Hi everyone.
I am a beginner to the high and low whistle and wondered if you could advise me please on CDs/ artists to listen to so as to get my “ear” in.
I hope to learn to play the high and low whistle and would like to immerse myself in the music ( hoperfully some will soak in )
Any advice, recommendations as to who and what to listen to will be gratefully received.
Thanks in advance.
Gray
Hi and welcome!
Joanie Madden - “Song Of The Irish Whistle I & II”, “A Whistle On The Wind”
Mary Bergin - “Feadoga Stain I & II”
Lúnasa
The Chieftains
Dervish
Flook
Be sure and listen to non-whistle cd’s also. Kevin Burke- Portland and any of Martin Hayes are great fiddle cd’s that will give you an earful.
Mick O’Brien’s May Morning Dew has great pipe music worth hearing and learning.
Chieftains 1 through about 9 are traditional. Beyond that, anything goes (non-trad).
It’s a lot easier listening to slower played music when you’re trying to learn. Laurence Nugent plays whistle and flute at all kinds of speeds. He’s my favorite whistle player.
Tony
For listening you could try this site.
http://www.rogermillington.com/tunetoc/index.html
These are advanced level playing with transcriptions, but you can hear what you are shooting for. I especially like the Micho Russell recordings, even though one of them is not the “best” quality.
Thanks to Peter Laban for his recordings and transcriptions of the Micho Russell tunes and thanks to MT Guru for pointing out this site on a thread about a year ago.
Rance
Hi all.
Thanks very much for the help and advice, I will be buying the CDs that you have recommended and hopefully moving up the learning curve ( or is it a cliff.)
Thanks again, Gray
I would recommend that if you are particularly interested in low whistle music that you buy yourself a Bb whistle and a copy of Mick O’Brien & Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh’s album, “Kitty Lie Over”. The record not only shows a great example of proper playing but they play a lot of the tunes at a very relaxed tempo making it easy to practice with. Since the tunes are played mostly on a Bb set of pipes (with fiddle tuned to match) you’ll get in some good practice with your Bb whistle which is a nice middle between whistle and low whistle.
Kitty Lie Over is indeed a wonderful album.
Buy whatever inspires because that’s what will make you listen and practice.
I would add Planxty–not necessarily a lot of whistle but the piping is divine and totally relevant to whistling.
If you listen to the cd’s on your computer using Windows Media Player or something similar, try setting the player to play slower on some of the fast peices–it can help you better dissect what you hear.
Get some Seamus Ennis, it is great piping and is very inspiring.
How do you get to the settings to do this on Windows Media Player?
Tuscon,
Sometimes you have to physically ‘rip’ the CD in question onto your hard drive for the slowdown option to appear. It depends on the version of windows you are running.
All I know is, I open windows media player click on the ‘Rip’ tab, rip the Cd to hard drive…click on the ‘library’ tab and scroll down to ‘Fresh tracks’ and that is where your CD will be…click on the tracks and they will appear in the now playing pane.
To view the now playing pane, click on the tab ‘Now playing’.
Double click on a track to play it.
Go to your tool bar at the top of the player.
Click on 'View".
Click on ‘Enhancements’
Pick ‘Play Speed Settings’ from the drop down list.
You should now have a slider control for speeding/slowing down your now playing track available at the bottom of the media player screen.
Any luck with this?
There are probably easier ways to do this, but that is how I am used to doing it.
View->Enhancements->Play speed settings
But the quality is lousy, so dedicated software (e.g., “Best Practice,” which is free) is recommended.
-Craig
Try to get out and listen to some live pub session music too. The atmosphere is very inspiring. Sort of the natural habitat of the music. Over there in the UK you shouldn’t have any trouble finding several good sessions.
You don’t have to buy any CDs to hear good music.
Go over to the fiddle forum and look for the sticky topic of old 78s. The flute forum has a similar topic for flutes. Not all of these are good (either recording-wise or musically – what’s the deal with Michael Coleman’s pianist?), but they are very traditional.
Also, the Comhaltas site has loads of really good free music.
I find the more traditional and less “studio” music is best for learning.
Give Mick’s site a listen!