challenging tunes

[deisman]

Most of the time when I hear Drowsy Maggie being played it seems as if it is a race to the end. I like to play it slower so you can put in the ornamentation and maybe add variations. I don't think the people who race through it are enjoying the tune. My current hard tune is the b part to Dick Sherlocks. Probably the hardest tune I can play right now is The Cloudy Morning. I dunno - they're all hard to play well. Some days harder than others. Sure are fun though on any day.

Deisman

[ChrisCracknell]

I don't know any tunes that I can play as well as I want to... Even going back to the very first tunes (polkas: Peg Ryan's, Stitches, Newmarket) that I learnt in my first ITM weekend workshop/session held by some visiting Galwegians in our local Irish pub. Back before I had a simple system flute...

That said, I am still struggling with the Hurricane on the wooden keyless flute. But no one will play it with me around here anyway so...

And Drowsy Maggie is (was) a much abused tune round here - one of the first I and my friends learnt and immediately tried to play too fast - not helped by paino accordion and fiddle players playing the pedal note pairs at the start as single two note chords so their poor wee fingers didn't need to move so fast. Every session would have us play this steadily accelerating until the inevitable train crash... Maybe the time has come to dig it out again and see if anyone is ready to try playing it sensibly now?

[ChrisCracknell]

"Paino" accordion should of course be "Piano" but I find the typo too appropriate to just edit the original post to fix it...

[bogman]

You could give this Brendan Ring cracker a whirl - more tricky to remember the various parts than the actual playing. There's a youtube clip in the tune comments... http://www.thesession.org/tunes/display/10199

[drewr]

I've been trying to play the Ballivanich Reel up to speed it seems like forever. Also tried to learn the Humours of Scarriff for a half hour or so once and gave up. I find the Ingonish Jig damn hard to play also, and I want to play it properly since Ingonish is my home town!

[mariajeff]

i'm finding the "lads of laois" as played by jack coen challenging, esp. the 'b' part. great tune.

playing the 'a' rolls cleanly and at a decent clip in "maids of mt. ciso" is hard for me. playing 'e' rolls in "fermoy lasses" and not running out of breath is another challenge.

love the low matt malloy "drowsy" as someone mentioned. i play in on my 'c' flute, very nice setting. playing the 'b' part of "last night's fun" in the style of mike rafferty is fun but difficult for me, need to go back to it.

but as one wise person put it earlier, all tunes are hard to play well, even the "simple" ones.

[I.D.10-t]

"Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz"

(Sorry, couldn't find the ABC notation)

[Kirk B]

I really like to [try to] play Ed Reavy tunes. They're written for fiddle and they wander all over the place. They're a real challenge for me. There's a fiddler at my session who knows a bunch of Reavy tunes and he puts up with me trying to stumble through a few of them with him.

Cheers,

Kirk

[mimcgann]

"i'm finding the "lads of laois" as played by jack coen challenging, esp. the 'b' part. great tune."

This is actually the Humours of Lissadel--the labeling got screwed up.

Great tune.

[Nanohedron]

an instant way of making something difficult, if you are playing it from sheet, is to take any of the many tunes in D key signature and play them on a higher Eb flute and change the notation accordingly but instead of transposing to Eb key signature you transpose it to D# key signature which is the same thing but harder to read.

I can accept on its own the simple statement that D# notation is supposedly harder to read than Eb (I can read neither), but there is something about the rest of the above that hits me as being beside the point for the following reason:

If I'm playing an otherwise D tune on an Eb flute I can still read it in D, for Eb fingerings on Eb flute are the same as D fingerings on D flute. Conversely, if I had the literacy to read easily in Eb or D#, instead of needing an Eb flute I should still be able to play that tune in D on a D flute using that notation as well and for the same reasons. In other words, let's say I have a D tune to play, but someone hands me an Eb flute unbeknownst to me. What difference does the notation make, then? Same as if I'm going by Eb or D# notation but I get handed a D flute under the same circumstances; if all of a sudden I'm told, "Ha. You were just playing a different-pitched instrument," I know I wouldn't crash and burn over it. I'd probably say, "Whatever," and keep playing.

So unless you are positing that I would be playing with an ensemble in which at least one member absolutely requires the properly corresponding notation without which s/he cannot function, what am I missing, here? In the ITM world - and these are all ITM tunes being discussed (imagine that) - print is essentially unessential, however you write the tune. The tune itself is what is difficult, or not, and this depends all the more on what key you play it in on your instrument as well. But I'm all about the practicalities, that way. Would I play The Foxhunters in A? I think not. That's for the fiddlers, to my liking.

There's a reel that I learned to play in G Mixolaneous (indeed that is the only key I have ever heard it played in), and wanting to double-check on some things but having mislaid my go-to CD for it, I finally found a printed version but this version happened to be in E Mixolaneous. Aside from the possibility that that may have been the actual key the tune was originally written in (Paddy Fahey; what do you think the odds are?), the key mattered nothing to me so long as I could read it. Key be damned: the tune is the tune is the tune. That's it. If I play Mother's Delight in Em instead of the more customary Dm, it's still Mother's Delight, and no longer near as difficult on flute on top of it.

[LorenzoFlute]

There's a reel that I learned to play in G Mixolaneous (indeed that is the only key I have ever heard it played in), and wanting to double-check on some things but having mislaid my go-to CD for it, I finally found a printed version but this version happened to be in E Mixolaneous. Aside from the possibility that that may have been the actual key the tune was originally written in (Paddy Fahey; what do you think the odds are?), the key mattered nothing to me so long as I could read it. Key be damned: the tune is the tune is the tune. That's it. If I play Mother's Delight in Em instead of the more customary Dm, it's still Mother's Delight, and no longer near as difficult on flute on top of it.

Your point fails as soon as you'll want to play the tune with other musicians, usually fiddlers...

[dunnp]

Unless you play it on a C flute. I would do both learn it in Em fingerings and using keys on a D flute for the for the buzz of it. Key is irrelevant. It's time fiddle players started coming towards us anyway. I have flutes in many keys and like to get string players to use their capos (some old banjos sound better with lighter strings and capoed up to f say) and fiddle players to tune down. For too long its been all about the fiddlers and boxers. Martin Hayes would do both I should think sometimes he tunes down sometimes he plays within the key signature on a normally tuned instrument. Damn the fiddlers is how I used to feel until I discovered the joys of flutes i lower keys and with lovely keywork.

[benhall.1]

There's a reel that I learned to play in G Mixolaneous (indeed that is the only key I have ever heard it played in), and wanting to double-check on some things but having mislaid my go-to CD for it, I finally found a printed version but this version happened to be in E Mixolaneous. Aside from the possibility that that may have been the actual key the tune was originally written in (Paddy Fahey; what do you think the odds are?), the key mattered nothing to me so long as I could read it. Key be damned: the tune is the tune is the tune. That's it. If I play Mother's Delight in Em instead of the more customary Dm, it's still Mother's Delight, and no longer near as difficult on flute on top of it.

Your point fails as soon as you'll want to play the tune with other musicians, usually fiddlers...

Not necessarily. I quite often come across someone starting a tune in a key which is different from the one more commonly used. In my experience, people just play it in the new key. Not a problem. It depends on whether the musicians play tunes, or have just simply memorised the fingering.

I think it makes a huge difference how familiar one is with one's instrument. For instance, on flute, which is a relatively new instrument for me, I can't transpose too well. On fiddle, which I've been playing since I was a nipper, I don't even think of it as transposing - I just play the tunes. If someone starts one up in a less than usual key, I'll notice, in a kind of 'Oh, that's interesting' kind of way ... but then just play the tune.

This has made me curious - I wonder if that is my relative familiarity with the different isntruments, or whether it's actually easier to do that on fiddle than on flute.

[dunnp]

I find it much easier to play in any key on a banjo or mandolin or guitar than flute. For instance I never play in Eb on a flute without changing flutes but don't use a capo on a banjo.

[jemtheflute]

Whilst proficiency doubtless affects one's facility at such transpositions on any given instrument, I think from impressions I have of how fiddles work that, although there are easier and harder keys to play on them, once a player is practised in all the key-scales the physical differences are in general less/less of an obstacle than on a wind instrument. Fiddles and other multi-stringed instruments have a broader tonal baseline than necessarily mono-linear winds, which makes more tonalities more accessible closer to home, as it were, as well as offering more variable approaches to them and relationships between them.