Hi all,
Was curious if anyone had a tunebook out there for the whistle that isn’t based off of celtic music. Would love to try playing something different!
-S
Does it really need to be specifically for whistle?
Look through a bunch of, say, old time books in
the music store and see if there are a bunch of
tunes with one or two sharps in the key signature
(or even 3 if you’re feeling spicy) which stay
between the D below the staff and the D above.
Or country, pop, whatever you’re into. (Jazz can
get into a lot of accidentals, though, so that might
be a bit harder, you have use some discretion there.)
Fiddle books are often a good place to start in other
genres. I have a nice Cajun fiddle book that’s fun on
whistle.
How about this from our own L.E.McCullough? A nice selection of fairly easy tunes from around the world. Note the customer review by The Undisputed Dale Wisely.
Ahhhhh. Someone after my own heart. I don’t play ITM. I play all kinds of other stuff. I just love the sound of these instruments. I have a collection of sheet music, mostly for piano, that if my house were on fire, that is the thing that I would save. I keep meaning to put the bookcase on wheels for quick escape.
Here is a link to a Fake book. click here This is just one of many. Usually they have a black cover. Your local book store (like Books A Million) should have a few for sale. The songs have a melody line and if I remember correctly, a guitar chord. You can get 100’s of songs, something like 500 for $50 in a nice bound book. Usually, the books have a theme, like Rock, Pop, Jazz, that kind of stuff.
Wikipedia also has an entry for Fake Books. I don’t own any. What I really need to do is just make my own book of my favorite songs to share with my friends. I need a personal secretary.
The book I loved when I first started playing whistle is The Fifer’s Delight by Ralph Sweet, which is available from the Sweetheart Flute company website. Lots of Irish and Scots favorites, but lots of other great tunes, contradance, Canadian, New England. Highly recommended!
You can surf the web for traditional tunes in all sorts of genres. There’s quite a few bluegrass tunes available online. I have several books of folk songs with melody line and guitar chords; most of them are in whistle-friendly keys. In short, there’s lots of music out there!
I have a lot of non-Irish tunes. I print them and put them into a notebook. Many of them are hymns. If necessary I transpose them to D or G. Don’t forget libraries. They often have tune books.
A good source for traditional Irish and American (Old Timey, New England, Bluegrass, Southwestern, etc.) tunes is the Fiddler’s Fakebook by David Brody. Published by Oak. Good range of styles and most of the tunes work well on whistle.
As mentioned fife music has tunes that have come from different traditions. I was playing retreat (I think) and someone started to sing along with because they knew it as a church hymn. Notation is usually in the key of D.
Some tunes are in several different traditions. I have heard some tunes played in old time string sessions, fife music, and ITM. “Thus I Stand Like A Turk” in The Beggar’s Opera was based off of the tune from an old ITM tune called “lumps of Pudding”. How they were played was what changed.
It would be interesting to see some other tunes that are played on simple system instruments like the shinobue and Quena played transposed to a whistle friendly key, and the different style and ornaments pointed out.
This is an interesting page with different collections:
http://www.nigelgatherer.com/tunes/abc.html
perhaps of interest.
Wikifonia is an nice place. Lots of sheet music, and you can even transpose to a different key! Say you want to have a go at Nature Boy. You type in the title in the search box, and the sheet music pops up in your browser. Turns out it is in E minor, with a low A# as the lowest note. Too low for a D whistle. So you click “transpose” and choose the key +5, no sharps, no flats and there it is in a more convenient A minor. Not that it is an easy tune anyway. Lots of those whaddayacallem incidentals, waiting to create unpleasant incidents in you performance. But that is not Wikifonias fault…
I think it’s worth pointing out that if you have the right whistle, you can get decent G# and A# with cross-fingerings, so the only notes that really need to be half-holed all the time are Fnat and D#. Not all whistles are created equal in this respect, however. I don’t think many, if any, whistle makers make this a design priority, you just have to find the ones that work the best. I think straightahead jazz is a stretch on a whistle, but with a combination of half-holing and cross-fingering, jazzy style is attainable. That puts more music into the whistle’s range.
Ubizmo
Some good stuff here:
I like to play jazz tunes on whistle: Sweet Georgia Brown, Take the A Train, All Of Me, Scrapple From the Apple, etc., plus various blues tunes and “I got rhythm” heads. Having a decent cross-fingered G# helps with these tunes. When I ordered my D and C whistles from Hans Bracker I asked him if could make them with a usable cross-fingered G#. So he made them with the 3rd tone-hole a little smaller than normal. This makes it a little harder to half-hole the 3rd hole but makes for a pretty good cross-fingered G#. The Bb cross-finger works well also and with the C nat. thumb-hole these whistles are probably as close to full chromatic as you can get without adding keywork. Good whistles for playing jazz (and everything else).
That’s a useful heads up on the Bracker. Maybe there should be a separate thread about whistles with good cross-fingerings.
For now, I’ll mention that the Parks Ghost is a champ. In the first octave, recorder Bb works (XOXXOO), which is, in my experience, unusual on a whistle. The XXOXXX Gb works well too, and both notes are strong and clear.
Ubizmo
On the Bracker whistles 1st octave G# works best with XXOXXX. 2nd octave G# XXOXOX or even more precise XXOXDO (D=half-hole). 1st octave Bb XOXXXX or more precise XOXXXD. 2nd octave Bb XOXOOO. These cross-fingerings also work pretty well on Susatos. Especially the soprano D.
In the gift shop in Colonial Williamsburg they sell a book of 18th century tunes arranged for tin whistle.
And some Fife resources.
OK, Wikifonia totally rocks. This is like having a big giant fake book for free. Free Adobe file that can be saved and printed. And there’s lots of that corny sappy romantic music that I love that gets on my wife’s nerves.
That’s the one. I never learned to play any of the tunes in it, but it was kind of fun to look through and see the types of music that they had.
That whistle is useless, btw.