How to flutter fingers on a whistle?

Whistle
1

OK. In all fairness I’ve looked a bit, so if I’m asking something that has already been covered, please send me the link. I hear all about fluttering your finger over holes to get that quivering sound. But how do you do it? Is there a technique or some kind of exercise I can do to get my fingers to quiver?

2

It’s called vibrato (that will be more effective for your search results).

3

You’ve basically described the technique yourself. Great job. Flutter the fingers over the open holes to get a vibrato effect.

It is called, ironically enough, “finger vibrato”. It is similar to vibrato employed on a lot of other instruments, inlcuding the natural vibrato of an expressive singer. Basically you play the long note you want to modulate and you move the fingers up and down over the open holes to get the effect. What this does is vary the venting of the air through the open holes effecting the pitch played by flattening it momentarily and then returning back to pitch - like a whammy bar on a guitar. Exactly how you do it is up to you. It’s a matter of feeling and expression. I won’t get prescriptive with technique as to how fast you flutter or how much you bend the notes. (Do a search on “finger vibrato” for more on that.) It’s up to how you feel at the moment. What you want to avoid is actually trilling between two notes. I like to keep it subtle.

Some woodwinds might use a “breath vibrato”. In that case it is very much like singing. This method varies the air supply which will alternately raise and lower the pitch. Irish style whistle playing does not tend to embrace that method. Hence the fluttering fingers. But what do you do when you play the bell note, with no open holes? Hmmm?

It becomes natural the longer you play. You’ll find yourself doing it without thinking. Just “feel the tune” and let you hands express what you feel.

Feadoggie

4

For notes that have more than one open hole you can also vary the effect by fluttering other fingers or combinations of them. For example, if you are playing the note xxx ooo you can flutter the R1 finger, being sure not to touch the hole (as mentioned above), but you might also flutter R2 or R3, in which case you might be able to touch the hole. You could even flutter all three fingers.

Each combination will have it’s own effect and will vary from whistle to whistle.

I was watching a fellow playing electronic bagpipe once and was somewhat amused to see him subconsciously using finger vibrato. Obviously it had no effect to wiggle his fingers over the electronic contacts. :slight_smile:

5

There are four ways of producing vibrato on the whistle that I use, and I demonstrate all of them on this YouTube video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK9RmMnDuPA

They break down into two major types

  1. using the fingers

  2. using the airstream

There are two ways of using the fingers

  1. fully opening and closing one or more holes somewhere lower on the tube (below the hole where the melody note is emitting). Using various single fingers, and using various combinations of multiple fingers, will give varying timbres and intensities. Also one or more fingers can be kept down the whole time to, once again, change timbre and /or intensity.

  2. partially covering/veiling one or more holes. Unlike the full closure method above, partially covering holes can include the very hole from which the melody note is emitting.

There are at least two ways of imparting vibrato to the airstream

  1. the so-called diaphragm (intercostal) vibrato as used on the Boehm flute and by classically trained singers

  2. throat vibrato as used by many folk singers, and by players of the Andean Kena/Quena, to give two examples.

Technically speaking ‘vibrato’ refers to the pitch going both above and below the baseline pitch of the note; so-called “finger vibrato” on the whistle or flute is called flattement.