This thread is for experienced players to share one tip each, aimed at intermediate whistlers. I’d like the thread to consist of short, positive tips, so please try not to criticise other player’s tips or discuss them in depth (there’s plenty of space to do that elsewhere).
So… to get the ball rolling, here’s a sample of what I’m looking for. (I don’t consider myself experienced, so I’ll steal a tip from elsewhere.)
Tip: I read with interest the debate over whether anchoring the RH little finger to stabilise the whistle was A Good Thing or not. For me, this works really well, and I wish I’d known about it earlier.
My tip for intermediate players… use a metronome and set it at a speed you can actually play at without any mistakes. Increase speed slowly (1bpm at a time) making sure the mistakes don’t creep in.
Gnomes love giving egos a good bashing, they tell the truth about one’s ability, egos don’t.
I agree with Free Feet that a metronome is a great tool for improving your ability to play well with others.
I tend to avoid those exercises that are no fun - like anything I am not very good at. I am weak at the b rolls so I am currently dedicating the first three minutes of my practice time to that, then I can go on to the funner things.
Just a little tip. I seldom use a metronome, but when I did, I found that using a metronome playing off beats helps to keep a looser non-metronomic phrasing. Everyone seems to have it play 1 & 3. Try 2 & 4.
Besides listening to others, be sure to listen to yourself as recorded as often as possible. This is an invaluable tool for feedback as to how you actually sound and are progressing, not how you think you sound and are progressing; helps to zero in on potential bad habits like inconsistent tempo, staccatto rather than lilting feel in the wrong places, clipping notes, not breathing in the best spots, etc.
You can play a C# with B-1 and B-2 covered when, for example, you need to play a C# —> E (or vice versa) in rapid succession to reduce the number of holes you have to cover and uncover.
Let me second both PhilO and plunkett. Recording myself and listening to it was a real eye-opener, both positive and negative. I’d worked and worked on rolls, thought they sucked, but the work really showed – they were crisp and even. But the phrasing, both accents and cadence, were horrible. I obviously hadn’t worked on them.
Syncopation was something Chris Norman had me working on in my second lesson with him. I still wasn’t getting very good accents and wasn’t “flexible”, so that was something both to get me to exaggerate accents and play around with mixing up phrasing.
Unless I’m misreading you, it seems you’re serious about wanting to improve your playing, so I’d suggest giving the most attention to the things you’re having the most trouble with, prioritize, and dedicate yourself to reaching your goals. This may sound very basic and a given, but you’d be surprised how many players say they want to learn but aren’t willing to dedicate sufficient and quality time to do it. With all due respect to Devilplayer’s comment about avoiding exercises that are no fun and anything one may not be good at, that’s NOT the way to improve at anything you may be interested in. Commitment and dedication is the positive road to reaching goals and when learning to play any musical instrument, exercises that may not be “fun” are part of that road. As you progress, those things that were once a challenge will become fun and spur you on to learn more.
I agree with that. Some of my most un-liked and un-fun tunes are the ones i find hardest to play, but i keep at them every day because they’re the ones i really need to sort out to get to that next level.
Another thought came to me on this topic. Stick to the same few tunes and learn to play them well instead of keeping on finding new tunes to play mediocre-wise.
I have 27 tunes on the whistle, i’ve been playing 3.5 years. I don’t consider any of them to be good enough yet and i won’t move on until i think they are. But i meet other musicians who think they can play loads of tunes and not one of them is anything like as good as any of my 27, in fact some people i meet are downright shite - but they’ve got 100 tunes more than me! Wooopeee!
There’s no point in having a load of tunes if they’re shite and no one wants to listen to them. Get a few and make 'em great!
Hey, Free-feet… did you ever sell that Harper? I’ve had absolutely no luck finding one here in the U.S. but I hear Steve has started shipping them again and Hobgoblin UK now has a supply in their warehouse. Maybe some will eventually show up here in the states.
Personally, I maintain a “window” of tunes that I actively work on. As I learn new ones, others fall into obscurity, only to be discovered later on. It is true that it is important to learn them “right”, and to “savor them” as my teacher is fond of saying. But I’ve found it difficult to say when I know them well enough to consider them “in the bank”. And when I do pull out an oldie-goodie, I’m often surprised at how rusty I’ve gotten on them, and how much my playing has progressed since I last touched them.
There is something to be said for sheer numbers though: If you want to participate in any session, it is better to know many tunes at least well enough to keep up confidently than it is to know only a few perfectly. As long as you’re not leading and know when to hang back, the setting is much more forgiving than if you were playing the same tunes solo.
Learning ITM is much more akin to learning a language than to mastering a certain set of tunes. You might start off by memorizing certain sentences (ie. tunes) and spend long hours trying to pronounce and inflect correctly, but as you become more proficient, your chops become more transferable. An accomplished flute player recently shared with me his excitement when he realized that he was able to play tunes he’d never consciously learned before. I’m still waiting for that to happen.
As for bragging about your tune count, that’s about as lame as bragging about the price of your instrument or how many years you have been playing. All these things make a musician not.
My intermediate tip, especially for C&F denizens, is to leave your WhOA on the shelf, at least for a while. Pick a D whistle you like, any whistle, and play it. A lot. Get to know its quirks and character, its physical feel and acoustic response under as many conditions as possible. When your basic technique is solid and you’re ready to add other whistles and keys, you’ll have a firm baseline for judgment. You’ll have learned how to learn.
In my first 6 months or so of serious whistling, I stuck with a Generation D and a Susato. Later I added a more aggressive Feadóg, and eventually a Burke. Now that I have a modest collection of whistles for my own amusement, those original 4 whistles still get 90% of my playing time.
I still have a long way to go before I’m happy with my technique and musicality. But honestly, when you’re playing solo or in a session and you experience those moments when you hit your stride and are in the groove, the last thing anyone cares about is what whistle you’re playing. It’s just a tool, transducing your understanding of the music into sound. It’s the music that really matters.
I agree. I learned more in 5 lessons than in a couple of years before. Also playing with others helps a lot, it motivates, it improves the playing and it’s a lot of fun to be part of a group of musicians playing your whistle.
The whole point of that recent discussion is that you can cover the top, the bottom, or the sides, depending on what’s easiest for you and how you hold the whistle.
Seriously. I think this may be one of the most difficult lessons to learn because it takes an intentional effort at all times. When attempting to practice ornamentation, and especially when learning new tunes many people have a tendency to death grip the whistle. When it comes down to it, what you practice is what becomes ingrained in your muscles. As others have put it on the forums, “practice makes permanent”, so if you are indeed spending all your practice time with your fingers and lips tensed up then it will haunt you.
Keep your fingers in close proximity to the body of the whistle, don’t lift them higher than necessary (watch Donncha O Briain’s plaing for a great example of this). Practice playing your scales one finger at a time, lifting them and placing them on the whistle while paying attention to keeping your muscles relaxed while still covering and uncovering the toneholes quickly enough to avoid slurring notes. What has helped me is to focus mainly the muscles in my palm (at the base of the fingers I guess, I’m no anatomy expert) while keeping the finger joints fairly still (though not rigid). I figure the less joints and muscles you involve in moving your finger the simpler it will be.
Somehow, those parts came naturally for me, despite only having played guitar and piano earlier. May be that people who are used to economical muscle movement from other instruments apply that naturally to new ones.
I am not an expert, but I still have an advice for other intermediates.
One can play the whistle, without for that matter being able to play folk music.
Learn the instrument, but also develop an aesthetic sense for the music you want to play. Do not only listen to professional whistlers, but the music as a whole. Your playing will benefit from this.
