My guitarist had a change of life crisis and gave up the guitar for the mandolin! He even went and spent a month with the wife and kids in Ireland last summer. So, in order to keep on playing music, I'm learning Celtic tunes ... and this is fun!
Somebody help me! I know what waltzs and polkas are ... what are all the others? Reels, hornpipes, jigs, etc.? Is this explained somewhere?
I don't mean to sound offensive to yoru Guitarist, but they drugs these days that will do wonders for the mandolin player.
Honestly, if you are interested in learning the music, a trip to your local (decent) music shop to fetch a copy of O'Neill's will do wonders for your desire to learn.
Beyond that, here is my take:
Reels: 4/4 -- the bread and butter of Celtic music. Give me a **cking reel!
Hornpipes: also 4/4, but much slower, some really pretty tunes, but also a lot of tunes from hell to avoid. There are some fantastic dancers who turn these into a work of art.
Jigs: 6/8 -- I play them as warm up tunes, early in the session, or when I want a rest, but once in a while one of them is so beautiful that it must be played for real.
Charles, what is it that you play? We've any amount of information to help you, but if you tell us what your instrument is, it'll help us to get a little more targeted.
Best piece of advice for anyone new to the music: listen to the music, and lots of it, the best you can find. At first, stick with the truly trad stuff, if you can, to educate your ear. Tell us what instrument, and you'll get a thousand suggestions of who to listen to.
My advice is to start with jigs. There are loads of them in the tunes section. ( I see you've already downloaded some tunes there). Jigs are played in 6/8 time and are very suitable for guitar. Find a relatively uncomplicated one and have a go. If you flatpick you'll have no bother, but fingerstyle is a bit more complex if you want to get the right "feel". Take heed to Zina's advice and listen to loads of different bands and players-- these you can do for free if you follow the links to some of the band sites in the links section. But be warned, once you start it will become an incurable obsession.
In reading Zina's reply, that advice is golden, and you can throw your copy of O'Neill's in the can. You can get all the tunes you want right here -- but the most important thing to do is start listening to the music -- put on a CD and let it play over and over until each tune is part of the blood flowing through your veins. Find your favorite tune from that CD, and figure it out! Then find other sources for that tune, and listen to what others do with it, and choose a few variations you like and learn those!
When I first started, people would tell me that you have to really know a tune before you can correctly play it. Sure, just memorize the sheet music, it takes about 3 days, play it 100 times, and you've got it. Years later, I feel like a beginner on most tunes, and I now understand what it takes to really know a tune. Each measure, each breath, each ornament, each phrase has to be explored and opened up, and practiced more than you could possibly know or imagine.
Each tune is a small universe -- your job it to explore it.
Eliot, a couple of years ago, when I attended a workshop on slow airs by Brendan McGlinchey (who knows a thing or two about the subject), he said that with the air he was using for the workshop - "The Crown of Roses", if I remember correctly - he'd worked on it for 9 months before he felt ready to play it in public. As you so rightly said, that is *really* knowing a tune!
gday, a bit of an elaboration on what elliot posted earlyer.
has some definitions. dont know how accurate they are,
im still learning myself. http://www.irishtune.info/rhythm/
I picked up the mandolin and fiddle (I didn't play violin) a few years ago and have been learning Irish tunes ever since, along with some old time and bluegrass. My city doesn't have a "slow session", although there is a contra dance which tends to attract several new fiddlers like myself. Being close to 50, I am in somewhat of a hurry to learn enough session tunes and get them up to session speed. I play every tune I know perhaps 3 times a week, and I tend to learn a few tunes a month. For the contra dances, this strategy works pretty well, but the Irish session is a different story. I now know about 30 jigs, 30 reels, and 20 assorted slides, hornpipes, polka, and slip jigs. I started with the excellent Mel Bay books+CDs "The Complete Irish Fiddler" by Peter Cooper, and "110 Ireland's best session tunes". I downloaded "The ABC Player", combined all of Henrik Norbeck's tunes plus a few other colections into one master file with 1800 tunes, and I use MusicEase or the Concertina.net Tuneotron converter to print the tunes. Although I can do some ornaments, I strip the tunes bare in an effort to get the tune up to session speed, which seems faster here than in the few other sessions I've attended. Despite spending more time than I have on the tunes, and concentrating on the more popular tunes, I find I know perhaps one in four tunes played. Most of the better players here know 500 to 1000+ tunes, and seem to alternate a few well known jigs and reels with more esoteric tunes. My goal is to be able to play fiddle on close to half the tunes. I find that I can learn many of the contra dance tunes by ear, since they are played for 5 minutes or more each time, and are not played faster than the dancers prefer. Do most seasoned fiddle players learn most tunes by ear? How many years does it take to build up a repetoire? Any suggestions?
Yep, Russell, sounds like you're well on your way to OCITMS: Obsessive-compulsive Irish Traditional Music Syndrome. Welcome to the club.
My advice--stick with learning the tunes by ear as much as possible. Go ahead and use the abcs or dots to get the bones of a tune if that helps you learn more efficiently, but you'll be more confident at a session if you keep those ears on their toes, so to speak.
You'd do well to concentrate on reels and jigs. Most sessions hammer away on the reels pretty heavily, so it helps to know a lot of them. The other types of tunes will come to you anyway--most polkas for example are relatively easy to pick up, even if you don't play them much between sessions.
Ask one of the better players at the session if you can bring a tape recorder just to help learn the tunes. Most players don't mind this. Then listen to the tapes over and over and learn the tunes.
You'll probably hear from some others on this site who strongly encourage quality over quantity, so I won't get too preachy. But suffice to say that you don't need to play even half the tunes to enjoy a good session, so be patient with yourself, and consider diving into one tune at a time to really get the lay of the land before moving on. This music comes alive the more personal a relationship you develop with it. Better to play a handful of tunes well than a hundred that would make you cringe....
Or, worse, that make somebody else cringe. *grin* I'm joking. Really.
"Do most seasoned fiddle players learn most tunes by ear? How many years does it take to build up a repetoire? Any suggestions? "
Yes; Depends on you; and my suggestion is to take Will's advice. Most experts I know say that beginners are in too big of a hurry to get that repertoire into the higher numbers -- my own teachers have all said to stick with just a few tunes (ten or fifteen is about what most of them suggest although one told me that she wished people would stick with FOUR) for the first year or so and learn what you need to learn on those. After that, the sky is the limit.
And it bears repeating: listen to the best of the music that you can find, compulsively and often, and listen to the more traditional before heading off into the modern sensibilities or the esoteric. For fiddlers, there's Kevin Burke, Charlie Lennon, Tommy Peoples, James Byrne, Michael Coleman, geez, there's a lot of those great fiddlers out there, and you'll soon discover what styles you like best.
Dunno much about contra music. Will plays contra, Brad and some of the others do too, so I'll let them take the questions on that end.
You can get a fair idea of Irish music using your computer and its soundcard without spending a penny. Just follow the site link to AbcMus 2 to download a player and up to 1600 Irish tunes. The link site is Henrik Norbeck's collections which are very well transcribed. You can even add guitar backing to the tunes but I'm not sure how well that works.
You say you know polkas so you've a good start - particularly if he's gone off to Kerry. The Irish have made polkas their own but waltz's - no way. Download Henrik's polka collection to get an idea of the way they are played here. Polkas may have grown out of marches but obviously marches have less swing.
Jigs, hornpipes, and reels are all traditional dance tunes but these days they are played more for listening so the play is often highly ornamented. The dancer would have provided much of the ornamentation in her steps previously. Some good tunes on Henrik's site that will give you a fair idea of the music, but with minimal ornamentation, are:
Hornpipes: Harvest Home, Derry and Belfast hornpipes.
Jigs: Three Little Drummers, Lark in the Morning. King of the pipers.
Set dance: King of the Fairies.
Marches: Crucaharan Cross, Green Cockade, Battle of Aughrim.
Reels: St.Andrews, Donegal reel, Pigeon on the Gate.
I've not messed around too much with AbcMus as I'm just picking up some tunes by ear so the following advice may not be the best for you as a guitarist. But it's good for a whistler:
After installing the player select a MIDI device from the pick list under Options. Pick Creative Music Synth if available. Select whistle for melody and acoustic guitar (nylon) for backing. Set the whistle melody to play one octave high - put a 1 in a check box instead of the default zero. Set MIDI playback speed to suit.
Assuming you've a pair of bog standard or above speakers connected to your soundcard you can now listen to the tunes. Mess around and have fun. As he has gone to play mandolin you had better get yourself an auld Planxty CD as Andy Irvine is the man in that department.
You've opened a door to a treasure trove. See you in Ireland sometime.
I am in awe of this community. I've played guitar for 34 years, starting with flatpick, but switching to fingerstyle for the last 4 years. Still not clear on ALL the common styles, but I have a solid start. I've downloaded some tunes and converted them to standard notation with TablEdit. Any further suggestions are REALLY appeciated. It's obvious I will be taking a trip to Ireland. One last thing: I'm 50, and I'm just a kid. Anyone who says that "you're over the hill" is full of it. I figure I've got a good 30+ years of driving music ahead of me!
Will had listed about 400+ common session tunes a few months back on a different discusion which I can't find. I was wondering if anyone had built up a downloadable tunebook from these same 400+ tunes?
Russell, I have over 1,000 trad tunes on my hard drive, but they're in "Mozart" transcription software. If you happen to have that on your computer, we can share files (gif of the sheet music and midi sound files)--otherwise it's not much help.
Many of the 250 or so tunes on that list of "common session tunes" are in fact in the database here. You could create your own tunebook using the feature of the same name that Jeremy so wisely included when he built this site.
P.S. Here's the link to that list of common session tunes. It'd be nice to add more tune titles to the list, based on what people agree is common at their sessions.
a newcomer needs help!
a newcomer needs help!
My guitarist had a change of life crisis and gave up the guitar for the mandolin! He even went and spent a month with the wife and kids in Ireland last summer. So, in order to keep on playing music, I'm learning Celtic tunes ... and this is fun!
Somebody help me! I know what waltzs and polkas are ... what are all the others? Reels, hornpipes, jigs, etc.? Is this explained somewhere?
# Posted on February 27th 2003 by CharlesEHunt
Re: a newcomer needs help!
I don't mean to sound offensive to yoru Guitarist, but they drugs these days that will do wonders for the mandolin player.
Honestly, if you are interested in learning the music, a trip to your local (decent) music shop to fetch a copy of O'Neill's will do wonders for your desire to learn.
Beyond that, here is my take:
Reels: 4/4 -- the bread and butter of Celtic music. Give me a **cking reel!
Hornpipes: also 4/4, but much slower, some really pretty tunes, but also a lot of tunes from hell to avoid. There are some fantastic dancers who turn these into a work of art.
Jigs: 6/8 -- I play them as warm up tunes, early in the session, or when I want a rest, but once in a while one of them is so beautiful that it must be played for real.
--Eliot
--Eliot
# Posted on February 27th 2003 by Eliot
I've...
I've enough typos in the last post to keep a printer in business for a week.
# Posted on February 27th 2003 by Eliot
Re: a newcomer needs help!
Charles, what is it that you play? We've any amount of information to help you, but if you tell us what your instrument is, it'll help us to get a little more targeted.
Best piece of advice for anyone new to the music: listen to the music, and lots of it, the best you can find. At first, stick with the truly trad stuff, if you can, to educate your ear. Tell us what instrument, and you'll get a thousand suggestions of who to listen to.
Zina
# Posted on February 27th 2003 by Zina Lee
Re: a newcomer needs help!
My advice is to start with jigs. There are loads of them in the tunes section. ( I see you've already downloaded some tunes there). Jigs are played in 6/8 time and are very suitable for guitar. Find a relatively uncomplicated one and have a go. If you flatpick you'll have no bother, but fingerstyle is a bit more complex if you want to get the right "feel". Take heed to Zina's advice and listen to loads of different bands and players-- these you can do for free if you follow the links to some of the band sites in the links section. But be warned, once you start it will become an incurable obsession.
# Posted on February 28th 2003 by Backer
Absolutely
In reading Zina's reply, that advice is golden, and you can throw your copy of O'Neill's in the can. You can get all the tunes you want right here -- but the most important thing to do is start listening to the music -- put on a CD and let it play over and over until each tune is part of the blood flowing through your veins. Find your favorite tune from that CD, and figure it out! Then find other sources for that tune, and listen to what others do with it, and choose a few variations you like and learn those!
When I first started, people would tell me that you have to really know a tune before you can correctly play it. Sure, just memorize the sheet music, it takes about 3 days, play it 100 times, and you've got it. Years later, I feel like a beginner on most tunes, and I now understand what it takes to really know a tune. Each measure, each breath, each ornament, each phrase has to be explored and opened up, and practiced more than you could possibly know or imagine.
Each tune is a small universe -- your job it to explore it.
--Eliot
# Posted on February 28th 2003 by Eliot
Re: a newcomer needs help!
I agree, Eliot, that's the multiverse of music.
# Posted on February 28th 2003 by Trevor Jennings
Re: a newcomer needs help!
Eliot, a couple of years ago, when I attended a workshop on slow airs by Brendan McGlinchey (who knows a thing or two about the subject), he said that with the air he was using for the workshop - "The Crown of Roses", if I remember correctly - he'd worked on it for 9 months before he felt ready to play it in public. As you so rightly said, that is *really* knowing a tune!
# Posted on February 28th 2003 by Trevor Jennings
And then...
Do you ever feel like you really know a tune, then you hear someone play it, and suddenly you feel like you have to start over with it?
I was comfortably playing "Palm Sunday" and then I heard Grey Larsen play it...
--Eliot
# Posted on March 1st 2003 by Eliot
Re: a newcomer needs help!
gday, a bit of an elaboration on what elliot posted earlyer.
has some definitions. dont know how accurate they are,
im still learning myself.
http://www.irishtune.info/rhythm/
good luck,
evan.
# Posted on March 1st 2003 by ev
Re: a newcomer needs help!
I picked up the mandolin and fiddle (I didn't play violin) a few years ago and have been learning Irish tunes ever since, along with some old time and bluegrass. My city doesn't have a "slow session", although there is a contra dance which tends to attract several new fiddlers like myself. Being close to 50, I am in somewhat of a hurry to learn enough session tunes and get them up to session speed. I play every tune I know perhaps 3 times a week, and I tend to learn a few tunes a month. For the contra dances, this strategy works pretty well, but the Irish session is a different story. I now know about 30 jigs, 30 reels, and 20 assorted slides, hornpipes, polka, and slip jigs. I started with the excellent Mel Bay books+CDs "The Complete Irish Fiddler" by Peter Cooper, and "110 Ireland's best session tunes". I downloaded "The ABC Player", combined all of Henrik Norbeck's tunes plus a few other colections into one master file with 1800 tunes, and I use MusicEase or the Concertina.net Tuneotron converter to print the tunes. Although I can do some ornaments, I strip the tunes bare in an effort to get the tune up to session speed, which seems faster here than in the few other sessions I've attended. Despite spending more time than I have on the tunes, and concentrating on the more popular tunes, I find I know perhaps one in four tunes played. Most of the better players here know 500 to 1000+ tunes, and seem to alternate a few well known jigs and reels with more esoteric tunes. My goal is to be able to play fiddle on close to half the tunes. I find that I can learn many of the contra dance tunes by ear, since they are played for 5 minutes or more each time, and are not played faster than the dancers prefer. Do most seasoned fiddle players learn most tunes by ear? How many years does it take to build up a repetoire? Any suggestions?
# Posted on March 3rd 2003 by russellrapport
Re: a newcomer needs help!
Yep, Russell, sounds like you're well on your way to OCITMS: Obsessive-compulsive Irish Traditional Music Syndrome. Welcome to the club.
My advice--stick with learning the tunes by ear as much as possible. Go ahead and use the abcs or dots to get the bones of a tune if that helps you learn more efficiently, but you'll be more confident at a session if you keep those ears on their toes, so to speak.
You'd do well to concentrate on reels and jigs. Most sessions hammer away on the reels pretty heavily, so it helps to know a lot of them. The other types of tunes will come to you anyway--most polkas for example are relatively easy to pick up, even if you don't play them much between sessions.
Ask one of the better players at the session if you can bring a tape recorder just to help learn the tunes. Most players don't mind this. Then listen to the tapes over and over and learn the tunes.
You'll probably hear from some others on this site who strongly encourage quality over quantity, so I won't get too preachy. But suffice to say that you don't need to play even half the tunes to enjoy a good session, so be patient with yourself, and consider diving into one tune at a time to really get the lay of the land before moving on. This music comes alive the more personal a relationship you develop with it. Better to play a handful of tunes well than a hundred that would make you cringe....
# Posted on March 3rd 2003 by Will Harmon
Re: a newcomer needs help!
Or, worse, that make somebody else cringe. *grin* I'm joking. Really.
Most experts I know say that beginners are in too big of a hurry to get that repertoire into the higher numbers -- my own teachers have all said to stick with just a few tunes (ten or fifteen is about what most of them suggest although one told me that she wished people would stick with FOUR) for the first year or so and learn what you need to learn on those. After that, the sky is the limit.
"Do most seasoned fiddle players learn most tunes by ear? How many years does it take to build up a repetoire? Any suggestions? "
Yes; Depends on you; and my suggestion is to take Will's advice.
And it bears repeating: listen to the best of the music that you can find, compulsively and often, and listen to the more traditional before heading off into the modern sensibilities or the esoteric. For fiddlers, there's Kevin Burke, Charlie Lennon, Tommy Peoples, James Byrne, Michael Coleman, geez, there's a lot of those great fiddlers out there, and you'll soon discover what styles you like best.
Dunno much about contra music. Will plays contra, Brad and some of the others do too, so I'll let them take the questions on that end.
Zina
# Posted on March 3rd 2003 by Zina Lee
To put Will's advice another way...
Definitely work on the feel, way over number of tunes, every time. Doesn't do you much good to play a lot of tunes badly, yeah?
# Posted on March 3rd 2003 by Zina Lee
Re: a newcomer needs help!
You can get a fair idea of Irish music using your computer and its soundcard without spending a penny. Just follow the site link to AbcMus 2 to download a player and up to 1600 Irish tunes. The link site is Henrik Norbeck's collections which are very well transcribed. You can even add guitar backing to the tunes but I'm not sure how well that works.
You say you know polkas so you've a good start - particularly if he's gone off to Kerry. The Irish have made polkas their own but waltz's - no way. Download Henrik's polka collection to get an idea of the way they are played here. Polkas may have grown out of marches but obviously marches have less swing.
Jigs, hornpipes, and reels are all traditional dance tunes but these days they are played more for listening so the play is often highly ornamented. The dancer would have provided much of the ornamentation in her steps previously. Some good tunes on Henrik's site that will give you a fair idea of the music, but with minimal ornamentation, are:
Hornpipes: Harvest Home, Derry and Belfast hornpipes.
Jigs: Three Little Drummers, Lark in the Morning. King of the pipers.
Set dance: King of the Fairies.
Marches: Crucaharan Cross, Green Cockade, Battle of Aughrim.
Reels: St.Andrews, Donegal reel, Pigeon on the Gate.
I've not messed around too much with AbcMus as I'm just picking up some tunes by ear so the following advice may not be the best for you as a guitarist. But it's good for a whistler:
After installing the player select a MIDI device from the pick list under Options. Pick Creative Music Synth if available. Select whistle for melody and acoustic guitar (nylon) for backing. Set the whistle melody to play one octave high - put a 1 in a check box instead of the default zero. Set MIDI playback speed to suit.
Assuming you've a pair of bog standard or above speakers connected to your soundcard you can now listen to the tunes. Mess around and have fun. As he has gone to play mandolin you had better get yourself an auld Planxty CD as Andy Irvine is the man in that department.
You've opened a door to a treasure trove. See you in Ireland sometime.
# Posted on March 6th 2003 by DerryMan
Re: a newcomer needs help!
WHOAH! I don't play contra-dance music!
# Posted on March 7th 2003 by Mad Baloney
Re: a newcomer needs help!
I play PRO-dance music
# Posted on March 7th 2003 by glauber
Re: a newcomer needs help!
LOL -- Sorry, Brad...I thought I remembered you saying that you'd played for some contra dances. Let's see, PRO, PRO...what's PRO?
zls
# Posted on March 7th 2003 by Zina Lee
OH -- light dawns over Marble Head, Glauber, now I get it...I was looking for yet another clever acronym...
# Posted on March 7th 2003 by Zina Lee
Re: a newcomer needs help!
I am in awe of this community. I've played guitar for 34 years, starting with flatpick, but switching to fingerstyle for the last 4 years. Still not clear on ALL the common styles, but I have a solid start. I've downloaded some tunes and converted them to standard notation with TablEdit. Any further suggestions are REALLY appeciated. It's obvious I will be taking a trip to Ireland. One last thing: I'm 50, and I'm just a kid. Anyone who says that "you're over the hill" is full of it. I figure I've got a good 30+ years of driving music ahead of me!
# Posted on March 15th 2003 by CharlesEHunt
Re: a newcomer needs help!
Will had listed about 400+ common session tunes a few months back on a different discusion which I can't find. I was wondering if anyone had built up a downloadable tunebook from these same 400+ tunes?
# Posted on March 16th 2003 by russellrapport
Re: a newcomer needs help!
Russell, I have over 1,000 trad tunes on my hard drive, but they're in "Mozart" transcription software. If you happen to have that on your computer, we can share files (gif of the sheet music and midi sound files)--otherwise it's not much help.
Many of the 250 or so tunes on that list of "common session tunes" are in fact in the database here. You could create your own tunebook using the feature of the same name that Jeremy so wisely included when he built this site.
# Posted on March 17th 2003 by Will Harmon
Re: a newcomer needs help!
P.S. Here's the link to that list of common session tunes. It'd be nice to add more tune titles to the list, based on what people agree is common at their sessions.
http://www.thesession.org/discussions/display.php/110
# Posted on March 17th 2003 by Will Harmon