Chiff and Fipple Forums

The clip Kirk posted sounded rather rushed to me, not much flow to it. As if he had five minutes to get the recording down because there was a taxi to the airport waiting. I'm willing to believe he doesn't always sound like that, but I didn't find it very expressive or enjoyable and it didn't get my...

Think about a tenor recorder as well. I have a maple Zen-On 2400B: http://global.rakuten.com/en/store/ontai/item/2400b/?s-id=borderless_recommend_item_en which is about the same price as the MK Pro low D whistle: http://mkwhistles.com/mkshop/mk-pro-1.html I sometimes play in a session with somebody ...

As a baroque flute, does the Tipple flute in C# make a remotely plausible substitute for an A=415 D flute like the Aulos Stanesby plastic? As far as I can see, the Tipple requires you to half-hole a lot of notes that you can get by cross-fingering on a Baroque traverso. For me this is NOT a good thi...

I've never heard of him. Should I?

That would be Jon Swayne, Guido Gonzato and Misha Somerville, at a guess?

There are transcriptions of Moldavian Hungarian kaval music in Balogh Sandor's book/CD "Moldvai Hangszeres Dallamok".

Written notation is quite hard to use for an instrument where so many different harmonics are used.

I wonder how many Scottish tunes ended up in the US fife and drum tradition. I can think of several Irish and British tunes that have. Geography lesson: the Scottish ones would have been British too. I just looked at the colonial fife tunes on my website (from some American fife band who vanished o...

is there really that much difference between two similarly-drilled wooden tubes that can't be attributed to the mouthpiece? I don't pretend to understand anything about mouthpieces. I just blunder around until I find something that works. With the SANS I ended up getting the best results with a str...

I have a SANS chalumeau in olive wood, which sounds great but is a bit hard to play in tune for the top couple of notes. It knocks the socks off the Hohner. I have heard and tried xaphoons. Not impressed at all. Nasty sound and poor intonation. The clariphone seems like an idea that should have been...

despite impostors like the alleged 5/4 'waltz' of Tchaikovsky's sixth symphony Tchaikovsky didn't invent that idea. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTW4X6qfz2w http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnSbQKd27FM (that looks difficult) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdHw4nZ684w http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...

Waltzes generally have a slightly extended second beat, systematically throughout the tune (hence the accordionist's cliche left hand for them, "root CHORD CHORD", rinse and repeat). You can't do that with Carolan's 3/4 tunes, and Mr O'Connor is about as far from that as you can get - it f...

"Mr O'Connor" is not a waltz. Carolan died about 60 years before waltzes were invented and 100 years before they got to Ireland. "Ashokan Farewell" was not written as a waltz either (I don't know what category you could put it in apart from "unspeakably turgid bore") an...

"Crested Hens" is a mazurka.

Two waltzes that go well together: "Farquhar and Hettie's Waltz" followed by "My Cape Breton Home".

In Indian culture the swastika could go either way, but more often in the same direction as the Nazis had it. Just google.

What are you doing with it that makes an ordinary Boehm one unusable?