Chiff and Fipple Forums

Whoo hoo and a huzzah as well! You don't realise how much you appreciate something until it's gone, so bloody well done to whoever fixed it.

Not quite what the OP was proposing but Sarah Jeffery (Team Recorder) did a video last year about the Hellcorder, the recorder-based guitar amplifier .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pc67IJZr9o The original Hellcorder video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuB2tH-wnXY but Sarah's reactions a...

[citation needed]

Agreed 100%. I've owned my Goldie low D for many years, have tried loads of other makers' examples since, and nothing has ever come close. There's Goldie whistles, and then ... there's everything else.

Low D. As you get into specific situations where a whistle in another key would be useful, you'll find out what that extra key (or keys) of whistle will be - but a low D is the standard which will get you a long way in standard session / small group work as the majority of tunes played in their most...

As they say on Wikipedia, [citation needed]. I know practically nothing about Irish dance other than Riverdance and the old jokes about the lost manual 'Volume 2: the upper body movements'. But as soon as anyone starts asserting that anything traditional dance related links back to sun worshipping, ...

I can't find any, either. Tony Dixon has a polymer piccolo, but I don't know how "good" it is. The Tony Dixon piccolos are OK - nice and light but a good strong sound. Go for the tuneable one. https://www.tonydixonmusic.co.uk/product-category/piccolos/ I wouldn't play it in preference to ...

I'm looking to improve my playing of (Jonathan Swayne style single drone border) pipes for dancing. It's been said that the constant sound of the pipes don't give a sufficient emphasis on the 1, the first beat of the bar, to help the dancers keep in time and feel the beat. Has anyone got any tips fo...

For me it's not a tune but a warmup which gets my embouchure dialed in quickly. I learned it from professional Boehm fluteplayers. The short version is just playing Bottom D. Start as quietly as possible, build to as loud as possible, and return to as quiet as possible, all on a single long breath,...

If you've got such extremely small hands that pipers grip doesn't work for you, you should look at the Susato whistles that can be customised for small hands.

For everyone else the low whistle to go for is a Goldie, nothing else comes close in expressiveness and sheer playability.

+1 for Musique Morneaux.

They took over the Ralph Sweet business when Ralph retired, and I've therefore effectively been playing their D keyless piccolos for over 30 years now with consistently splendid results (that's the instruments, not necessarily my playing of them).

My Colin Goldie, no contest.

There's perhaps an irony here too, stringbed. Just as the flageolet "slipped, slowly but surely, into obsolescence", the whistle was blossoming into great popularity. Is my memory playing tricks, but didn't Generation used to market their tin whistles as flageolets? It wasn't until much l...

It's come up before, http://forums.chiffandfipple.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=108663&p=1218608#p1218608, with a report that Mel plays the whistle, but no more backstory on how it got into the movie. Could be a continuity snafu - Mel was playing some tunes between takes, stuck it on the dashboar...

They show up even in 18th Century tune collections, and they seem quite at odds with the popular association of hornpipes with the simple diatonic instruments they are named for or sailors tunes. Another log to throw on the fire is that I suspect the section quoted above is actually looking at thin...