Are cranns done on whistles the same as Uilleann pipes??
sorry about the caps
Well, well, well…you decided to come over to these neck of the woods. I don’t play the pipes (as you know), but I had a guy who plays pipes (Sean Lally) teach me how to cran and it is essentially the same. Cranning in the high D sounds great on the whistle (I leave the top finger up for the cranning of the high D).
for some reason, I can’t seem to cran on the pipes, but it’s sooooo damn fun to cran on the whistle. LOVELY YUM YUMS
Cheers,
Armand
Well, we all got 86’d over on the UP forum, so I thought I would come over here to see what’s going on. Never got 86’d out of a forum before; been there for bars, though.
Crannig on the whistle works just like on the pipes. Joe Shannon would ‘cran’ with his two top most fingers on the whistle to great effect.
I assume right hand covers bottom three holes; so he would do D-FG-D-FG? ornament??
Thank you! I was wondering what the heck a ‘cran’ was 
My impression is that crans on the whistle tend to be less rhythmically subtle than those on the pipes (where you can hear different crans pretty clearly).
Grey Larsen’s “The Essential Guide” book covers cranning on whistle.
On pipes, a cran is usually two or three grace notes played after the note itself. For most players, that means grace notes played on the bottom hand. One benefit is that the grace notes are near the note being ‘cranned’.
Joe Shannon used to play those two grace notes on the top hand - his two top fingers playing the grace notes. That one system for gracing then works for D, E, F sharp, G, and A. By the way, Patsy Touhey, the piper who died in 1923, never played rolls but used trills instead.
The illustrative lesson would be to play Miss McLeod’s reel and every time you played the G in the first part, grace it with two or three cuts with your top two fingers and, steering clear of a roll by not tipping note with the top finger of your bottom hand. Another good tune for that is the Limestone Rock with its G note in the first part of the tune.
XXX OOO
OXX OOO - cut 1
XXX OOO
XOX OOO - cut 2
XXX OOO
OXX OOO - cut 3
XXX OOO