I’m very new to the tin whistle, and I’m looking for Irish tunes to play on mine in D (usually play rhythm guitar with a seisun near Chicago). The Tin Whistle Fingering Research center looked promising, but the link to their music page seems to be broken. Did find the “Buzzing Whistle Jig” online with a fantastic tab, and now I’m looking for more. Any suggestions?
Cheers!
Katie
The “Instant Tin Whistle” books have all the tunes in both sheet music and whistle tab. You can get them from Amazon and all the other usual places. http://www.mally.com/details.asp?id=10 It really is worth learning to read music if you can, though.
ya seriously… learn the dots. 
You are only ever going to be concerned with the D scale and its relative variations. The tabs can help you but honestly not any more than a fingering chart would. Even then the sheet music will be best considered a catalog or archive of sorts for the tunes. You will most likely find that when you start playing with others that the setting of the tune at a session is far more elaborate than the sheet music will reference. So here the aural tradition of this music being passed along is more practical to stick with, but for written notation of the music, regular flyspeck is going to be much more efficient in getting tunes under your fingers, and will open many more opportunities to find new tunes, variations on tunes you know, and build repertoire.
Just my 2¢…
yup, learning dots is gonna be useful cause it’s more plentiful, and its not that hard. with ITM, it’s mostly simple single-melody-line tunes, with repetitions at that. many tunes have similiar phrases too, so after awhile, whole bars will be easier to process and translate into fingerings. learning to do it by ear, of course, is even more useful.
i think using dots as a jumping off point for learning tunes isn’t as bad as people make it out to be, as long as you do it in conjunction with listening. afterall, it works well to get the fingering down. pretty soon, you may find that you don’t even need the dots anymore after familiarizing with tunes, or that when you’re reading dots and playing a tune for the first time, the ornaments, even variations come out naturally, so it’s not gonna come out too robotic.
Don’t, whatever you do, learn musical notation. It makes you play like a robot or cheap computer midi processor. If you don’t believe me, just listen to all those mechanical performances of classical music. No nuance, no soul, no cuts and rolls.
What you need to do is go to Ireland, find an old man living in an isolated bothie who knows several hundred tunes by heart, and dedicate yourself for the next ten years to sweeping his kitchen floor and milking his cows. You may be fortunate enough to hear him playing the whistle himself from time to time. When you do, get out your tin whistle (this has to be the cheapest one available, preferably out of tune so you have to work hard to play it properly, with a fluffy, unfocused sound) and try to follow along. At this point, some people scratch the tunes down in ogham on the sides of cowpats. But this is getting dangerously close to musical notation, and is probably better avoided, as it can lead to a mechanical, robotic style of playing. After ten or so years you should have a good grounding in the tradition.
Then: you can start going to sessions where the aim is to play as fast as you possibly can along with lots of other people so you can’t hear yourself. Because you’re properly grounded in the tradition, you will now have the joy of being able to sneer at anyone who can read music, or anyone who has spent years learning to play their instrument at conservatory and therefore inevitably plays in a robotic, mechanical style, with no connection to the ineffable sould of the tradition, which can only be learnt by milking cows and chewing stalks of grass.
Alternatively, you could learn to read music, which should take you an afternoon, and discover that even the whistle need not be used exclusively for playing jigs, and that the tradition is simply one among many musical genres.
But I wouldn’t do that if I were you!
As you already play rhythm guitar, just think of whistle fingering as a set of new chord shapes … start with the left hand (right hand if you’re left handed), memorise the “finger shapes” for each new “chord” (ie note), move onto the other hand … job sorted 
… works for me … Good Luck
I like that analogy, Kypfer. Combine that with the trick of treating the staff lines as whistle tab, and getting started should be pretty easy.
Also, I wonder … Sometimes guitarists say “tabs” generically to mean any kind of notation, including standard dots. So maybe the OP already reads dots.
The only thing you are doing there is showing you haven’t even made a start at understanding the point being made by those advocating learning by ear. Amusing attempt at a pisstake, but not quite achieving what you hoped for.
Oooohhhh! That hurt!
Well, I have nothing against learning by ear, which is not what I was arguing against. Rather, against the idea that reading music off a page results in robotic, mechanical playing. Do you think that someone playing off a score doesn’t listen to what he is playing? Ninety percent of the work in preparing a piece for performance takes place after the notes have been learnt.
There seems to be a meme on this forum that classical - in the widest sense - music is somehow non-traditional, but of course it has its own traditions, in terms of interpretation, too. There are many traditions. And there are excellent musicians in all of them.
Another thing I’d suggest, now that I’m thinking about it, is that insisting too much on a particular style closes doors. I mean, why not try playing jigs to tanpura and tabla accompaniment and see where that gets you? For instance. It might be something beautiful.
But my main point was that reading music is one of the most valuable skills a musician can have. It opens all kinds of doors. And it isn’t in any way opposed to using your ears - quite the contrary.
Whatever, it’s back to the cowshed for me.
Using instruments from other traditions, it’s all old hat and has been done so many times. But that’s not what that particular discussion is about. It’s about the initial acquisition and basic understanding, the nuts and bolts of a particular stream, tradition if you like, of music. First things first.
My point stands, I don’t think you quite grasp the argument in favour of a certain approach. It’s much easier to relegate that to the cowshed, isn’t it?
If we disagree, it can only be because I don’t understand, certainly.
Well, for all your cowshed and kitchen sweeping banter, you have so far failed to address the central argument of the ‘traditional’ approach you’re making fun off. And the way you treat the argument shows a flawed understanding of it’s core principle.
Welcome to the forum Katie.
You can find some tabs here;
http://www.whistlethis.com/index.php?content=Y0hKbGRtbHZkWE09
Click on a tune you like and up comes the sheet music and tabs.
This collection is small, but will get you started.
You can also click on the MP3 files and listen to the mentors play the tune. Highly recommended.
Do consider learning to read music. You can find thousands of ITM tunes in note form verus a few dozen in tabs.
Good luck on your whistle journey.
I will give you this though, Gumby - the tabla/whistle thing was pretty clichéd. I don’t even like fusion music myself.
As for the rest, I had no intention of addressing a core issue, simply advocating learning to read musical notation, rather than a tab system which restricts you to a specific instrument and its official repertoire.
BTW - I’m not a conservatory trained musician.
I actually agree with you on a lot of points. I just don’t get why you should want to make the point by taking the piss and effectively putting down one school of thought without any attempt at seriously addressing the point they are trying to convey. Because, no matter how much you take the piss, it’s a serious point and well worth considering.
Probably because he has a sense of humor that you simply don’t grasp.
I thought the little rant was quite funny, actually, and not something worthy of a scolding…
Welcome to the forum, Killthemessenger… Here, the future and the past collide. Here, the old and the young clash whenever the latter aren’t overtly brown-nosing the former. Here all things are possible, and all things meet their opposites. Oh, and sometimes we talk about whistles too - you know, after the personality indexing is finished and all… 
Probably because he has a sense of humor that you simply don’t grasp.
Do you think so?
Probably because he has a sense of humor that you simply don’t grasp.
It’s not too often that I read purely offensive things on this site.
Before a fist fight starts over my sense of humour, let me just state: I don’t have one.
Food fight Aisle 16!
Sent in peace…
Steve