So what should are next tune be for the beginner to master? What tune after that and so on?

The Star of the county Down is a great first tune ... sounds nice played without embelishments and allows the new player all the room in the world to practise cuts/strikes/rolls and slides. Where do we want to go from here? What is a good next step for the beginner?

In my 8 months of playing whistle and discovering Irish Traditional / Celtic music and sitting in on some sessions I've heard alot of tunes now. Just hearing the music and getting familiar with it is a goal we all should have. I also know there is a world of other music people may play with the whistle. I've played Chistmas and religous tunes as well and I'm sure there are a large number of cultural tunes outside of ITM to be played.

So lets bat around a number of tunes and see if we can come up with a top 10 list for the new player. Here is a list of tunes that I've managed to squeek out in some form or another as a beginner that you can find on You Tube or other spots:

Kesh Jig
Saddle the Pony
Blackthorn Stick ... bit tough ... fast decending scales (Saddle the pony and Blackthorn stick work well together as a set)
Drumshanbo jig
Swallow's tail jig (drumshanbo and swallow's tail work well together as a set)
Rakes of Mallow
The Foggy Dew
Sally Gardens ... very similar to the tune from the Lord of the Rings .... Concerning Hobbits
Out on the Ocean
Silver Spear .... okay ... this one is a challange!! I'd put this at the final goal moving to intermidiate
Tripping up the Stairs ... just added this to my list ... fun song

Those are the tunes that I've managed to be able to play and retain in my 8 months of playing.[color=#][/color]

Hi ggiles, i am glad that you found into the forum as well
so we are now 5 of the 6 who were interested at first, thats good.

Hi everybody else too

very first of all: i am still sick and cant concentrate well and long so forgive me if my writing, spelling, choosed words this time will be quite bad, or even worsed than normaly 😉 but i try

first of all; good thread, this is important
i thought about if we should discuss this here or if i should move the thread into the discussions forum, or if we should just keep this one as the monthly "whats the next song?" thread
we have to decide this

ggiles wrote:

"So what should are next tune be for the beginner to master? What tune after that and so on?"

good question but:
did we get enough out of the first challenge?
could we do more?
discuss, learn, record again ...?
i mean should we always just record, post and see what happens or should we think about how we can improove our results?
For me it was a nice thing to learn that tune which i maybe wouldnt had known and learned whitout this challenge and i am happy about the possibilitys that tune gives but i am sure we didnt "get into it" at all, we just scratched at the surface .... maybe we keep the threads all open and everybody post new recordings wehnever ...or we could discuss now what we all could do more, better, different,... i am not sure
we should think about this

anyway still the question "whats next" remains
i would say it mustnt be ITM only
it should be anything the grpup like to learn
it shouldnt be anything from the tutorial of bill ochs lessons, cause some of us use this anyway and there are and will be recordings of it already and everybody can join there (or should it?) i mean i wouldnt like to learn lesson 8 before i mastered lesson 3 for example and i wouldnt recomend it for anyone, so tunes which are not in the used tutorials should be prefered i think

the other question is how do we want to decide?
if this challenge would have winner and looser i would recoment that the looser always choose the next tune 😉 but we dont want to have winners and loosers, do we?

maybe everyone should choose one tune, first user a, than user b, than user c, and so on?
or we all name some tunes/songs and we just take whats named most times
or we let the dice decide 😉
we should think about this all, speacialy for the future

about your list; i cant listen to all this now but i hope it will be a very easy tune this time cause otherwise i may not be able to take part cause my sikness this month

on the other side i still didnt post a serious recording of the first tune yet 😉

for this reasons i hope it can be this month something i already know
what about "concerning hobbits"? its easy and beautifull
or "scarborough fair"? one of my favorites on the whistle and guitar
or "Me a gar eur goulmik"? easy andf beautifull and John (Whistler already knwo it too)
or "Oh Susanna"?

but i take what the group choose and hope i can take part, i will record what i can i promise

oh and we should decide how long each challenge should be, so long untill everybody did post a reecording, monthly depoending on the tune?
we should decide this one day too

please answere all to those things we all have to decide togehter otherwise we may have to decide with just 2 or 3 of us cause this has to be decided

No no , "The Sally Gardens" and "Down by the Sally Gardens" are different tunes. Unfortunatelly "Down by the Sally Gardens" is often named just "Sally Garden".

I'm confident that ggiles meant "Down by the Sally Gardens" because he mentioned "similar to the tune Concerning Hobbits". Although I think they're just ... distantly related 🙂 - http://soundcloud.com/kmartycz/chvsdtsg

The first one, "The Sally Gardens", seems to be for more experienced player, not for beginner.

Down by the Sally Gardens sounds good.

Its a hard tune...

Ok..I can't complain hahahaahh

Does Ryan give a free score of it?

Also what tempo mark will we use?

I think we need to do both...One slow and one fast....although lets make the faster a little bit slower...

I have a low D and this will be a good practice...

Yes ... Down by the Sally Gardens. Easy tune to learn it is in alot of beginner material when you get a whistle.

Its still unclear if i should move this topic or if it should become a sticky and ...the most important

we still didnt decide how to choose tunes

see again what i (Andreas) said and asked before on September 13, 2012, 17:41

ok, here we go again

1
how we will always decide whats next?
id say it musnt be itm only
can everybody agree?
1b
it shouldnt be anything from the tutorial of bill ochs lessons, because it would disturb our step by step learning (see post above from sept 13)
can everybody agree?

2
how do we want to decide?
because its important that everybody likes to join it should be alkways a tune most want to learn next
so we should each time start a discussion and every body name what he likes and than we see whats named most times
csan everybody agree?

3
how long should every challenge run?
i would say, never mind if easy or dificult tnes, we should always give a month time, if more time is needed for some tunes we still cn decide to take 2 month for one tune or even2 tunes in a momth if they are easy
so we will had a agust challenge "star of the coubnty down" we have a september challenge down to sally gardens" and we should have a october, november,.... challenge for every month now
can everybody agree to that?

4
i recoment to learn some christmas tunes before christmas
even if you are not a christmas fan, or dont want to play with or for others, do it just for you, it can have a good effect on the moode, spoecialy in european winter something important 😉
and because most x mas tunes are easy id say in november we all learn 2 x mas tunes and decide as usual by lists?
can everybody agree?

please answere all to those things we all have to decide togehter otherwise i may have to write a sticks with the "rules" as i recommended them right now

I'll start with what I think the easiest question for me is. How long? I think it should be left open ... the challange is to learn the tune at your own pace. Now yes, we do need to move on to the next tune and so on but there is no reason to put a limit on it. Also we want new members to add to our recordings as they join in. Taking a month to debate what the next tune should be is probably about right. One idea may be to look at moving to a different style of tune. So far we have done to aires / songs. Lets move on to a reel or a jig. Something a bit more snappy. Lots of easy ones to choose from: kesh, rakes of mallow, tripping up the stairs, saddle the pony. Of course these can be made as difficult as you want through orienmentation and "oh my God" speed or nice and simple clean notes at a moderate pace.

Decisions were made

This thread is now a "sticky" and the official discussion thread for all following challenges.

I also changed the info in the forum sticky about "The Compare and Learn Challenge"

Well, I'm going to be quiet on this choice. I've directed the direction for the first 2 tunes and supplied some direction for the third already.
So someone else has to pick. I'll be happy with what ever the choice is.

Additional:
found possible sources for sheet music or abc notation:
The Galway Girl lyrics, guitar chords and whistle notation at unitedireland
The Galway Girl in abc and sheetmusic on thesession
that way i also found out the Tune the Galway Girl IS a reel

Guys, sorry but I have to skip now.
I got another tune, Harvest Home, as "homework" and I'm not sure if I'll find time to learn something else.

Ok, this is my last attempt for this month 😉
we are running out of time
what about something easy
what about greensleves, its beautifull and seem to be realy easy
if we wait long enough we have to take twinkle tiwnkle litle star for to be able to have an october challenge 😉

hey apreciated member of this community; if you read this, please answere 😉

Well I stayed out of the suggetions for October but I'll get into it for November.
I want to hear something with more pep in it. We need a jig!

Here are 3 to pick from:
Saddle the pony ... http://www.youtube.com/v/RDNatVYvpeA&fs=1&source=uds&autoplay=1

Tripping up the stairs ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6w4dqcsokc

Kesh jig .... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnUy349nuqA

These all are greatly imbelished in these videos. The base structures of these tunes are simple and repetative.

Saddle the pony is a great tune. Ryan Duns has a tutorial on this one at his site.
The tune is very traditional ... 2 parts ... repeat part 1 twice than play part 2 twice.

Andreas ... yes I do know the tune. Hence why I am able to recommend it as an easy step into jigs. I learn a new tune every 2 weeks or so. Not amazing just well enough to play it through and commit it to memory since I am playing in sessions every now and then ... you just can't sit and listen.
Saddle the Pony is very repetative and fairly natural finger progressions ... up the scale and down the scale with little skipping around it. If you can play Down by the Sally Gardens and The county Down this is a very small step.

I'm sure someone will list one ... but we are also looking for beginner friendly stuff. How do a bunch of beginners know if it's a good starting tune if someone hasn't played it? As the core group this will be a problem but as your community here grows and new beginner players join they have a road map laid out for them. I think that is the true merit of this forum. So it is okay that I have played these tunes so far.
Ii would suggest that for December we list a couple of Christmas tunes! I haven't played any of those yet and they usually aren't very complicated ... good beginner material.

Vote for "Saddle the pony".

The last Challenge "Saddle the Pony" started long ago (and is still on opf course, for everyone who still wants to give it a try)

But what about a new one?
Id say YES!
And i ask you: What do you think about Greensleeves? Its beautifull and shouldnt be to diffcult for advanced beginners

cool, so we are too already ... id say one more and we take it to get things running again?

OH, you just did it, i mean learn it already? its sad that no other one did agree yet but ...
id say now we MUST have a challenge 😉 and i will open a thread for it tomorrow and provide some information, notation etc ... (here we used to just discuss whats the next tune)

By the Way
- Great that you did that
- i just did listen once but i like your version - more tomorrow

Alright! I'm up for Greensleeves.

Been very busy with the family ... hockey, now soccer season starting hear. Always time for a tune or two!