There were some heavyweight testimonials. “Sounds just like a Clarke,” she said, “but it’s brass.” I listened. Then said whistle-player sent me the URL for a demo tune for whistles made by a guy called Ronaldo Reyburn, in Oregon. The Burke was OK, and it was a session whistle, meaning it was loud enough to be heard over our piano accordeon, but… I tried a couple of other brands, a plastic whistle, the new Clarke, a conical tin with a plastic mouthpiece, in the middle above, which the major whistle-player I knew really loved. I usually blow down mine for a minute or two before playing in any weather.
Peculiar shape, with a big drum under the mouthpiece, cork rings, a tuning slide – you can pull the top right off, but it’s actually meant to slide minimally up or down for hot or cold weather. $200 USD new, which for a whistle is high. Then I bought a secondhand Burke, a name brand from New York, the whistle on the far right. I did a lot of reading on the Web, learning terms like chiff and fipple. So it was time to foray into the high-end bracket. OK, find a whistle with that sound but in something unrustable, like brass. Yeah, but none of them were as sweet as the first. What to do? First choice, buy another Clark and dry it after each use. That started my real sortie into whistle geekery. It had rusted the side out of the whistle just below the mouthpiece, and my Clark was no more. My beloved Clark – my black “stealth whistle” – suddenly started playing breathy or off. After exhaustive struggles and queries I discovered that I make an unusual amount of saliva. I still recall, when I was handed the melody in a jig for the first time, when all the instruments united round the whistle, the chill that went down my neck.Īt about that time the third whistle devil reared its head. A Celtic music group, formed on impulse by that same first musical mate, with guitarists, her fiddle, and a piano accordeon. So soft, so true, so much chiff … After a lot of international to-ing and fro-ing I managed to order one, and I was hooked.Įventually my brain managed the macro-routines that would let my fingers reach the right notes without a five nanosecond delay – not possible in realtime Celtic music – and I graduated to tunes, and then to playing with other people, beginning with a monumentally patient guitar-playing mate, and then, with literal months of practice, aspired to join a group. Then, at a folk gig with a mate in Poughkeepsie in NY, I heard somebody play a Clark Original. Added to that persistent sour high D, it nearly made me give up. Simple song tunes were possible, but the first time I hit a real Irish jig, the famous “Irish Washerwoman,” my fingers simply could not manage the D/C natural/B run-down in the second part. I took mine home with some sheet music – I learnt to read that at school – and tortured the neighbours and exasperated myself for months. Mine was true enough, but the mouthpiece was on crooked, so the high D always sounded coarse or shrill. The first whistle I bought was one of the generic cheap brands, a Walton, like the one at the left above: brass barrel, plastic mouthpiece, sound may or may not be true. The Clark Original is a conical barrel – the alternate is a cylinder – with a fipple, or mouthpiece, of wood inserted in the squared top. Cheap whistles MAY have all three, or they may not. The three virtues sought in a whistle are chiff, or resonance, stability – when you blow up an octave, the note stays true – and durability. Making and playing a tin/penny whistle is like scrambled eggs. Blow harder still, and with earplugs, you can reach a third. Blow harder, and you’ve got a second octave. Covering or opening holes will give you an octave of notes. The whistle’s structure is basic – a tube with some sort of mouthpiece to blow air over a sound-making device, and six holes of various sizes at varying distances.
Clark whistles still use the template, as in the black one second left above. They’re called “tin” because in 1843 in northern England, one Robert Clark made the first, literally out of tin, and it cost a penny. Tin/penny/Irish whistles are a feature of Celtic music, Irish and Scottish particularly. If it doesn’t work, it’s only ten wasted bucks. I’ve been singing a bit lately and turns out I CAN do that. OK, I thought, as my mate happily bought one and tootled a recogniseable tune instantly. Then, about 10 years ago, a VERY musical mate talked me into attending a folk festival workshop on the tin or penny or Irish whistle. For most of my life I believed the verdict of one secondary school not-even-music-teacher, that I couldn’t sing in tune, let alone play an instrument.