Your Personal Everest of Tunes

pastorkeith · Post by **pastorkeith** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 7:39 am

OK - just wondering what you might consider your Holy Grail of tunes - your personal Everest - the one you keep at and keep at until you can nail it like _________ on that CD you keep close at hand in your CD player or on your ipod. Personally I haven't even begun the foothills of O'Carolan's Farewell to Music.
pastorkeith

Flogging Jason · Post by **Flogging Jason** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 7:59 am

Clumsy Lover is one tune that I would love to be able to play at session speed WITHOUT reading the music!

sbhikes · Post by **sbhikes** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 8:26 am

My personal Everest would be to play the flute like Eileen Ivers plays the fiddle.

I've been to 18,000ft on a small pile of rocks 9km from the summit of Everest and I know that there are some mountains I will never reach. There just isn't enough air for me up there. Eileen Ivers is to me as Anatoli Boukrev is to bottled oxygen.

tompipes · Post by **tompipes** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 8:36 am

I've been getting into more and more Carolan tunes. A great one is Madame Crofton. Keeps you on your toes.
http://www.oldmusicproject.com/AA3Sheet ... rofton.gif

Tommy

Anglorfin · Post by **Anglorfin** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 8:39 am

Right now my personal mountain is Humours of Ballyloughlin. A lovely tune but so much to remember!

Some of the crans that I've heard put in it by various people usually leaves my fingers tied after trying to play them at speed.

I've tried substituting crans into other tunes I know but it doesn't always sound like it fits.

colomon · Post by **colomon** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 9:30 am

"Lord Gordon's". I can usually play it through once pretty reliably, but I have never played it three times in a row without getting the order of the parts screwed up.

Then there are the tunes which are nice little hills but shrouded in fog so I can never make out the precise detail, like "Dowd's #9", and the tunes which are mesas whose walls seem unclimbable to me, like "Maudabawn Chapel"....

anniemcu · Post by **anniemcu** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 11:15 am

You name it! Even if I know it, I feel like I'm still stumbling around the far foothills of the outer range.

PhilO · Post by **PhilO** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 2:02 pm

They're all hard to get really perfectly, but several come to mind as being particularly difficult to "master." Banish Misfortune has a sort of free form to it and is just not at all played as written. It has 3 distinct parts that are each repeated and each with a totally different feel. I'm getting there...slowly.

Tommy Peoples Jig (as in the Cathal McConnell tune book), which he even says, "Good luck with that one!" I've got the feel of the tune pretty well but still have some problems at times fingering the high G sharps (half hole).

On the Temple House Jig, sometimes i need to slow down to maintain the proper feel of the triplets at the end of the second line, mostly because I'm pig headed and insist on doing it the hard way, because I like the feel a bit better. (I cut the triplets which entails a bit of fancy fingerwork, rather than tongueing).

Finally, in The Glass of Beer, when I was finally told to tongue the down beats or b notes in the first bar and a half instead of the high notes, the entire tune came into focus for me.

I guess whilst considering the above, it makes me think about all the so-called dos and don'ts regarding tongueing; I'm just an amateur, but I think any attempts to generalize about the use of tongueing is not really too helpful.

Philo

Cathy Wilde · Post by **Cathy Wilde** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 6:09 pm

To be able to play The Eagle's Whistle (or any tune, for that matter) half so well as tompipes!

Beyond that ... for me right now it's a bunch of Fahy and other F-natural-ey things at a reasonable speed. And the perennial Commodore. And The Gold Ring. And The Jolly Tinker (I can never keep the parts straight on that one either). And Colonel Frazier. And ....

Oh, heck, every tune is Everest for me, every time. I just want to play it better than I did the last go 'round.

FJohnSharp · Post by **FJohnSharp** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 6:36 pm

I've taken a stab at Flogging Reel a couple of times and it's just way beyond my ability. I'll know i'm a player when I can play it.

hathair_bláth · Post by **hathair_bláth** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 9:38 pm

I feel dumb admitting this, but Tralee Gaol in the Bill Och's book is kicking my tail right now. For some reason I can't get the rhythm or the cuts right. Not really Everest, but a really steep foothill.

Innocent Bystander · Post by **Innocent Bystander** » Fri Jul 20, 2007 6:14 am

I used to have terrible trouble with The Plains of Boyle and The Kildare Hornpipe. Then one day (after learning a few more hornpipes) I found I could play them to my own satisfaction.

Took me some time to get "Smash the Windows" but it's getting there.
Never had that much trouble with "Banish Misfortune". Probably I'm not playing it right.

The Kid on the Mountain is the one that has me beat. I can lip-whistle it note-perfectly, but my fingers won't do it. One day they will. One day.

daveboling · Post by **daveboling** » Fri Jul 20, 2007 7:12 am

The Fox Chase, Ennis' version.

Wormdiet · Post by **Wormdiet** » Sat Jul 21, 2007 7:07 pm

Colonel Frazier
I can play it in a basic flutish way but what's the point in that? The sticking points are the long rolls in the 3rd and 4th parts.

Jug of Punch
After Paddy Carty. Working on getting the f-naturals to go smoothly, but more importantly, getting something approaching a musical flow.

Key_of_D · Post by **Key_of_D** » Sun Jul 22, 2007 6:45 am

daveboling wrote:The Fox Chase, Ennis' version.

That's one hell of an amazing recording, simply amazing alone how he memorized that 13+ minute piece... I'm afraid my memory isn't capable of such a feat.

Tune's that I'm constantly working on "trying to master" at the moment would be: the 4 part version of The Langstern Pony, Over the Moor to Maggie, and The Queen of the May. This is just on the tin whistle... I've just started the pipes not too long ago! Let the madness begin again!