love to play just about everything in ITM.
But singing songs is different for me, it’s not just a matter if it’s inside your vocal range or not, it’s not as simple as that, i agree with Nano.
You have to practice singing just as hard as you would practice an instrument. And if you aren’t happy with your voice you can’t trade up to a high-end one.
If I have a problem with certain songs I really want to sing I try different keys until I’m comfortable. Then I just practice hard. I try to learn how to phrase each passage. I find if I’m unsure of a passage, or what I want to do with it, I can easily stray out of tune or just trail off. Even if I get the notes out, it certainly won’t be expressive. Just keep singing the hard bits over and over till they feel right and pay attention to your breathing.
Ignored post (that took 20 minutes to draft) removed.
Heh.
The thing about most songs (those I’ve heard from the Irish tradition, anyway) is that they don’t range too much beyond one octave, so yes, that shouldn’t the problem at all. All one should have to do is sing within one’s comfort zone.
Sorry, but the point is to EXPAND one’s comfort zone by increasing one’s understanding. (at least, that was my point - not necessarily just for ITM, either).
djm
Just to put the record straight: I can’t lilt anything. That’s my (paltry) repertoire of ITM tunes, total, on all the instruments I can play.
I was only referring to the practical end of range issues, particularly in sean nos singing, is all: the idea being that all things being more or less equal (ornamentation aside), it’s curious how one song is easier than another.
Yes, it is noticible, and which songs are easier or tougher are not the same from one person to the next. These tough ones, whichever ones they are for each of us individually, are the ones we should concentrate on learning.
djm
What works for me is singing the ones i can sing and enjoy to sing, i sing those in sessions. I practice 1 to 2 hours a day and sometimes find a new song i like, not very often.
The reason why we can sing certain songs and make a mess of the others is something we just have to accept i’d say, isn’t it part of the beauty of it all? 