suggestions, please!

[kabili]

i'm hoping you veteran whistlers (or maybe a clever newbie) will have some suggestions for me, a relatively new whistler. (i say relatively new because i made the mistake of buying my first whistles when i was in grad school. i played them for about 2 days straight in an obsessive-compulsive frenzy and haven't touched them since.) now that i've got my degree, i'd like to play a bit more regularly. my problem is that my music background is playing concert flute and piccolo in grade school and high school. so the fingering patterns are no problem, but the experience of playing by ear and playing without an ensemble is new and strange to me. anyone have any suggestions to help me jump right in without wishing for sheet music and/or wondering where the rest of the ensemble is?

i've been exposed to the sound of traditional jigs, reels, hornpipes, etc. on a regular basis for a few months now (i'm taking traditional irish dance classes) - but unfortunately, this hasn't translated into my being able to play them without sheet music!

thanks!
kms

[clarinetnut]

You might try getting a recording of a song and listening to it enough times that you can sing it all the way through (minus the recording) without mistakes. Then you can slow things down, play around to find intervals, and such....all in your head. I've only just started using that method, but I find it helpful. It's slow to begin with, but you will eventually be able to get things faster. I'm a relative newbie to whistle as well. I was classically trained (with sheet music), so I understand your problem. Sheet music is a safety net that is hard to throw away. Good luck!

[Monster]

i'm hoping you veteran whistlers (or maybe a clever newbie) will have some suggestions for me, a relatively new whistler. (i say relatively new because i made the mistake of buying my first whistles when i was in grad school. i played them for about 2 days straight in an obsessive-compulsive frenzy and haven't touched them since.) now that i've got my degree, i'd like to play a bit more regularly. my problem is that my music background is playing concert flute and piccolo in grade school and high school. so the fingering patterns are no problem, but the experience of playing by ear and playing without an ensemble is new and strange to me. anyone have any suggestions to help me jump right in without wishing for sheet music and/or wondering where the rest of the ensemble is?

i've been exposed to the sound of traditional jigs, reels, hornpipes, etc. on a regular basis for a few months now (i'm taking traditional irish dance classes) - but unfortunately, this hasn't translated into my being able to play them without sheet music!

thanks!
kms

What Clarinetnut said is really good, Yes I concur, affirmative, that is correct sir.

I would like to welcome you to this mad, mad, chiffleboard, just jump in and start posting, and oh yes practice the whistle also, sometimes I get the feeling I want to talk about the whistle more than I want to play it, so that is advice ummm, mainly for me.

BTW is your first name Rock?

Jeff (Monster is only my alter-ego)

[Marko]

luckily for me I'm hopeless at reading music, so it's not so much of a problem. It is odd having to play a tune with very little to go by though. I find the most difficult thing bout the whistle is trying to find somewhere to practice. it's a little more piercing than im used to.

[Martin Milner]

Hi Kabili,

What I still have to do (after playing/singing various folk stuff for ten years on different instruments) is listen to the tunes dozens and dozens of times. If you can sing or lilt the tune you are more than halfway towards playing it right.

Get some CDs, listen listen listen. I then often need to get the sheetmusic (usually easily found on the web) to fill in the notes I couldn't catch properly even after dozens of listenings. Having found the elusive notes, and played it through with the music, I again try to play without reference to the dots.

I do think there's a difference between learning by ear, and knowing what the tune is supposed to sound like before you try to play it. I recently attended a class where we did everything by ear, but one or two tunes proved too difficult for everyone - given the sheetmusic afterwards, it all fell into place in seconds.

Obviously the aim for most of us is to be able to play the tunes without reference to sheetmusic, but for some tunes I think I am always going to need to use the dots during the learning process.

[chas]

I concur with all that's been said. Especially Martin's comment about listen listen listen. I have a couple of things to add, though. I'm an ear-player, but it's almost impossible for me to catch all the notes of a fast reel played by most whistle or flute players. For me, it has to be augmented by either sheet music or slowing the tune down. A good source of sheet music is JC's tunefinder ( http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/findtune.html ). To slow tunes down without changing the pitch, there are a couple of programs, Transcribe and (I think) the Amazing Slowdowner. David Migoya also recently posted info on a CD player that will do this on the fly.

I'd also like to point out that there are all sorts of renditions of tunes out there, some of which are much easier to learn from. Kevin Burke In Concert is a wonderful album, almost entirely solo fiddle, and played at a pretty relaxed pace. There are also a lot of cuts on Wooden Flute Obsesseion (a few copies may still be available from kkrell of this board) that are easier to hear the notes of.

[Martin Milner]

I'd also like to point out that there are all sorts of renditions of tunes out there, some of which are much easier to learn from. .

Very good point, Chas.

Solo CDs, or tunes with basic accompaniment (guitar, bodhran or piano are very common), are much easier to pick the tunes out of than stuff like Lunasa and Flook. Not to say you can't do it with Lunasa, but it'll be harder.

You can also get some good tutorial CDs (with sheetmusic books) which are designed to help you learn by ear. CDs are better than tapes because you can put the track on repeat.

[Tyghress]

Chas beat me to the punch....Roni's Amazing Slowdowner is great! There are also some CD's that go at a slower pace for a time or two, then speed up a bit.

But for playing in a session without a session. . .there is a virtual session online on a BBC website (someone else may have the link handy) that is NOT slow, but gives you the proper sound of multiple players. The sheet music is also displayed for ease of learning. Use it or not, as you choose.

I personally don't advocate going cold turkey on sheet music. What you'll find, after you've got a bit of experience at translating what you see and what you hear, is that this sort of music is built in chunks, and the chunks are often very very similar from one tune to another. Once you make this mental click, you'll be listening to a tune, and see the pattern in your mind.
Better yet, at some point you'll see a pattern on sheet music and say to yourself that you can substitute in this other pattern that you've seen/heard.

You've been trained to translate dots into music...(as opposed to those of us who have merely learned to translate dots into notes and struggle with the transition from notes to music)....why ignore this skill?

(now waiting for the purists to flame)

[kabili]

BTW is your first name Rock?

nope, sorry to disappoint. that moniker is an old family joke based on a kid's mixing the syllables of my first name, Kelly, and the last initial B (my maiden name). so really it's pronounced more like kuh-bee-lee.

thanks everyone, for the suggestions, and for making me feel welcome. especially to all those who told me it was okay to use the "dots" to help learn a song originally -- i feel like you've told me i can keep the training wheels on my bicycle for as long as i want! though i am also working on pulling some familiar songs out of thin air, as it seems to me. making some progress on Star of the County Down, which has some nice repetition of the phrases (luckily for me).

[Tyghress]

Kabili, here is the link to that virtual session. . .enjoy!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/folk/acoust ... unch.shtml

[feadog39]

Kelly,
I don't know where you live, but the best possible thing you can do is to find a real, live whistle player to take lessons from. Stuff on CDs, while cool and inspiring, is often highly stylized and/or heavily ornamented, thus not a best place to acquire the basics. (The explicitly tutorial CDs are, of course, better). If there isn't a whistle teacher to be found in your area, then consider going to an itm festival sometime where you can sign up for the whistle classes.

Personally, having had an extensive classical/jazz background when i started and the ability to site read very well, i nevertheless found reading music to to be a crutch when i was starting out on whistle.

Anyway, best of luck with it.
Brendan

[IDAwHOa]

there are a couple of programs, Transcribe and (I think) the Amazing Slowdowner.

You big tease! Posting great info like that and no link to it. Please provide the links to those resources.

[Tyghress]

http://www.ronimusic.com/

that's the slow downer

[mvhplank]

I'm not sure the advice to "practice" is strong enough yet. What will really put the tune under your fingers is to play it repetitively (that is: many, many times, but not necessarily the same way every time), ad infinitum.

That's how I got off the dots when I was getting ready to attend a session an acquaintance was starting up. Play, play, play, look away, play some more. Do 15-20 repeats before going on to the next tune. (Thank goodness they're usually short tunes!) Try variations, holding some notes while skipping others, tossing in ornaments, whatever. It's much harder to do that with the dots in front of you, telling your fingers something different.

Repetition lets you take advantage of muscle memory and other nifty things that go on at a neurological level. I've known some real power sight-readers, but I play up to speed best on the tunes I have down solid.

M

PS--It seems to me I heard Seamus Egan (multiple All-Ireland winner) talk about a tune he won with--he played it so much he was heartily sick of it by the time the contest rolled around.