Meticus wrote:
I managed to learn my very first song on a tin whistle
Congrats!
I see you're a piper, cool. I play Highland pipes and uilleann pipes, I did have a Flemish pipe for a while (by Arie de Keyzer) but I never got very far with it.
Meticus wrote:
I restricted the ornaments to a few taps and a slide
Happily on trad Irish whistle there's not a big catalogue of ornaments to learn like there is on Highland pipes and uilleann pipes.
Basically it's "cuts and pats" as they say, a "cut" being an upper gracenote and a "pat" being a lower gracenote.
Cuts and pats are strung together in various ways to create rolls, semi-crans, and full crans. IMHO full crans aren't really part of the older traditional whistle technique anyway.
Here's my super-quick guide to cuts, pats, and rolls
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nfu_fDUyNHs&t=21sAnd my quick demonstration of putting it all together
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35SqhcSojn8Meticus wrote:
A big issue for me is to decide when to play legato or staccato.
Is there any rule how to mix those or is one prefered to be used more than the other?
Do you learn that by heart and play a song always the same way or do you improvise during playing and it's different each time you play a song?
Yes the matter of articulation with tonguing is difficult. It took me longer to integrate that (becoming natural and unconscious) than it did the ornamentation.
There are different styles/approaches to tonguing, the best thing to do IMHO is to listen to Mary Bergin as much as you can. For me, she's the best at it.
Years ago I attended a whistle workshop, the workshop leader had fully transcribed several performances of Mary Bergin including all the articulation! I don't think it would make sense to try to recreate that specific Mary Bergin performance by sightreading that transcription. However I found it fascinating and valuable to study.
There's no "rules" per se but there are patterns or habits that players have. One pattern you'll hear is in a reel where there are groups of four 8th-notes strung together is to play the first two 8th-notes legato then separate the two last 8th-notes by tonguing. But you wouldn't want to play in a predictable pattern like that! You would sound like a machine. The phrases of the tune, and your individual style, are the guides to when to tongue notes.
Meticus wrote:
Any guidlines where to place ornaments or simply where you think it sounds best? Do you always play the same or vary it spontaneously each time you play the same song?
Once again for guidelines I would listen to Mary Bergin. She shows wonderful taste and restraint, she never over-does the ornaments.
I have two theoretical/philosophical positions that many will disagree with, but I see you've put much thought into these issues so I'll lay out my attitudes:
1) I believe that there is very little, oftentimes no, ornamentation in Irish flute and whistle playing. I say this because I view cuts, pats, and the rolls which are built from cuts and pats to be articulation, not ornamentation.
Cuts and pats separate notes, and are an alternate to tongued separation. When you separate two notes with the tongue it's not an "ornament" and neither is it when you do the same thing using the fingers. I call cuts and pats and rolls "digital articulation" rather than ornamentation.
2) I believe that traditional Irish dance tunes and in particular reels are built up from traditional tune-fragments. The longer one plays Irish reels the larger one's vocabulary of these fragments get. These fragments (they could be called motifs or licks) tend to exist in families. Each family has a particular musical function, being built around a particular harmonic idea (or chord if you like) and occupying a particular length. When many trad musicians pick up a tune on the fly by ear they don't have to memorise a specific string of 8th-notes, rather they identify motif-families.
This struck me 30 years ago when I could play a tune to a trad player (a tune they had not heard) and they would play it right back to me, but their version would be quite different, and better, than the way I played it!
So when you play you're not improvising in a jazz sense but rather making selections on the fly about which member of a motif-family to shove into the situation at the last second.
So it's not spontaneous in the sense of composing new material of the fly. You're choosing from building-blocks you've already played thousands of times in an endless number of tunes.
Meticus wrote:
what's the best way to learn a new song?
I think it's far better to learn tunes by ear.
Beyond that, and speaking of the dance music (rather than vocal pieces) the way I was taught, back 40 years ago, was my mentor would teach me a basic version of a tune. This basic version wasn't a dumbed-down version but a performable version with rolls in all the standard places for that tune. Once I had the basic version down he would start playing through variations, exploring what could be done to the tune.
He would say "better to learn 20 ways to play one tune, than to learn 20 tunes." That's how I learned, and when I teach that's how I teach. (You teach how you learned, I suppose.)