Is it just me or has anyone else tried playing the blues on a tin whistle? My husband had been working on his “eight bar blues” on his guitar and bemoaning the fact that our son-in-law, and outstanding musician, wasn’t here to improvise some cool stuff over the top of his background, so I offered to try. Surprizingly, to me at least, it sounds pretty good. Family get-togethers now feature a set of two guitars and a D whistle doing some blues. The son-in-law says he thinks I should just drop the Celtic stuff and do blues (fat chance.) Has anyone else out there done anything similar?
I have played some blues, progressive rock and jazz among other things, but mostly with my low whistle. I think it is great fun to experiment little with other music than ITM. I think whistle (and especially low) suits well in blues, and it is actually quite easy to improvise, starting with pentatonic scales and so on.
But, yes I consider it to be crazy.I like whistles in every kind of music and then I think, most doesn’t like whistles in any music. 
I think the whistle could play anything you want. There have been some threads on South African kwela—not blues but sort of old jazz (not a good description)—and the whistle sounds great. Flook verges into jazz, just my opinion, and again the whistle sounds great. You can bend notes on a whistle so you should be able to get a bluesy sound it seems like.
Yes, that’s the part my son-in-law likes. The ability to bend notes easily makes that bluesy sound come easily. It’s much harder to do it on the guitar or harmonica.
How to play blues on the whistle:
- Learn the music! (Don’t skip this step.)
- Once you’ve done that, this article might help.
Not crazy at all Phoebe, the link above is basically what I do on a D Whistle for blues in E minor and you can use the same pentatonic scale for G major.
The Bb Blues note can be slid up to from below or down to from above by half-holing and cross-fingering can be used. A nice Blues Bb in the second octave is given by XXOXXX and if you waggle the lower fingers up and down, you get a useful trill.
John S
Yeah! What Dale said!
My own Dale and some others will often shift into a blues riff after a regular session, and sometimes I’m with it enough to whistle along. Fun!.. and “crazy, man!”
It seems to me that the blues scales are quite different than the scales played in Celtic music. Wouldn’t the whistle have to be played with a lot of half-holing to grab those notes?
Pat
See the link I posted above.
Some, yes. Good practice!
Not blues per se, but some of the more advanced thinkers at my session will occasionally break out with old Stones tunes (a couple of weeks ago, I did a bit of noodling for “Honky Tonk Woman”), classic 60’s pop (Hang On Sloopy, on a ukelele 
), or they’ll use an old rock lick (name currently escapes me) as an intro to Star of the County Down.
When that happens I’m usually bar-bound to refill the pitcher… 
That’s basically what I’ve been doing. The improvising in the correct scale with the bends and so forth seem to come quite naturally. If only I were a natural Celtic music player. 
Great little article. Exactly what I wanted to know. Thanks!
Pat
Agreed,
Absolutely Brilliant! Check out that article!
I was playing the blues within minutes. I don’t really know any blues songs except the one that Lisa and Bleeding Gums Murphy played on the Simpsons, but using the fingering in that article, I’ve been improvising all sorts of bluesey tunes.
Thanks!
Ryan
To know the blues you got to live the blues, so send me all your money, quit your job, leave your spouse and live in some rat hole. THEN you’ll be able to play the blues.
Bob Z.
I don’t want to play the blues that much. I’ll settle for listening to my husband practice those eight bar blues endlessly until I’m gritting my teeth. Then I’ll join in. 
I’m kinda with Bobz on this one;
When I was a kid (i can only just remember that) I would jam with some friends who owned guitars - I had only my trusty recorder in C so we jammed A minor. The recorder sounded awful. It sounded totally awful if some of the notes got played. I decided to find out why. This was the beginning of a kind of crazyness that resulted in a lifetime search for the blues. What I know so far is that; blues is a musical expression of an individual expressing that individual’s feelings in that instant. To me that’s the true purpose of music. The musician’s cultural setting will colour the range of expression available to the musician and, to a great extent, the percieved emotional message.
We employ simple rule-sets to allow the quickest entry into expression - scales, rules of harmony, rhythm etc. For feelings - the simpler the better. Which is why the pentatonic minor blues scale can be useful. The scale indicated by the link above is a very good place to start - it gets the scale on a whistle with a minimum of offensive by-notes.
Pentatonic blues scale works like this:
1 = Root note,
2 = root note + 3 semitones (one and a half tones interval up),
3 = 2 + 2 semitones (one tone up),
4 = 3 + 2 semitones (one tone up),
5 = 4 + 3 semitones.
Octave = 5 + 2, etc etc
On a C whistle this can be achieved by starting on D, E, or A (dorian, phrygian and aeolean modes).
If you start on E-flat the scale would simply be all the black notes as seen on a piano.
Here’s some more handy rules for some common figures we associate with the blues;
- pitch bends work well into and out of the whole tone intervals,
- pitch bends should not exceed a whole tone,
- on chromatic instruments the whole intervals can be bridged by the intervening semitone as an ornament, but should never be stressed.
- a sharpened 2nd note yields the major third in the root harmony - this is often used as a kind of ornament - it breaks rule 1 but it adds a signature colour and bridges the harmony from minor to major - blues as we know it often carries a major/minor ambiguity - this ambiguity can be extensively exploited to add nuance to the feeling expressed.
- as in all music, the expression often relies more on how you break the rules than on how you adhere to the rules - so break the rules whenever you feel like it.
- the pentatonic minor scale becomes major if you use note 2 as the root.
I hope all my years with no money, unemployed and living in rat-holes has yielded some value to the subject.
Oh, I forgot. If you own a computer and can afford the internet you’re way too affuent to understand the blues. But in the interest of musical diversity I offer some topics for modern / suburban blues songs. All begin with the musical phrase Duh Dah Duh Dump.
“My Beemer needs an A/C unit”
“My daughter’s boyfriend has tatoos”
“My wife ran off with my stock broker”
“My husband ran off with my Avon Rep”
“You love that computer more than me”
Bob Z.
To quote “Bleeding Gums” Murphy for the 2nd time in one day…
“You play pretty good for someone with no real problems” 
To play something like country blues or countrified city blues is no problem. As others have observed, the pentatonic blues scale is easy to get on a whistle pitched a whole step down from the key you are playing in. Whistles can easily be made to wail too. BTW, on a D whistle you can play blues in A as well as E fairly easily—which is the best whsitle to choose for a given key depends on which notes you need.
Certain styles of blues employ scales with lots of fairly chromatic passages. More jazz inflected blues or T-Bone Walker style blues employs, as well as the more common notes in the blues scale, a lot of flattened fifths and major as well as minor thirds. These can be got by half holing but it takes a lot of practice to do a fsst and clean chromatic run from say minor third up to fifth.
I’ve used whistle in blues, relatively folky jazz contexts and a variety of rock contexts. I’ve used it on recordings, sometimes just in the background but sometimes in more prominent parts. It often works very well.