I have some basic familiarity with musical notation (that is, I can pick out a tune with sheet music...slowly), and I've made some half-hearted attempts at the recorder and guitar in the past. I'm a lover of traditional music and have been listening since I first stumbled across a Thistle and Shamrock program some twenty years ago. It seemed the tin whistle might be simple enough for someone like me to master eventually. I have always wanted to be able to play my heart out on some sort of instrument!
I'm using my children's cheapie "Mel Bay by Clarke" D whistles right now in hope that I might improve to the point of justifying a purchase of my own whistle.
I've taken Ryan Duns' course on YouTube, and have poked around Brother Steve's tin whistle pages trying some of the tunes and working on ornamentation. I probably started a good five or six months ago, but as you might imagine, practice sessions are not easy to come by, so I'm in that awkward spot of not being quite up to speed on *any* tune yet. Read the thread "Beginners Go Too Fast," and appreciated the advice there to use a metronome and some tips on frequency of practice. I'm sure there are many other "beginner" threads available here that I just haven't come across yet. Perhaps someone can point me to good ones...
My burning question is...most of the lessons I've encountered online make a big jump from teaching ornamentation to "fast" (for me, probably slow for the teacher) versions of tunes incorporating them. How do I get to the point where I just naturally know where to place ornamentation? What I wish I could do is take a tune played by a master teacher, slow it down, and learn it piece by piece *with* ornamentation intact. Not exactly "making it my own," but I don't know where to place taps, cuts, rolls, etc. on my own.
Also, how long do I give it before I figure I'm just hopeless and not a musician?
![smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_smile_144.gif)