Hi guys.
I just got to try teaching the whistle for the first time a while ago. A week and a half ago a girl who I barely know came up to me and asked me to teach her to play the whistle Irish style. I knew that this girl is a player of the dreaded reer, cause I used to be in an acustic ensemble together with her last year in school. Without even thinking about it I said yes, I had no real reason to say no and I figured it’d be a fun experience. The reason why she wanted to learn the whistle was that she is applying for some University and needs a scholarship, this particular one demands that you play a certain number of instruments, she’s going to preform something at an audition later. Now, I am really not good enough to be teaching the whistle, but the whistle was the only thing she could think of that was fairly similar to the reer and that she didn’t already know how to play, and I am the only whistle player she knows of.
I lent her a whistle and we sat down for a one hour lesson. She already knew a suitable tune, The Donnybrook Fair jig, so I didn’t have to teach her any tunes. Obviously, she also has good breath controll and everything like that, so most of the time was spent on me trying to teach her the ornamentation, she insisted on wanting it to sound “right”, so I had to make her stop tounging so darn much and teach her to use cuts and taps instead. Then I taught her how to do rolls and how to incorporate them into the tune. It was good fun and quite rewarding for me as well, but pretty hard. Teaching a reer player to do rolls and stuff in just over an hour is hard work, but she did really well. I wrote some stuff down for her to go practice during our one week break, and next week we’re going to have a small follow-up on this crash-course. I hope she hasn’t forgot everything I told her or started doing something “wrong”. One of the biggest problems she had was to get the rolls in time, on the beats, but I explained this carefully and hopefully, she’s been working on it now. Otherwise she was a real quick learner, a lot quicker than I was when I started out at least. Might be due to her previous experience, so now we know that the reers are good for something
I’d love to hear from fellow whistlers who have experience in teaching. Share your methods please.
My whistle teaching experience has consisted of total beginners, so I’ve had to take a very different approach. The first thing we start off with is breath control: since the whistle takes so little air, anytone who hasn’t played a wind instrument before is going have a difficult time regulating their breath. So I get the student to play the longest, most consistant B (on a high D whistle) they possibly can, and do the same with each note, so their muscle’s get a sense of the different feel of each note. After they get all the notes out, we play a slow scale from low to middle D to get the fingers landing on the holes correctly.
By this time they’re probably getting pretty board, we learn our first tune! I usually would do this just to keep someone interested, even if they haven’t mastered all the previous stuff yet. The first tune: Amazing Grace. It’s easy, not too corny, and everyone knows it. If I can get someone playing amazing grace all the way through, they’ve made a lot of progress in a short time. Unfortunately, most of my teaching has involved friends that had a passing fancy for the whistle, and I’ve gotten mush past this point with anyone. Nobody wants to actually practice and have scheduled lessons!
One important thing with beginners to not play too fancy: this can be discouraging. Like when I’m first playing Amazing Grace for someone, I try to play it really simply, but with excellent tone and rhythm, since those are the thing we are working on at the moment. When you start working on ornamentation (and this is all theory at this point), I would say try to play a tune with just a few cuts at first, then build up from there. Even more experienced players know how mind boggling it can be to dechiper a Mike McGoldrick recording, you don’t want your students to have to do this.
Well anyway, I wish I had more opportunities to teach becuase I really enjoy it, and I have lots of ideas. But who’s know what life will bring, we’ll see.
Many moons ago I taught myself how to make and play Native American style flutes at camp. Than began teaching youth how to do the same. Since there are no real written records of music played by Native Americans before Columbus, I learned and taught improvisation. Then I came across a Waltons d whistle at the Mall of America and started teaching myself Amazing Grace, that was one of the first and easy tunes to play. By speeding up the tempo and improvisation I soon learned the scale and probley some bad whistle habits. Now I make cpvc d whistles as give aways and tell the reciver that the first two notes to learn are d and octave chang to d to pratice breath control. I bought a clark sweetttone for .50 cents (garage sale) and that strated my collection. Curious I also picked up a recorder very cheap (garage sale) and turned the end piece upside down and found it played like a d whistle but still sounded like a recorder. The term (teaching) could open a very long
debate on what that is. I consider what I do as sharing knowledge so a person will learn how to learn.
I just recently started teaching whistle by request. I had several different people ask me if I would teach whistle for quite a while, so I finally tried to come up with a ‘game plan’ and gave it a go. It’s really going well! I’ve got one beginner, and two intermediate / advanced students.
The beginner has come a LONG way in her first 3 weeks. She had never played any wind instrument, wanted to learn Irish whistle, bought a Waltons D and contacted me. I started out having her feel out the whistle and paying attention to how her fingers fell into the holes, reiterated the importance of timing throughout the lesson, and after we got through the scales a couple of times I taught her the A part of Britches Full of Stitches. I picked it because it is simple, a bit silly, has one second octave note (D), and ends with two taps. That way they really feel a sense of accomplishment and something to go home excited about and practice with.
She came back the next week playing it in nearly perfect time, we worked on getting her to relax (realizing it would take a while of course) and learned the B part with a cut in it. She’s doing really well so far, and I’m going to make her sit on it for a bit and get really comfortable with it before we go on.
My other students were 1. Flute player 2. Clarinet player. Both of them took to the whistle pretty well but boy did they both have to get over the over-blowing and over-tonguing. I gave both of them a “roll drill” to do to train the tonguing out of them - I used just the first part of Paddy Taylors to make them use a single breath to roll down the scale and end on the second. Worked great! Tricky, tricky! After that, they finally got the concept and the next week both of them were doing great!
I’m really amazed what one can accomplish in 30 minutes of sit-down time with someone if you work it out right. I’m still learning the ropes, but it’s really a great experience watching someone learn and most of all, seeing them have the accelerated learning curve you never had (at least that I never had) via the hands on visual guidance of a friendly and able teacher!
Take care, and best of luck on your endeavors!!
John
Oh yeah by the way, I made a CD for my beginner student with the Britches Full of Stitches tune played very slowly and in time, and then again at regular speed. She said that has helped her out tremendously in between lessons to keep her timing.
Tricky, tricky! After that, they finally got the concept and the next week both of them were doing great!