I am a fan of Baroque music and have been looking into the life and music of Turlough O’Carolan. The songs sound lovely on the whistle but many of them fall above or below the normal range of the whistle. I’m curious how other whistlers deal with this. Do you raise individual notes or passages and octave or alter the melody slightly.
I use to play with a group that used a lot music that was out of whistle range and sometimes I changed the octave and kept up. Other times our piano player would find a note that is in the chord as the note out of range. This is easy for piano and guitar players.
Search the internet for the music you want to play that has guitar chord tabs. Then look up the notes in that chord.
Posted only recently over at the flute board: Handling notes that fall below the range of the flute
In short, just play those notes an octave higher so that they do fit in the range of your instrument. Sometimes it makes sense to shift a whole phrase to preserve its melodic motion.
I’ve always ‘folded’ the tune into a different octave, until recently. This technique usually works quite well with faster tunes, or if there are a few different instruments playing the melody.
But nowadays I’m playing a bigger proportion of slower tunes, and I’m usually the only one playing the melody (to a classical guitar accompaniment). In this more exposed setting, any messing about with the octaves can stick out like a sore thumb. So … I’ve started using three different ways of avoiding this ‘running out of notes’:
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Play a whistle in a lower key. So, to play a tune in D that requires some notes below the key-note, use a whistle in A. (This, of course, means flattening the G# down to a G, but that’s a straightforward matter of finding a suitable fingering).
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Use your little finger (AKA ‘pinky’) to part-cover the end of the whistle. On my D Harper, I can play the C# below the bottom D (bell-note). This is needed in The Holy City.
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Buy a Hans Bracker D+1 whistle. This makes it easy to play tunes such as The Ash Grove and She Moved Through the Fair, that need the C natural below the bell-note of D.
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If none of the above work (eg for Danny Boy in C) I use a melodica (sacrilege, I know
). But, then I have to stand a long way from the microphone; that thing is so loud!
I hope this helps.
All the best,
Seán in Tipperary.
One easy technique you can try is to use a low g whistle and play it in G fingering (i.e., six fingers = G below the staff). This allows you to hit all those notes that fall below the staff and you’d still have a pretty reasonable range up higher. I too enjoy playing such music on the whistle, and have found this solution very satisfactory. The lower tonality is sweet and full and unless the music runs really high in the staff, is quite playable on mid-range whistle. For example, Plaisir d’ Amour. Beautiful melody. Perfect sounding on a nice whistle. In the key of d, it falls to A below the staff. Easy-peasy on a G whistle: xxx|xxo and fuller sounding that a version in g played on a d whistle, that falls to the bottom d. (Though this version plays nice on a low D whistle, I prefer the middle sound of the G whistle.)
I concur with the “hooked-fingering” of the low c# as a way of getting that one note – but you need a whistle that has a relatively short d-hole to end-of-whistle distance! Even on a conical bore c whistle, that stretch is pretty close to impossible. Takes some practice to do it fast (which I haven’t done), but looks like it could come in handy on a number of O’Carolan tunes.
A lot of airs also sound very nice done this way on G whistle, somewhere between the chirrpy-happy tonality of the high d whistle and the deep flutiness of the low D whistle.
If the tune you’re after goes both way up high and way down low, well, then you’ve got to make a decision as to which is more important for the sound you wish to achieve with that particular tune. I would tend to prefer to “alter the melody slightly” and keep the melody in its native octave, rather than bump everything up or down. If that means taking a written below the staff B-A on a high d whistle up an octave, or perhaps better, to some other more suitable lower relative interval (d-c#), I’d do that before playing the whole phrase or section up an octave.
A little more work, but an alternative approach is to transpose a tune you like into a key more suitable for your whistle(s). My own tune books have all kinds of baroque era music that started out in Eb or C or some such and have ended up in D or G. If it’s in a relatively easy key like A or E and sometimes B, I just leave it as is.
Alternatively, you could simply commit the ultimate sacrilege of obtaining and playing an alto recorder! 
I was working on Colonel John Irwin today and I just changed the ending ornamentation from F#-E-D-C#D to F#-D-E-D or F#-E-F#-E-D. Other songs Like Eleanor Plunkett or Southwind are trickier. I guess I could just raise them a fourth or play them in D on an A whistle (an excuse to buy another whistle 
)
Take the ABC from your source and paste it into the transcriber here, up or down scale, to the key you want to play (or whistles you have).
Lots of options. You could transpose the tune to a key that fits better on your whistle (or use a whistle in a different key). If it still falls outside of the range regardless of key, you can octave fold, or you can rework small parts of the tune to avoid the notes that fall outside of the range, especially if it’s only very small bits.
I don’t play any tunes where I can’t solve this this issue by octave folding on whistle. However, I usually tend lean towards prefering stringed instruments for a lot of the fiddle tunes that spend a good bit of time on the G string.
So what melodies you guys are playing have a range larger than 2 octaves? I can’t, offhand, think of any Irish traditional ones.
None for me, but there are, however, a large number that go outside the range of a D whistle, which is what I assume the OP is asking about. I don’t play any O’Carolan tunes, so I have no idea what the range of them is.
O’Carolan’s tunes were written for harp I assume. I found some transcriptions while looking for examples of airs to learn. Some of them are quite nice and have a sort of folky-baroque style.
Here’s a version of Southwind on dulcimer/guitar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_F1XpAVZ7E
I read some short biographies on his life that I found interesting. It seems he travelled around performing and writing songs for individuals.
The range of O’Carolan tunes is sometimes quite wide. For instance, look at Mr O’Connor (2 full octaves). Or Loftus Jones for that matter (2 octaves and a major third). I can’t think of any other ones with a particularly wide range at the moment, but I’m sure there must be some …
There are certainly trad dance tunes as well… Lord Ramsey’s, The Humours Of Lissadell, The Maudabawn Chapel, The Dash To Portobello for instance. And I find that bumping everything up (to use WC’s expression) usually doesn’t harm the melody – quite the opposite, it can add an interesting twist. After all, some flute players (Seamus Tansey!) are doing that quite frequently without even having to*, and it sounds really cool.
As for O’Carolan tunes, the situation may be a bit more difficult though… the melody is somehow more likely to get damaged by these manoeuvres IMO.
* Curiously, this octave jumping doesn’t seem to be as common among whistle players. Maybe that’s because the second octave takes more air on the whistle… but then again I’m listening to far more flute players than whistle players.
So what melodies you guys are playing have a range larger than 2 octaves? I can’t, offhand, think of any Irish traditional ones.
Think fiddle tunes, from low G and going up to high b. Kilcloon, Never was piping so gay, several Paddy Fahy ones, The Galway reel, Forget me not, Farewell to Ireland. That sort of stuff.
That’s very nicely put, I’m just about a buy my first low G for the same reasons as it seems to offer the best of both worlds 
(Also for physical considerations as I find, low D = too big for hands, high D = too small for hands)
I suspect this is largely the same reason why it was the treble recorder (the functional analogue of the low G whistle) that was considered the preeminent melody instrument of all recorders. It’s only the modern school market & teaching approach, I think, that has shifted this honor up to the soprano in the minds of many. It’s range is just perfect for making a beautiful melody.
(Also for physical considerations as I find, low D = too big for hands, high D = too small for hands)
Interesting about the high d being too small for you! I think you’re the first person I’ve heard with that particular complaint. I don’t have particularly big hands in any way, but I don’t find the low D especially large or the high d especially small. I guess you’ve just got a pair of “size G” hands! I have a bird flageolet, and even that’s not too terribly difficult to play. Owing, of course, to the four finger hole, two thumb hole arrangement.
More than two octaves, very few, I should think.
Congress, Ashokan Farewell are two octaves on the nose; Schubert’s Marche Militaire and Bells of Ste. Genvieve are just shy of two octaves. Almost all the traditional tunes I have in my collection are similarly shy of two octaves, usually d to a’ or b’ (e.g., Si Beag Si Mor. The College Hornpipe is two octaves, d to d’‘. An old tune called Miss Lumsden is g to e’‘’, so I’m not sure that counts precisely! 
Le Ronde des Lutins is e to b’’ (third octave b). Mozart’s Andantino is e to e’‘. Windsor Forest is also two octaves, d to d’'.
I think most whistles are able to get up that high (though whether one would want to visit long up in that register may be a different matter!)
The original question, I think, is really more geared towards tunes that run lower than d, rather than higher than d’'!
Without wishing to divert the thread, and clutter the forum with my medical woes (I’ve already started a thread about this) I damaged my right thumb in accident some years ago, over time it became very stiff and inflexible, and worst of all the middle joint had an annoying tendency to disclocate if pushed beyond it’s limited range.
Holding the weight of a low D and reaching for the bottom hole basically hurt my right thumb and left me in pain for hours afterwards. My favoured low D at the time was an old Chieftain OS, heavy ish, big stretch to D hole, I did try the Dixon tapered bore low D (much lighter, easier stretch) but although I have and like other Dixons (it’s a Dixon low G I may be buying soon) the tapered low D is a little quiet for my taste.
So I moved exclusively to playing high D, which previously only occupied say 20% of my whistle playing, I was getting on reasonably well then it was deemed I needed to have the troublesome thumb joint fused. Had this done 18th of last month so I now have a cast on (another six weeks) and my right thumb is cast at such an angle I can’t close it enough to hold a thin whistle.
Hopefully (please) this is temporary and when cast is off I should be okay with a high D immediately, and once strength is fully restored perhaps in time I can also return to low d as well?
So for now the low G, is hopefully thick enough to hold and easy enough to reach, as well as having the pleasing tonal qualities you so eloquently stated.
The Savage Hornpipe is a brilliant tune and goes way off the bottom of the whistle; http://abcnotation.com/tunePage?a=www.village-music-project.org.uk/abc/clare_J/0108 in the original key of Bb, I first learnt it from Blowzabella in G and still play it in that key given half a chance.
From John Clare’s Mss, for my money (again hearking back to the Blowzabella version) best played fairly undotted and on the brisk side; various options for folding the tune.
Also a great tune for giving the lower octave of the English concertina a good run out 
Playing an octave higher may turn the first into the second!