The purists among us will say that this is not an electronic whistle, and they are right. The realists among us, who want to be able to practice whistle fingering without any noise being heard by anyone other than the player, will want to read this.
Today I received a Technopipe by Anders Fagerstrom in Sweden. You may have seen his website: http://www.technopipes.com .
He offers several different models of pipes with different fingering methods programmed into them. One model, the Galician Open fingering, is also whistle fingering! I have just played several Irish jigs on this model and it does work.
The downsides?
*It doesn’t sound like a whistle - it sounds like pipes (but you can turn off the chanters.)
*It’s pricey - it cost me £210 including shipping to England, and the dollar is still much weaker than the pound. (You can also get a quote in Euros.)
*Because it does not sense air pressure (you don’t use air at all) you have to use your left thumb to change octaves, which takes a bit of getting used to.
The upsides?
*It is silent. Not blue-tack silent, or Joanie-Madden silent, but I-can-play-this-on-the-train silent. Also, since you don’t have anything in your mouth, it’s safe to play in a moving vehicle.
*You can change the pitch through a wide variety of choices and also instantly jump to one of four pre-set common keys.
*It’s MIDI compatible (so it could sound like a whistle).
*It has a built in metronome, a recording facility, and you can play along to something that it has previously recorded (I think it can only save one thing at a time).
*Anders can customise his standard model for you - mine is set to default to the key of D, and he was willing to programme in special fingerings for me if I needed them, for example an unusual Cnat fingering.
I’ve only played the thing for about 7 minutes but already I know it is what I have been waiting for for the last seven years. If only I’d had one during my thin-walled-student-housing days!
(edited because after a year and a half I realised I wrote Galician CLOSED instead of Galician Open. D’oh!)
I had a look at the site a while ago but thought this was only for pipers and was wondering why they couldn’t make this for whistleplayers.
A question though : what’s with the seventh hole ? Is the fingering (except for the second octave) really absolutely the same as the whistle ? How’s with Cnat ? How’s with finger vibrato ?
On the upside : this is one whistle I don’t have to convince the lady of the house about… She’ll see the benefits of this in a second !!!
As for the soundsamples, how easy could they be replaced with tin-whistle-like sounds ? I guess it would sound quite monotonous though since there’s no pushing around a midi-sound file… But could it be done and how ???
the seventh hole is probably the bottom hole on a set of highland pipes. i never knew that they made other electronic pipes, i thought that highland and uilleann pipes were the only ones
Soundsamples: I contacted Anders in April of last year asking about this and he said it was an interesting idea and that he would look into it. I contacted him again in January and he said he hadn’t forgotten about my email but he hadn’t had the time to look into whistle sounds as he had so many other projects in progress.
It’s like a Silkstone D+ whistle - the seventh hole can give you a note below the tonic, and you can ignore it if you want to.
Yes. What made me hesitate was wondering about Cnat. I can now confirm that (ignoring the seventh hole) Cnat works with OXOOOO, OXXOOO and OXXXOX (the last two are often used on a laughing whistle, which is my other main whistle). I am happy to check other fingerings for people.
I don’t really do this but I’m not sure if it would work or not. I have noticed that all of my whistle-tricks of slowly coming off of a hole to bend a note don’t work, obviously - either you’re touching the sensor or you’re not, there’s no halfway point. But I still go through the motion of bending because that’s what I do on a regular whistle.
The vibrato is in the middle of the tune and is achieved AFAIK by simply having a slightly flat sound sample played for a certain key combination (these have to be learnt too).
Check out the fingering charts (“Details” on the Technopipes site) for more information!
Well, if anyone else is looking for a whistle that you can play without bothering anyone else at all, I strongly recommend this. I’ve been getting nearly an hour of practice time every weekday now on my commute. And almost no strange looks, hehe.
It takes just a few seconds to take out the whistle, turn it on, turn off the drones, decrease the volume, change the key (I like to play in A), and even set the metronome if I want to, and then I’m content till the train gets to my destination. I still have a bit of trouble making sure I am in the correct octave on the tunes with quick changes (though I am improving!), and a C-sharp can be difficult to play without losing contact with the whistle on a bumpy train, but for my needs this is undeniably the best whistle-related purchase I’ve ever made.
I find it difficult to finger a whistle unless it is in my mouth. How do you practice on this gizmo? Do you just hold it in your lap, or against your chin, or what?
I put the bottom end against my leg and hold the whistle more or less upright, leaning a bit toward me. On the train I often have a backpack on my lap and just prop the end of the whistle against that instead.
it’d be hard to play standing up, unless you didn’t need to go above second octave D, or rigged some kind of neck lanyard.
Interestingly, I tip the pipes away from me and am experimenting with folding my LH pinkie inwards, to rest against the pipes from the other side (same side as LH thumb). I find that completely removing the LH thumb works best (I’m not used to sliding as per recorder playing ) and then placing it back down. I think but am not sure that this is how the GHB are played.
Works well and I’m getting the hang of the second octave nicely. Will post some more samples when I can get round to it!
)
OOO I have to resist 