Etienne Laurin

Four months ago I started learning to play Irish Traditional Music on the tin whistle. After I had hinted about it, my family offered me a wonderful Feadóg whistle for my birthday.

I started my lessons on the wonderful Bro Steve’s Tin Whistle Pages and other online ressources. It wasn’t enough for me so I got Grey Larsen’s Essential Guide from the library.

Since I don’t play with anyone else, I rely on online radio to find new tunes to learn and to play along with. The most recent tune I grabbed off the radio is The Bag of Spuds. It happens to be Clare McKenna‘s version. It sounds different from the two versions of the tune avaiable on thesession.org. It has a few more notes and a lot of ornamentation.

Slowing down a tune helps to figure out the added notes and ornamentations. To do so I use the command line music player mplayer with its -speed switch and the scaletempo audio filter:

mplayer -af scaletempo=stride=10:overlap=.30:search=5 -speed 0.5

Now, beginner that I am, I can transcribe the ornamentations and try to play them.