Your opinion of TRAD session tunes musts

[Tamirb]

Hi my friends,
I'm new here. My name is Tamir and I play Jerry Freeman's whistles and Doug Tipple's Flute.
I didn't know whether to publish this question in the whistler's forum or the flutists', so I decided to do it here...

I am kind of stuck with my tunes "vocabulary", most of things I play come from listening to Lunasa.
While this is not a bad thing, it won't allow me to play in my local sessions.
I also listen to Danu, Altan, Planxty, Cherish the Ladies etc, but I don't find there a lot of "Session Tunes Material", so I find myself playing things all over again and again, and I can't find a way of learning and hearing new things.

So, I thought that maybe you can help me with your opinions of tunes I must know, the basic things I gotta learn to be able to play in sessions, but, try to avoid the "too-obvious" things like "The Kesh", because I found out that while they became classics, they also have become clichés and people here aren't too exited to play them.

I would also like you to recommend me of artists that you think that I can get inspired of...

I'm sorry that my English isn't really good, by the way (;
Thanks a lot!

[BigDavy]

Hi Tamirb

You could try going to your local sessions and record the tunes they play (after asking politely of course) and learn them.

David

[Tamirb]

Hi, thanks!

Well, someone from the local session suggested me that as well, and that's something I might be doing, but still, this session is unique, and I need more "general" tunes.

[plunk111]

This is actually a pretty good starting place...

Pat

[Tamirb]

Wow, this is very nice, thanks a lot. Any more tunes suggestions?

[MarkP]

http://comhaltas.ie/shop/detail/foinn_s ... _volume_1/

Pick and choose but most will know most of these (links to audio at the bottom of the page). Then you can look at Volume 2 and Volume 3 and you'd have a few more. The playing isn't always great but you can look around or other recordings once you have the basic tune.

Also this lot, you can preview enough audio to hear the tune
http://paddyobrien.net/tune-collection/

[colomon]

http://comhaltas.ie/shop/detail/foinn_s ... _volume_1/

Pick and choose but most will know most of these (links to audio at the bottom of the page).

I'm always interested by lists like this. At a quick count, I'm solid on about 68 of those. (Thought it was 69, but on closer inspection it turned out one of their Ballydesmond polkas isn't familiar to me.) There's probably 10 or 15 more I could muddle along on if someone else started them. A lot of the ones I don't know I'm mildly embarrassed to not know, but they're played rarely if ever by local players or on the recordings I study, so I'm not likely to learn them any time soon.

There were 10 tune names I didn't recognize at all!

[MarkP]

On the 'most will know most' rule of thumb, knowing two thirds of them sounds like a fair average for a well acquainted session player in the age of travel and Internet. How about Volumes 2 and 3?

Or Mally's books?
http://www.mally.com/results.asp?CategoryID=1

Or thesession.org most popular tunes?
http://thesession.org/tunes/popular

[MTGuru]

The Breathnach Corollary of Murphy's Law states that when you go to a new session, the number of tunes you will recognize is inversely proportional to the importance of making a good impression.

[MeMyselfandI]

If you catch the names of tunes want to learn the by ear, try this:

irishflute.podbean.com

Great resource, lots and lots of tunes, played slowly, and then at a good tempo. Enjoy!

[Infernaltootler]

Every session you go to try to pick one or at most two tunes you liked to go home and learn. Don't try and learn them all.

In my opinion it is pointless writing down all the tunes as I've seen done. To me, this just leads to a book full of tune names but the person is writing down the same tunes every week without ever approaching playing any of them and it's annoying to be constantly quizzed about tune names the whole evening.

If you pick one or at most two, by the end of the year you could have another 40 or 50 tunes depending upon how fast you learn. They get easier to learn the more you practise too.

Even then, you'll never know enough tunes to play with every set at a session.

Oh, and do be careful of noodling on tunes you half know - that can be really grating.