I will be celebrating my 4th decade of playing fiddle and mandolin this month. I know -- I should be a much better player by now, but I figure I have a few more years left to work on it.
I actually started learning Irish music when I first started and switched over to old time and other genres after a few years. I always loved Irish but didn't have the chops back then and figured I had to choose in order to become a moderately decent player.
A few months ago I started attending some Irish sessions near me lead by an excellent fiddler, Brian Conway. I have been to a bunch of those sessions. The upside is that the playing is excellent overall -- some seriously wonderful players, both young and old. The hard part is that the ITM tradition is to play medleys of tunes with each tune repeated only 2 or 3 times so it does not allow much time to learn on the fly. At the session I attend the tempi are rather reasonable -- I have heard that at other sessions the tunes are played at breakneck speed.
At old time sessions I lead or attend we almost never play medleys and end up playing the tunes for about 10 minutes straight with many repetitions. Even at std speed this allows even an intermediate player to pick up the tunes. This is the tradition of most OT sessions i have attended.
In any case, I am a little overwhelmed but also energized by the prospect of learning a whole new repertoire of tunes with different nuances and rhythms (jigs and slip jigs, for instance).
I try to get the tune names as often as I can at the sessions so I do have a list to work from for those. I have downloaded a bunch of those tunes from thesession.org but there are usually a bunch of versions and I can never tell which are the good ones.
I also have quite a few recordings including classic ones from yhears ago so can learn by ear from some of them as well as from youtube videos.
I did get a DVD set of Kevin Burke's (Homespun) which I learned a few tunes off of as well as some tunes I learned from Matt Cranitch's book. I plan to take some lessons with Brian Conway.
I also found an excellent free book online from the Harp of Tara Kingston, Ontario. Scroll down to the Download section of the page. You can download the whole book or parts of it. One part is the repertoire for slow sessions. The book includes some excellent background info for the tunes and the players of them. Having read thru quite a few tunes in the book, most are pretty presentable versions so I will prob use that as one of my main printed sources of tunes. I think many of the tunes are accurately transcribed as well.
There are a few slow ITM sessions somewhat near me (1 hour's drive) so I may try those out. I am a firm believer in immersing in a genre -- like learning a language, it works best for me.
I guess it is more my impatience to actually play this music, but also presented with a mass of tunes to learn and catch up on. On a positive note I notice that tunes I have in my head I can easily figure out on mandolin or fiddle.
Anyway, any other suggestions for repertoire building?
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