I’m new to this - so hopefully I don’t have any bad habits yet.
What would you suggest we newbies do from the beginning, to prevent having to break bad habits later? The only ones I’ve found on my own so far are:
Use the finger pads rather than the finger tips.
Learn finger vibrato rather than breath vibrato (although it has its place).
Anything else you wish you had done from the beginning?
Thanks,
Jason
Other tips that have helped me:
If you already play a ‘band’ wind instrument (sax, flute, trombone…) try not tonguing at all. It’s instructive for learning ornaments.
Do the ‘death grip’ check. Excess tension in the hands steepens the learning curve.
Your ‘emergency’ whistle should be at least an OK whistle. Being stuck waiting hours for something when the only whistle you have is a nasty one, well, that sucks. 
Have fun!!
ive only been playing about 3 months but one thing i regret doing is learning to play with those finger graphs in the book and then as i figured out how to read music i added leters above the notes so i wound up learning to play by finger charts and then by letters and finaly having to learn to follow sheet music i could have easily started with sheet music and skipped a couple of steps
Well now that you know sheet music if you decide to take up more instruments they won’t be too hard. Now you will eventually have to learn by ear that is what I have trouble doing myself.
I regret ignoring pain in my right wrist and forearm. This website has some relaxation and stretching exercises. I would strongly recommend doing them even if you have no problems.
http://www.mindspring.com/~shin-on/handcare.html
I also spent too much time finding information and looking for tunes I didn’t need. I got overwhelmed with information. I should have concentrated on one structured tutorial.
I didn’t listen to enough music on CD’s. That should be included as part of your practice time. Seriously. If your budget doesn’t allow for CD’s, there are radio programs on the BBC that you could listen to. And radio programs in Ireland. If you are learning music other than ITM, then listen to that kind of music.
Listen to music, Listen to music, and listen to music. If you can read sheet music that is great but I wouldn’t recommend learning tunes that way. You need to get a feel for the music. Definitely use sheet music to help… it would be nearly impossible to learn every note of a reel by listening to it played at full speed 
. Listen to the structure of the tune. If you want to go crazy with your own ornamentations to traditional tunes, go for it. Just stay within the basic structure of the tune.
When I started on whistling I also had too much tension in my fingers, as a result of which I lifted up my fingers too high.
It cost me quite a lot of effort to get rid of this bad habbit, I finally succeeded with the help of my whistle teacher, who kept pointing this out to me.
She told me that I wouldn’t be able to play at full speed in the future if I kept on lifting my fingers that high.
Use a metronome. Practice each piece of music as slowly as you can play it completely through with accurate ornamentation without any mistakes. Only turn the metronome speed up 1bpm at a time when you can play the whole tune comfortably.
If you rush through tunes making mistakes then you just reinforce those mistakes in muscle memory. A metronome teaches you to play in perfect time with perfect accuracy.
I dispair at the amount of so called musicians i see on stages who cannot keep accurate time throughout a piece of music.
Similarly, don’t try to play too fast too soon. Learn accuracy first, then speed. Like typing.
I use breath vibrato. Is that bad?
The best advice I’ve seen on Chiff is:
Enjoy your music. Few of us are going to be recording in a studio, and even for those that are, this will keep the flame alive for a long time. So many beginners burn out in a week, month, six months, a year, and it is mostly due to losing the fun aspect of music.
The other tip for beginners is to practice every day. Whistles are portable so there is always time to be made. A few minutes here and there every day will usually result in more improvement than a couple of hours once a week.
Trumpet player Eddie Lewis has an excellent essay about practice methods:
http://www.eddielewis.com/trumpet/essays/basicpracticeprocedure.htm
Lewis’ keeping score essay is an eye opener and counter-intuitive, but it makes a lot of sense when I think about it:
http://www.eddielewis.com/trumpet/essays/keepingscore.htm
I would wager that the vast majority of beginners practice in the way that reinforces bad habits that Mr. Lewis first describes.
Enjoy.
Get somebody to show you how to articulate cuts & taps. No amount of reading about it will completely convey what’s happening.
LISTEN to tunes. Learn the ones that you enjoy hearing.
Have fun!
I can’t say that breath vibrato is bad - I’m still a noob. However, in my searching the forum and online tutorials, it seems that finger vibrato is preferred and is apparently more traditional.
Again, this is judging just from what I’ve read, which is obviously not everything.
Maybe it’s not right to say it’s a bad habit, but I think I’ve read more posts by people who wish they’d learned finger vibrato over breath vibrato, rather than the other way around.
Jason
Recognize that there are many disciplines to learn with playing the whistle:
Tune (duh)
Beat
Finger speed
Ornamentation
Breathing
Timing
A lot of tutorials on playing whistle emphasize tune and ornamentation, with a comment on where to breathe to “sound” ITM.
As noted earlier, this is where listening to lots of tunes comes in. I have probably 15 MP3s of “Banish Misfortune”. Each plays it with their own beat. I cant and dont want to read music but if I had to follow off sheet, I would learn the tune and the beat of the tune but not the flavor. That is why I need to listen to it rather than learn from sheet.
The different styles teach me finger speed which comes from sheer finger strength development. Do I want to play “doo-pah-pah-do-pah” or “doo-diddily-pah-diddle-dot-pah”? It is like training any other muscle in your body, I believe, particularly in light of Cynth’s comment about ignoring the pain symptoms. The best thing I found was treating my finger “training” as I would if I were running a marathon (like that’s gonna happen): pace yourself. Dont over-do it. And the “training” I did was hours of practice with the whistle, not necessarily playing tunes.
I personally play reels with my fingers held high sometimes and it is not an issue. If I am playing tight triplets, my fingers are low but this is not a result of having learned to play this way. It is finger control.
Once the finger muscles were developed, it gave me the versatility to be able to apply ornaments with the discipline required. Sure, I knew ornaments but I applied it hap-hazardly and without thought. I now had the finger control to use ornanments to my advantage.
Breathing properly for me came with practice and discipline. There are certain tunes that I remember having a hard time early on, but the more I played, I knew how to hold a note more cleanly, knew the tune so I knew how to dispense my breath, and knew the right places to take a breath.
Timing is putting it all together.
I can’t spend nearly as much as I’d like to on CDs, but I’m a member at three local library systems, and between them I’ve been able to borrow most of what I need to hear, and buy only those I’m really attached to. This considerably reduces what I need to spend.
Everything posted is good advice. I won’t argue with any of it (especially the part about enjoying yourself).
I found the biggest stumbling block for me was breathing. Knowing when to fit in a breath and what notes are ok to drop in order to grab one is never a trivial step in the learning process.
Also, there are a lot of whistles out there that can be blown into or out of tune depending on your breath control. Learn your whistle and how to keep its notes in tune.