i have come to the following conclusion
all the best
john
I’ve got a fifth category, and those are the tunes that you don’t know that you know, although you know them.
My entire repertoire now seems to consist of tunes titled “What Was That?”
I’m trying to get a running joke going at t’Folk Club with the line “Don’t play that one, play the other one!”
It’s not going well so far.
My entire repertoire now seems to consist of tunes titled “What Was That?”
Yup. And every tune I know is confused with another one I know equally well (or badly). The chance of me playing the right one is 50%.
How about "Fashionable, recently composed tunes that just plain suck but get played anyway because some respected performer composed them?’
That’s almost as bad as “Old, traditional tunes that just plain suck but get played because some respected performer played them.” 
And don’t get me started on the “and there goes my respect” part. 
If all you crave is novelty, you’re wasting your time playing trad music. Instead you should be figuring out a way to be like this person
that would be an “interesting” look for him 
do ya really think he could pull it off?
Pat? “Elfin” just ain’t him.
didn’t look like an elf to me 
No I don’t do elfin at all. Lumpy, dark, and ogre like, yes. 
I guess I went a bit OTT with the Gaga pic. Sorry.
Carry on folks.
Probably a good call. Take it from me … piping in a veil is a b****.
Sorry Pat, I wouldn’t recognize Lady Gaga if she bit me on the arse, so to speak. So I’m afraid your feminizing insult was lost on me. Sorry.
If all you crave is antiquity, you’re wasting your time playing trad music. Instead you should be figuring out a way to open a museum. And mind the dust.
The point being that statements like these, that can be turned around so easily and make just as much sense, are basically vacuous. Set up a straw man like “all you crave is novelty”, then knock it down. Easy peasy.
How about: If you think that the traditional folk process involves something other than ordinary people playing tunes that they, um, you know, like - whether they be new or old, and constantly renewing the repertoire - then I can recommend a few ethnomusicology courses.
[quote=“MTGuru”]
… basically vacuous.
[quote]
Now there’s a concept I can get my head around!
Hello … hello … hello … hello … 
another related quesion worth asking is how many tunes we each consider it possible to learn if our endeavour is to do our utmost to do justice to each new tune - personally for me, getting to the stage where i feel i have made a real stab at getting the most out of a tune is a very slow, laborious process - also, it takes me ages to get to the stage where i can play a tune without having to refer to the first few bars in print as an aide-memoire -at the same time i’ve seen other people soak up new tunes with incredible ease
Oh good, I’m not the only one with that repertoire! We should do a session some time (it’ll go something like, “hey, let’s play that one that goes like ‘da-da dadada da!’”)
I’m bad sometimes at remembering tune names. 
I’ve picked out a bunch of bagpipe tunes by ear on my whistle, and usually I think of them as “that one I like that the band I used to dance with played in a retreat set” or “that one they played in a set with Scotland the Brave” or even “that one the local piper usually plays when we do the Highland Fling.” (<— I happen to have finally learned that that one is usually Orange and Blue. I am slowly learning the real names to the dance tunes, rather than “you know, the one for the Scottish Lilt.”)
Again, for me it depends on whether you wish to be able to say “play X tune” or “play that tune that goes like ‘doo de doo de doobie doo-da doo’”!! LOL
Questions I would rather not answer:
How many tunes can you play that you cannot (EVER) remember how the A part starts and can only recall by starting with the B part and going through the whole thing in your head? ( Too many. )
How many sets have you learned because you mixed up the first and second tunes and now play them together because that’s the only way you can be sure you named one of them correctly? ( Too many. )
Yes. The Brown-Haired Maiden + High Road to Gairloch are like that to me. It wasn’t until I saw the sheet music that I realized they weren’t the A and B parts to the same tune. They just go together in my head (there’s a third part that I still haven’t figured out the name of).