The Whistle Is Not a Fixed-Pitch Instrument

From time to time, one or two sentences will change the way I approach this instrument and this music. Here's an example, written by Peter Laban:

Complaining your C's are out of tune on the whistle is a bit like a beginning fiddleplayer complaining his notes are off when he puts down his fingers.
This is not a fixed pitch instrument, it's, for a good part at least, your job to play in tune.

Before I read that post this fact had never occurred to me before. But it makes a great deal of sense. Instrument designers must adjust the size and position of the tone holes in order to compromise between:

• The pitch of "regular" notes like G, A, B, etc.
• The pitch of "cross-fingered" notes like C natural
• The two octaves most commonly used, and the fact that we must over-blow to reach the second octave
• The cylindrical body of most whistles
• The fact that a whistle "embouchure" cannot change for different notes in the way a flute player's embouchure can
• The desire to have a consistent tone and volume across the scales

Despite the efforts of many talented instrument builders, and despite over 100 years of research into the subject matter in the flute trade, there is no perfect solution to all of the above.

Don't believe me? Think that this doesn't apply to those who play certain premier brands? Well, ask yourself the following questions:

• Can you play any note over the first two octaves with precisely the same breath pressure?
• Can you play out of tune if you choose to?

Clearly, breath pressure has an effect on pitch!

Hence, while some whistles may be easier for some players to keep in tune, and while some whisles may be impossible for anyone to play in tune, we shouldn't consider a whistle defective because we must adjust our breath and fingerings in order to play in tune. That's the nature of the instrument. People who don't like this fact can take up the concertina.

The best way I've found to practice playing in tune so far is to play along with CDs.

Growing Pains

I'm updating this site to the new Blogger beta version, so you'll see some new features like labels ("tags") appearing on the posts. I'll be going back through my old posts and tagging them to create an index to topics I've discussed. But the new Blogger is really different than the old version, so if you see odd formatting and other problems over the next few weeks, please be patient while I get everything sorted out.

Books: Get Free Music Books from Google

Google is now offering PDF downloads of the full text of public domain books via their book search service. I did a few quick queries and found some old books of Irish and Scottish music, such as The Poems and Poetry of Munster: A Selection of Irish Songs (in English and Irish) and The Complete Works of Robert Burns.

Technique: L.E. McCullough's Presentation

Courtesy of Mike Reagan, here's L.E. McCullough's presentation from the 2006 Northeast Whistle Gathering, called "Six Ways to Break Out of Being a Beginning Whistle Player – OR – How I Became L.E. McCullough (not that you would want this to happen to you or a loved one)." It's in Microsoft Word format, but you can get a free Word viewer from Microsoft if you don't own that program. If you've been playing for a few years you probably know all this stuff, but it's a great collection of important advice for folks just getting started.

McCullough writes:

Looking back on my first couple years of playing Irish music on the whistle, these are the things I now see made a big difference in my development. I sincerely hope they prove of some benefit to you.

Photo: Burke Forest

A forest of Burke whistles at the 2006 Dublin Irish Festival.

Technique: Ear Learning

The other day I got the Jig of Slurs stuck in my head and I wanted to try and work it out by ear. Now I find two general things challenging in the area of ear learning. One is learning the tune well enough that I don't get confused about it when I make mistakes trying to play it. The second is figuring out where to start.

The second problem generally involves a good bit of trial and error for me, but this time I realized the solution was easy. The Jig of Slurs is a pipe tune, so it has to be in A mixolydian, since that's the only key the GHBs can play! This is a pretty useful shortcut if, like me, you haven't yet learned how to reliably distinguish all of the modes by ear.

Learning tunes "by ear" is something of a euphamism for me since I tend to memorize the tune first and then try to play it later, instead of playing along with a recording. One thing which has been helpful for this process is to lilt the songs instead of humming (or playing) them when learning. There are several reasons I think this is helpful:

• It divorces knowledge of the tune itself from the technical ability to play it, allowing me to focus on really learning the tune.
• Lilting is less forgiving than humming in terms of making you get the tune right. When I hum I tend to slur notes a bit, and this makes it easy to gloss over notes that I don't have right in my memory. With lilting it's harder to get away with this.

I tried to find a link about lilting, but I can't find anything. Any suggestions? The best suggestion I have is to listen to a good recording. I'm enjoying Colm O'Donnell's excellent Farewell to Evening Dances, which features lilting, singing, whistle, and flute.

Recordings: Séamus Ennis in the Alan Lomax Collection

Here are two recordings and a photo of Séamus Ennis, courtesy of Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress.

Seisiún: How to Ruin a Session

No, that's not a typo in the title. I'm going to propose a unified theory of session suckage.

Let's consider a list of things people complain about / forbid / write guides to discourage doing at sessions:

• Use of sheet music
• "Noodling," and other efforts to play an unfamiliar tune during the session
• Guitars, recorders, and other "non-traditional" instruments
• People who start too many tunes
• People who play over other people when they are trying to start a tune
• Bodhrán owners (as opposed to bodhrán players)
• Multiple bodhrán owners
• etc.

Now none of the above strikes me as intrinsically evil. If you're a good musician, looking at sheet music isn't necessarily going to turn you into a bad one. There are some truly great guitarists, such as Arty McGlynn and Mícheál Ó Domhnaill.¹ But what they have in common is that they're devices which seem to facilitate people playing along with tunes which are not the best in their personal repertoire or which maybe they don't know at all. Guitarists with no background in traditional music may show up wanting to "jam." People frustrated at how long it takes to learn to play the music may buy a bodhrán because they think it's "easier." Folks who are good sight readers might try and play along with tunes they've never heard before. Etc.

At both of the sessions I go to, people tend to play along with every tune they know, and sometimes a few that they don't. Granted, one is a learning session, and one started life as a beginning session and is still very beginner-friendly. So that sort of thing isn't completely against the rules. But one of the things I really like about, for example, the CD Music at Matt Molloy's is how frequently there will only be one or two musicians playing. Here you have a group of some the finest musicians in the world spending much of their time with their instruments on the table listening to a couple guys play a tune together.

Since I spend a lot of time listening at sessions, people seem to go out of their way to tell me that I "have as much right to play as anyone else" and ask me if I'd like to start tunes. That's really nice, and I appreciate the fáilte, but I consider time spent actively listening at a session to be productive time.

To be clear, I'm not saying that people who are terrible musicians shouldn't play at all; I'm a beginner myself! I just think that if something like sheet music can allow me to play when I should be listening, it's doing me — and the other folks in the session — no favors.

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¹ Sadly, Mícheál Ó Domhnaill died this week. I started a Wikipedia article about him as a small contribution to his memory.

WWW: Some Links of Note

Here are some things which caught my attention this past week:

• Donate to breast cancer research and maybe win a whistle. I sent in a donation, and I hope others do, too.
• The Shamrock Club of Columbus is having their annual Irish Music & Arts Festival this coming weekend, 14 and 15 July, promising "Irish music, art, dancing and food in a family setting." Performers include The Kells (my teacher's band) and The General Guinness Band.
• Skip Healy is holding Wind on the Bay, a weekend school of music featuring Skip, John Skelton, and others, 30 September - 2 October this year.
• The Summer 2006 Chiff and Fipple newsletter has been published.

Technique: Not Lifting a Finger

I was at a session a few weeks ago and noticed another whistle player playing the first part of Morrison's Jig by just lifting fingers two and three of his top hand, while keeping the first two fingers of his bottom hand down nearly all the time (except for the A-F#-E or G). I tried it, and it made the tune really easy to play.

I've been experimenting with Brother Steve's suggestions on "not lifting a finger" lately with good results. In addition to Morrison's, I'm finding his advice really useful in The Atholl Highlanders, the Kesh, The Sally Gardens reel, and others. It also reduces the need for stabilizing the whistle with the bottom hand pinkie in some, but not all cases — I still find the pinkie useful in cases like the second part of "Drowsy Maggie" where you alternate between C# and high E.

This is one of many cases where I read something (in this case, Steve's page on this topic) long ago, tried it, and found it not terribly helpful, and then tried it again much later with completely different results. When I first tried leaving bottom hand fingers down for notes like B and A I wasn't playing very quickly, so leaving the fingers down didn't really gain me much, and I didn't like the change in timbre. But I'm playing the tunes much more quickly now, so the timbre change is much less noticable whereas the fingering is correspondingly harder!

It's probably generally true that some advice from experienced players requires a certain level of ability to be helpful — not necessarily a lot, but stuff which seemed backwards to me as a rank beginner is making a bit more sense to me now.