I regret my absence from C&F, a fine forum and a fine group of people. I offer my regards to my many friends, the mouse of Dakota, and Tom of Maine, and Thom of Maryland (0r is it Delaware?). And to keep the message short I’ll not mention the other names - I chose the above for enjoyment or alliteration.
I haven’t dropped the whistle, my collection is still next to my favorite chair. But Thom Larsen corrupted me a bit over a year ago when he sold me a Stoney End Cross-Strung Harp kit, and since then I’ve built another, a Stoney End 26 string double strung (53 in toto). It is a pleasure, I have always been a string player, but now I take a tune on the whistle, in a key, and then take it to the little cross-strung, then to the bigger double strung (and when I get lost I pick up the old “git fiddle” and work out the arrangement.
I wish I could say I will immediately become regular again on the C&F board, but my internet time has become very busy as I’m running the communications among my college classmates just prior to our Forty-Fifth Reunion in the spring. Perhaps, and I hope so, I can get it to run itself by mid summer. If so I hope to be able to spend some time back here. In the meantime I’m finding a lot of fun in working with the differing modes of the western scale on the harps. (Yup, Tom of Maine, the whistle shouldn’t be able to play the notes of our favorite, “As she moves through the fair” - we discussed the half toning a year ago). The tune is in Mixolydian mode, which sets the tonic to the fifth of the natural pitch of the whistle, so on a D whistle one starts the piece on A (DFA), then the natural fingering of the D will give you the tune.
That last may sound silly to some of you who don’t know me, but I spent fifty years playing guitar, and some time with music, and am new to the whistle. The guitar and the whistle each require another part (unless you have the fingers of Segovia), the harp doesn’t, so I have been enjoying “noodling” and arranging (beyond the pure joy of taking pieces of wood and shaping them and making them sing).
Pardon the long letter, I doubt that I’ll spend much time here in the near future looking at responses, not for want of desire, just for want of time. Once I get that college thing squared away I hope to be back on this fine forum.