Technique: Blowing C Natural

On the recommendation of a Chiff and Fipple forum post I bought a Korg CA-30 tuner. It immediately helped me fix a problem I've had getting C natural to sound right. I've tried alternate fingerings, but they didn't help at all. With the tuner as feedback, it was very simple to figure out the correct breath pressure.

I suppose I should be able to do this entirely by ear, but it hadn't occurred to me that the correct pressure for C natural would be lower than for B (on my whistle, anyway), or that the variation in pitch for C natural would be so much greater than for other notes. That alone was worth the $20 I spent.

Technique: Blowing Low D

When I started to play the whistle I could play notes in the first octave easily but had difficulty consistently hitting notes in the second octave. Then I learned how to control my overblowing well enough that I could hit at least the first half of the second octave consistently, but soon found I had the opposite problem: It was difficult for me to return to the bottom half of the first octave, especially D and E, after playing long passages at the top of the staff.

Then I read a tip on the web somewhere -- and I can't find the link, or I would give credit -- which helped tremendously. It's just a small conceptual shift, but it made a world of difference to me. When playing low D and E, exhale rather than blow.

I don't think I've missed either note once since I read that.