Hello Everybody, it’s Riverman, who, after long bullheaded delays finally broke down and bought a low D. I wanted to get the best for a change so I got a Kelpie in satin black. Woah!! What a beautiful sound!
However, most of the time I sound alternately like a wounded moose or the last wheeze of a dying man. I am playing with the piper’s grip and playing the low whistle almost exclusively, as someone recommended on this site.
Still, after three days it’s rather discouraging. Sometimes I can hit it…others the whistle bounces around in my hands and I leak a lot of air.
So, does anyone have more advice for me?
Just stick with it. It will settle in eventually and once it does you won’t remember the effort you had to put in to get there. Three days isn’t a long time, neither is three weeks or three … trust me. The destination is well worth the journey.
Feadoggie
WHS. Took/taking me a long time, but I think it worth it. Record yourself playing today. Save the recording for a month and compare it with a new recording - you will be encouraged by the change. In a year you will be embarrassed by both and will have forgotten the early problems. You will then be frustrated by the new challenges.
Onward and upward…
I just recently got a MK Low D after playing high D, Bb, & Alto G for 6 months. It is definitely a lot harder than I thought. I wondered if I should have purchased an F. I’ve been practicing almost every day and making improvements.
I practice with some easier slow songs. For example Farewell to Glasgow is a good one because there are only a couple low D notes and they’re preceded by a low E.
The way I practice the grip is to start with the ring finger using first pad and then lay down the middle finger and then the first finger. I often have to do that in the middle of a tune. if I notice I’m leaking or the note isn’t clear, I stop, reposition my fingers, and continue. After a while I have to do that less and less.
Another problem I noticed is I have trouble with low E & D. It seems the E is not in the middle of the F & D and for some reason my finger tends to go to the middle and miss the E. So it takes a bit of practice to build up the muscle memory so that middle finger can find the E correctly.
I’m new at this so any feedback or if I said anything wrong, please let me know. The more I play the low whistle the more I love its sound and the less I want to play my high D. I still play the high D for fast tunes and I think it’ll take a long time before I could play something fast on a low D. But I really enjoy playing slow tunes and that’s where the Low D is perfect.
I am not much of a whistle player on all counts, but I did notice this - when I first started on the Low D my fingers ached and hole coverage was hit and miss, but after picking it up for only a few minutes every few days over a period of several months there was a significant improvement. Time is the essence.
The low D is a tricky beast. I’ve been at it for about two weeks (Ethnicwinds Ceol Pro Low D), and I’ve found that it takes a bit more breath control for the very low/very high notes than I’m used to. Trying to control leaky fingers has also been an issue, but things are improving. Cunparis gave some good advice; play slower, and take the time to train your fingers to find the correct position. Concentrate on good tone production, which for me has meant learning at what pressure to blow each note for clearest, most even sound. Boring, yes, but it appears to be working.
Also… try to record yourself practicing. I am noticing a lot more mistakes and uneveness listening to the playback of my practice than I notice during practice. This has been a HUGE help in improving my timing and tone (well, it’s still not good, but getting better).
Does it bounce around mostly when you go for the C# (all holes open)? This one drives me nuts…although I noticed that you can keep the lowest (bottom) hole closed without affecting the pitch, which helps keep you from bobbling the whistle (I’m trying to play "Red Haired boy, which goes the the low-octave c# a few times in succession… I feel more like I’m juggling than playing the whistle).
Anyone else have suggestions on this scenario?
There should be no bobbling or bouncing going on. But you absolutely need to anchor the whistle with your bottom hand for the upper notes, especially C#. You have two anchor points: your lips, and the “pinch” between your bottom thumb and ring finger covering the bottom hole.
And as cunparis says, you need to be completely conscious of your finger positions, and readjust as you go if necessary.
You could always take up the Banjo…
wiz
Tried playing banjo once…
Had a breakdown. Haven’t touched it since.
You can make playing low whistle easy by using your pinky not your ring finger on the bottom hole. You just miss out the ring finger. For people familiar with uilleann pipe fingering imagine there is the ghost d hole below your ring finger. On pipes you play D with all four fingers down, for E you raise the pinky and ring finger at the same time. If you apply the same to low whistle then there is absolutely no stretch. It takes a very short time to get used to.
Wear a safety harness when you’re on roofs.
I’ve suggested this myself in the past. But I’d reserve it as a technique of last resort, if your hands are just too small for a particular whistle’s stretch. In which case you do what you have to do, whatever works.
Otherwise, on pedagogical grounds, my recommendation to beginners approaching the mastery of something new is always to make the effort before leaping to a less than standard workaround as an easy out.
FWIW, I find the “trick” to pinkie fingering is to treat the pinkie and ring fingers as a unit, and move them together as a unit. The ring finger then plays the imaginary hole between #5 and #6. This more or less preserves and leverages the muscle memory of moving the ring finger normally.
Why a last resort?
…you know, Mutepointe, I thought of you when starting this post because I knew you would come up with something absolutely ridiculous. There’s just no help for you, is there?
Besides, I only fell off a roof ONCE! It’s not like I make a CAREER out of it, you know!!
Thanks for all the replies, and especially the encouragement! (excepting Mutepointe’s comment, of course)!
I didn’t think about keeping the D hole covered…
I find that I have greater success when I use the middle pads of both “top” fingers in my right hand. This seems to make it easier for my last finger to reach the bottom hole with the first pad, and seems to help me cover the wider E hole straight on instead of from an upper angle. Is this wrong?
I love the sound of this whistle–and my family loves it even more. This MUST suceed!!
Well, to a certain extent I do tend to trust in the collective wisdom of common practice. If the two fingerings were equal in all respects, I’d expect to find a sizable proportion of all whistlers and keyless fluters using pinkie fingering. And that’s simply not the case. Certainly, I’ve never seen anyone myself (except myself). Even the uilleann pipers I know, who are quite confortable with pinkie articulation, use standard fingering. And with my teacher hat on, I would never recommend to someone who has already mastered the standard fingering that they switch to the other, which might be the case if I thought it conveyed an overall advantage despite less common usage.
I suppose there are also extended arguments in the context of leveraging skills among instruments. For playing keyed timber flutes or other keyed Boehm instruments, you want to train and maintain independent and sequential movement of those two fingers. Muscle memory and the engrams or whatever behind proprioception are acquired early, and are often harder to change or unlearn later than to learn naturally in the first place, with whatever effort and discipline are involved.
Of course, I know it’s always possible to point to individual, successful instrumentalists who exhibit oddball techniques - cramped piano hands, puffed out brass cheeks, sideways whistlers - and who play perfectly well. For a particular technical problem there are often multiple possible solutions. But for beginners, too many choices can be an enemy of effective breadth-first learning, up to a point. So I prefer to see someone making a good effort on the most usual thing before opting for alternatives, unless there’s a compelling physical or idiosyncratic problem to be overcome.
To some extent it’s a matter of personal pedagogical philosophy, I guess. As an explanation … well, there it is. 
No, that’s exactly right. 
Good, thanks, MT Guru; I’ll keep working on it—with a harness on…on my roof.
(that was for you, Mutepointe)
I think we’ll need to agree to differ there MTGuru. There is nothing odd about the pinky technique, it’s every bit as easy if not more so than standard technique and there is nothing that can be played with standard fingering that can’t be played using the pinky. Differing from accepted techniques is not unusual, there are scores of top level flute players who use pipers grips and of fiddlers who use far from classic bowing technique just to mention two examples. True, almost all pipers play the low whistle in the standard way but I would suggest it’s because they use a whistle mindset and more than likely don’t even think of playing the bottom D and E the same way as they do with the pipes.