I have been asked to buy multiple tonettes for a needy school in Haiti. The only good things about tonettes are the under $3 price and the raised finger holes. But tonette sound sucks. And I am not one to say that poor schools should have poor sounding musical instruments. But they need 20 (more would be better) and my budget will not allow $10/each.
Middle C tin whistles would be the best. They might have access to a piano. And there is no point in forcing anyone to learn sharps and flats or transpose. My guess is that students age 8 to 10 will be learning music on these budget instruments.
I have in my hand a Generation “C” whistle. With all 6 holes covered it sounds middle C. Raising my fingers from the bottom up it plays D, E, F, G, A and B. Blow a little harder closing all but the top hole and it sounds the next C. All fingers down using more wind and I get the G above that.
Google ‘Woodstock whistles’. I believe these were the whistles I saw for sale for $3 at the Tractor Supply Company here in town on 2 occasions. They were also C whistles.
From what I have found, the Tonette played the C below a D whistle, but could be played chromatically and was tunable. It seems that it has been largely replaced by the recorder.
If I’m not mistaken, the Tonette would only play one octave. It had a closed foot and was essentially a form of ocarina (closed vessel flute)
I can vouch for Courtly Music and the instruments they sell. I’ve been to their store quite often and know Richie and Elaine. They’re avid and excellent players and teachers and would not sell you junk.
If you’re buying for young kids, they’d love those translucent Yamaha sopranos. I’m an avid recorder player myself and I can tell you that these are really fine playing instruments for under 5 bucks. The kids can mix and match the 3 sections too for some colorful combinations.
Note that there is some confusion about the C/D thing. A recorder (eg Soprano) in C has a C as it’s lowest note, but the fundamental scale it plays is really a D scale. That C at the bottom is really just an extra note tacked on to expand the range. A C recorder is a great instrument for teaching kids music since the fingering is fairly similar to other orchestral instruments eg the flute. All fingers down on the left hand give you a G, which is how the flute is fingered. As much as I love the whistle, if you’re thinking of teaching kids to play classical types of music, the recorder is the better way to go.
If you have the time and patience, you could probably crank out a number of the guido low tech whistles for under your budget constraints. if you buy the supplies in bulk and maybe set up a jig or two you could probably make a ton of them in 2 days for a pretty low amount of money.
Tayberry.com has some very nice whistles for about $4. I got a Feadog and love it. They also have Clarks (although I don’t like the sound of the Sweetones, but the originals might be good), Generations, and others that are more expensive.
Everything on Tayberry is on clearance, 40% off, because Tayberry is going out to business. The Tayberry folks were good to deal with, too.
Paul is correct. The Tonette is a form of ocarina which was designed specifically to teach the rudiments of music to very young children. That said, the recorder has surplanted it almost entirely in, at least, the American school system. As your students are a bit older than the average tonette students, the recorder would be a much better choice in my opinion. Because of its wide acceptance in teaching, there is an available and proven student literature for it, and they are produced at very low cost at a quality more consistent than you’ll find in $4 whistles. The molding process used to make plastic recorders simply provides a more consistent product than the manufacturing process used for inexpensive whistles. If you buy a case of $4 Yamaha plastic recorders, they will at least all be the same. Note that the whistle, despite all its virtues, has not yet made nearly the same inroads into the teaching system.
The whistle is standard in schools in Ireland.
It has the virtue that the fingering in the second
octave is very simple. My impression that the
second octave fingering on recorder is beyond
most young children.
I did some recorder as a child, and we never did
much with the second octave, which, while
quite interesting and agile on recorder,
I didn’t figure out
till I was 16 or so.
This is a question: is the full range of recorders
really used when it’s taught to kids in schools?
Obviously there are a billion tunes more easily
accessible to whistle than recorder, at least if
you’re 7 or so. Nothing about learning the whistle
precludes moving on to classical flute, which
doesn’t use second octave recorder fingering
anyway.
For these reasons whistle is arguably better for
kids. A terrific instrument, inexpensive, more easily
taught and more readily accessible to children.
Also playing recorder gives you hairy fingerpads.
Don’t ask me how I know. It’s hard enough being
a kid without wearing gloves all the time.
And… they will be much better whistles than anything you can buy for 4 dollars.
I just had a thought here…
I may be shooting myself in the foot, but… There are a few people on this list who have built the LTW. Building it takes less than an hour, then an hour or two fiddling around getting the voicing and tuning right which will improve with experience. So, how about a few of us donate a little of our time and build a couple of whistles each and send them all off to Haiti? If we agree on the same building materials, window size, airway dimensions etc and we all use electronic tuners or computer software to tune them, they should sound in tune. (I think whistles with a relatively narrow window and a sweet voice would be appreciated by teachers and parents alike…)
I also have a couple of different whistle tutor books scanned in PDF format. While distributing them would normally be breach of copyright, I think e-mailing the books to Haiti and letting a school there print them for the pupils would be good Karma…
Oops. Posted this before I saw Jerry’s message. Looks like the problem is solved!
I’m still not sure key of C is the best choice, particularly if there is a piano available. Whistle music will be written for key of D whistles and the poor pianist will have a hard time of it transposing everything. There are no whistle tutor books I know of that are written for key of C whistles and teach six holes closed as a notated C.
I don’t understand this D vs C thing. If you learn to read C music on a C whistle, isn’t that fundamentally the same brain process as learning to read D music on a D, C, G, Bb etc whistle? So what if they aren’t learning to play the whistle as if it were a key of D instrument. Would that ruin their ability to play it properly in the future, or go on to another instrument?
I have a beginner recorder book and indeed it does not play into the notes that require half-holing the thumb. I was a bit disappointed by that since I bought it in order to refresh my memory, which had forgotten completely how to read music as well as play the recorder. At least it helped me read music again.
The Western woodwinds (Sax, Flute, Oboe, & the upper register of
the Clarinet) are standardized on a similar fingering pattern. On all
of those instruments, if you use the same fingering you do for the
note D on a D whistle, then it is called “D” on that instrument. But,
it doesn’t really sound like a “D” played on the piano, because to
have this standardization, some of them are transposing instruments.
That’s why they are called a “Bb Clarinet” and “Eb Alto Sax”,
because they are transposed according to that key (fingering a C
on a Clarinet sounds makes a note that sounds like a Bb on the
piano). I always transpose for differently keyed whistles so that
all fingers down is called “D”, because this keeps me from
learning new names for the fingerings of every whistle.
So, do you give the kids C whistles and transpose so all fingers
down is called “D”, so that they can play other woodwinds later
without relearning everything? Or do you assume they’ll adjust
and give the fingerings the names for the real notes? Personally,
I think kids are resiliant enough to get over it, so start with the
names of the real notes, so they learn what that note name is
supposed to sound like…
