Hi Jon,

A lot of good points have been brought up on this thread already but here's another slant.

Is what you can't seem to help playing neccessarily wrong? The "folk process" involves changes to a melody as different people play and process the tune. Do the different notes you're playing sound awful or are they just different? Maybe this is the way your ear hears that part of the tune. Remember, there really is no definitive version of a traditional tune.

On the other hand, if you just want to play those certain notes perhaps the problem is that you're trying too hard. I'm a fiddle player myself and I have struggled for what seems like years with the reel "The Fisherman's Island." The version I want to learn has a certain sequence of notes near the end of the B part that my fingers just don't want to do. After abandoning the tune for quite a long time I came back to it and found that I can play the sequence most of the time now. Naturally when I try to play the tune up to tempo I still screw it up but there seems to be some progress there.

Hope this helps you in some way.

Richard