I was puttering around the local music store (getting something for my fiddle as I recall) when I spied it...a Clarke Original resplendent in it's black paint and golden diamonds.
I shelled out the ten bucks. It was love at first toot.
I hooked up with Thom at the whistle shop and got a Clare and a tweaked Clarke. Started surfing the whistle web and discovered Chiff and Fipple...laughed my brains out at Dale's humor and was hooked.
In time I was also seduced by the flute and the pipes. But I still have that old Clarke original sitting on my desk. It has suffered much in the hands of my 13 children...many a dent and a fipple plug that wanders aimlessly. But I still play it occasionally. I enjoy it's innocence and the memory of those first magical days.
So, how did you get hooked in and what was your first tooter?
I always loved the sound of flute. Jethro Tull, <a href="http://breqwas.net/stuff/telenn_gwad/">Telenn Gwad</a>, Melnitsa - they are still among my favorite bands. In Russian flute is called "fleyta", and a recorder - "blokfleyta", and I didn't know the difference. I bought a recorder and started learning.
Soon I realised that blockflute is not a flute, and that most tunes I was playing were Irish or somehow else celtic - and that there is one more fife, much more handy for this sort of music. So I went to the store and bought a sweetone. That was the beginning...
They used to have a fiddle class at Adult Education. I was living in an apartment with a day sleeper upstairs at the time so I never could practice. Eventually I gave up on the class and now they don't offer it anymore.
Recently I had a chance to go to India. You have to sit on a plane for a whole day to get there from California. To help me tolerate that, my boyfriend gave me his old iPod and got himself a new one. The iPod was full of Irish music. I really liked the Irish music.
After several months of listening I decided I couldn't just listen anymore. I had to learn how to play the fiddle again. I went to get a book on Irish fiddle, brought it right home, and while I was looking through the book I heard my fiddle commit suicide in the back room. It just simply broke. This is why they warn you against cheap chinese violins.
I got the fiddle fixed and started learning from the book. Man the fiddle is really hard! Then I realized there are flutes playing those Irish tunes in my iPod. I used to play a flute long time ago. Maybe that would be easier.
So, I ordered a flute and while waiting for my flute to be built, I bought a little penny whistle so I could learn the fingerings. An Acorn. I almost wished that I hadn't ordered the flute when I realized how easy to play the whistle is and how fun and portable it is, and how nice the whistle sounds on all these iPod songs I have.
But now I have a flute and I feel right at home with it. I'm getting pretty good. I can keep up on one or two tunes at the session now. I prefer flute to the whistle, but I still like the whistle. I really need to practice the whistle more. I have a Sweetone now in addition to the Acorn. It's cute and red like my Vespa but I can't play it very well compared to the Acorn.
Somehow, I have not acquired WHOA. I don't know what's the matter with me. That Acorn whistle really can't be beat. The more I play it the better it gets.
~ Diane
Flutes: Tipple D and E flutes and a Casey Burns Boxwood Rudall D flute
Whistles: Jerry Freeman Tweaked D Blackbird
Waaaay back in the 1970's... Chieftains, Bothy Band, Planxty, Battlefield Band, etc... saw the whistles in a local music store, and bought one of each key I could find at the time - Generations Bb, D, and high G, and Camac, Low G and Low A. Spent all of about $25 US!
anniemcu
--- "You are what you do, not what you claim to believe." -Gene A. Statler
--- "Olé to you, none-the-less!" - Elizabeth Gilbert
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I've loved Irish music ever since I can remember, because it's a little slice of my heritage that I latched onto early. One day my parents and I went to an Irish pub here in Washington...great food, fun atmosphere, and a gift shop next door. My parents saw a Walton D sitting all alone on a shelf and decided to buy it for me, more as a novelty than anything else.
Time passed and the Walton was still sitting on a shelf--only this time in my closet. I never touched it until five years after its purchase, when I suddenly remembered it was there and pulled it down. It was squeaky, but kinda fun!
I found Chiff and Fipple and the rest is history! I'm up to 12 whistles in four different keys and the Walton still has a place of honor, despite its squeaks.
"It's the Great God Bird through it all!"
-Sufjan Stevens
I've always loved listening to flutes and other woodwinds. I have every Yanni cd , and I watched all the celtic women shows on tv. My father got a whistle, a feadog, and he was really good. I decided then that I had to have one. While looking at whistles online, I came across Chiffandfipple.com The whistle guides Dale posted here are an excellent resourse. So I bought my nickel feadog in the key of D, and I've loved my music ever since. I even got a low D recently, which I tend to play even more than my feadog
Chucked the Soodlum. Swooned over the Chieftain Low.
(Chasing sounds of Uru Bamba, Native American Flute, and then Riverdance struck! Eureka!!!!)
Many fabulous whistles later... and that original hearthrob Chieftain, battered by the years (hole tweaks, anodization, wholesale surface filing, etc), still lives on...in a seat-pocket in the car. Still thrills passers-by, in parking lots (maybe)...and yours truly (for sure!).
Thanks for instigating the trip down memory lane, Doc. And, no, I ain't tradin' the Chieftain.
Doc, my story isn't all that different from yours (minus the fiddle prior to whistle). The whistle was my first instrument, the Clarke Original with the gold diamonds to be specific.
One day I walked into a used record shop and they were playing the Pogues "Rum Sodomy & the Lash" album over the store PA system. I immediately walked up to the counter and said "I want to buy this album when you're done playing it", and I did. I listened to the heck out of it and then proceeded to find as much Irish music as I could. It took me several years without anyone who knew the music to influence me but I finally found my way to ITM (to this day, I prefer the traditional sound but the only "fused" sound I can stand to listen to is the punk influenced stuff such as the Pogues... I grew up listening to punk and I love the energy and the spirit of it much the same as I love the energy and spirit if Irish music).
I bought my first Clarke at a local Irish gift shop shortly after and began learning by ear, using a few tips from the piece of paper that comes with the Clarke. I played that Clarke Original for about two years before replacing it with another Clarke Original when the first began to sound less focused after dropping it a few times and getting small dents that bent the tin.
It wasn't until I had been whistling for about three years that I found C&F and began using the internet to research information on the whistle and realized how many kinds of whistles there were.
I still have my first Clarke, the gold paint has all faded/rubbed off to black and there are teeth marks in the top of the beak (don't worry, it's a habit I did break). It still plays and, though I don't play Clarkes anymore, I'll probably keep it around for nostalgic purposes and to remember where I started.
On a trip up the west coast of the U. S. I heard this beautiful music playing over the public address system in the Oregon Aquarium in Newport. Later on the trip I was in Seattle's Pike Place market. I saw a vendor with clay flutes and thought I could learn to play that tune I had heard. These were real flutes.
I picked one up and of course nothing, not a peep. The vendor gently suggested a small ocarina. I bought that and enjoyed it, but quickly reached its limits. I saw a Clarke C with cassette and song book in a local store and bought it. I think I paid $20. I took to it like a duck to water. I've been playing whistle almost every day since.
It took me many years to buy a second whistle, a Walton. My Walton was junk, unfortunately. Finding this forum opened up a whole world or whistles. Now I have eight whistles and two flutes, a recorder, pan pipes, and still the ocarina. I mostly play original tunes. My most moving performances have been at funerals.
A couple years ago I fell in love with the Lord of the Rings movies, and in turn, the soundtracks. For awhile I was content to assume "Concerning Hobbits" was played solely on flute, but once Return of the King came out, I realized that there was an instrument known as the tin whistle. I figured out several of the whistle themes on recorder, but got tired of the unwhistlesque sound. So I bought a whistle: a Waltons D. Then a year later (this summer) I got a Waltons C, and am in the midst of getting a Clarke C.
I was tyro in a pipe band in '71. We had a band party and the Pipe Major got into the spirits and whipped out two Clarke originals and inserted a whistle into each of his nostrils and proceeded to play a duet with himself. After wowing all of us with this feat, he played a few tunes in the normal manner. Then other whistles materialized and whistling went on into the night. The next day, I bought my own Clarke.
Feadog. It was cheap. And I'd vaguely heard of them before. And it was cheap. So I bought it. I know that's not very romantic but that's how it happened
Tho also- my dad's family is Scottish (among other things- I'm your typical white American mutt- but that's what they think of themselves as), so my dad listened to a lot of Scottish trad (though it wasn't his main interest), and when I started to listen to music, that was the majority of what I listened to- so maybe that was an influence, since I had some vague sense that the whistle was "celtic" somehow, whatever that meant... and when I realized that this Irish stuff on the tinwhistle was something-like-but-different-from the Scottish stuff I'd already been listening too, I thought that was pretty sweet.
CranberryDog wrote:...the Pipe Major got into the spirits and whipped out two Clarke originals and inserted a whistle into each of his nostrils and proceeded to play a duet with himself. After wowing all of us with this feat, he played a few tunes in the normal manner.
You know, I might have played the solobefore the nostril duet but that's just me.
CranberryDog wrote:...the Pipe Major got into the spirits and whipped out two Clarke originals and inserted a whistle into each of his nostrils and proceeded to play a duet with himself. After wowing all of us with this feat, he played a few tunes in the normal manner.
After playing the whistles with his nostrils, did he clean them off before playing them "in the normal manner"? Just curious...
Back in the '70s I knew a family whose son was just getting into Irish music: he already played whistle, was just learning Uillean pipes. He gave me a couple of Gen D whistles and I fooled around with them a bit, but never got any good on it.
Years passed, and I got into a lot of other types of music including playing pretty fair amateur Baroque recorder. One night, the musical guests on Sat Night Live were a group with the odd name of the Chieftains. They blew me away and I really wanted to learn to play that type of music. Whistle was the natural choice of instrument for me to learn, considering my recorder backround.
I went to a local music store and found a whistle book/cassette combo which, to my great surprise, was written by that whistle player I had known so many years ago and who had given me my first whistles:Bill Ochs! Really.
