Whistling

[morgana_l_f]

I'm trying to improve my tin whistle skills. Does anyone know of good info on playing or sites to check out?

[BoggleBoy]

That's cool that you can play an instrument. I was never afforded the oppurtunity to learn. I tried for a while to teach myself to play the harmonica, but, well, I got as far as making my cats mad.

I'm afraid I've never seen anything on-line regarding that particular subject, however.

[Aaediwen]

Have you been to www.chiffandfipple.com yet? I've found it's at least an OK site in general, but I have yet to find a better fingering chart anywhere

[OBH]

I don't know how advanced you are but here is a good site for beginners:
Whistle Tutor

There is another beginners tutor at The Whistle Shop, they also have a good links page and decent prices on a large selection of whistles. They also give good advice like trying a low G whistle for your first low whistle instead of jumping straight to a low D. I took that advice and I'm glad I did, it made me realize that a low G is as low a whistle as I need.

The Chiff and Piffle forum has a good links page as well.

Here's a site where you can get a free version of The Amazing Slowdowner, a nifty little program that lets you slow the tempo of a tune without affecting the pitch. It also lets you change the pitch for those groups who don't use a standard tuning. The free version has limitations, it will only play the first two cuts on a CD or will only play the first quarter of a mp3 or wav file on your computer. Some of the links above are to sites where you can download little 5 or 6 mb mp3 of tunes, download the ones you want. What I do is convert to a wav file, open sound recorder and load the wav file then insert the file at the end of the original file 3 times. Then ASD plays the whole thing and you can loop it so it plays over and over at whatever tempo and pitch you like. Works great for me since my music reading skills are rusted solid, lol.

I hope some of this helps, I love whistles, it's the easiest instrument I ever learned. You learn one scale then just change whistles to change key, like a harmonica, how cool is that. It's also very addicting and expensive, especially if you start buying high end whistles.