Getting back to whistling after a false start…
Larsen and McCullough seem to have some pretty good books out for someone getting started. What is the best tutor and song book to start out with?
both are great, there are a lot out there. if you are getting larsen’s, then i suggest amazon to get it, you can get for over half off. 
Larsen’s book is exhaustingly comprehensive. Don’t get me wrong - it’s awesome… but for someone just starting out it might be a little overwhelming.
I’m personally a big fan of Cathal McConnell’s 3-CD & book set from Homespun Tapes: this one here. I think it’s one of the best for someone new.
The Bill Och’s book from Clarke is also beginner-friendly.
Thanks for the replies.
Buckeye - does McConnell’s cover more than Och’s book? Book seem to have gotten good feedback from reviews on Amazon (when leaving comments for McCullough oddly enough)
Cathal McConnell’s tutorial moves at something of a slower pace, I think, and the way the material is presented just sort of clicked better with me. 
HI 60hz,
Most of the commercially available whistle tutors are excellent value. They are all pitched at different mindsets. For instance, the Bill Ochs book is aimed at people who want an open-ended tutorial that will take them from nothing to playing tunes proficiently and have a moderate selection of tunes if you start going to sessions. The standard tutor in the Feadog whistle/CD/book set presumes nothing about the player and includes full tablature as well as music notation and presents about 30 tunes - some of which are nursery rhymes that everyone has heard, this book gets you started, nothing more. The Geraldine Cotter book starts you fast, has no tablature but gives an excellent selection of session tunes. The Grey Larsen books spend a lot of time on the context - very good for expanding your appreciation. There are quite a few more. Most learners encounter more than one tutorial and chose their own path depending on who they are and where they are going with the instrument - usually in combination with visiting sessions, finding a teacher and playing stuff with their friends.
For a stand-up-start you would be safe in chosing any of the recognised titles. It will get you started. From there you will get a much better idea of what the next step is for you. Once you are sure you have the desire to keep going, it’s a very good idea to find a decent teacher, it saves a lot of time and energy but will require an investment somewhat more than a book.
Another fantastic resource is whistlethis.com - this is the internet in action - get involved, get motivated, you won’t regret it!
Also have a look at http://www.tradlessons.com/?cat=4 This is Michael Eskin’s tune demonstration site - Michael posts on C&F a lot and has put enormous energy into his site - you can request him to demo any tune you are interested in, he plays it slow then up-to-speed so you have an example of where you are aiming with your effort. Once again, the internet in action - gotta love hyperspace!
I’d like to add about sites like whistlethis and tradlessons - hit the donation button, it’s going to cost you a heap less than buying 4 or 5 books (even though you probably will buy them anyway) but it gives you additional resources at the click of a mouse that rounds-out and connects what you can get in print. People like Eskin and Wynder have made a significant effort for us - a couple of bucks keeps it all going for all of us and all those new players starting-up.
Hope this helps
Thanks for the great post, Mitch. I’m a guitar player and can read treble clef if that helps any. I guess some background on the instrument is great, but I am looking for something more to the point, fairly complete on how to play the instrument and a good selection of common sessions tunes (standards).
I’ll check out the Cotter book. Thanks again.
Hmm, I’m rather late in the game, having had to walk over to a friend’s house to re-acquire a tutorial so I could re-view it before reviewing it. But I’ll post anyway, since I wasted so much time writing this darn thing…
Though they’re both good books and I have both, I wouldn’t start with either McCullough or Larsen. IMHO, the McCullough tutorial book isn’t really all that suitable for a beginner – the audience that would benefit most from it is those who can already play the whistle a bit, and are ready to start adding all different kinds of ornamentation to their playing. The few tunes in the instructional section are there only as examples to show you various ways of ornamenting a tune, and then the second half of the book is a tunes collection. All the tunes in the book (about 70 of them) are played on the CD, but they’re only played quite fast and in a highly ornamented fashion.
The Grey Larson book is mostly aimed at a similar audience, though it has sections appropriate for a rank beginner as well (using your diaphragm for breath control, holding the whistle, etc.) But the meat of it is about doing ornamentation. And in fact, it has very few tunes in it at all – if you get the cheaper “toolbox” edition, you actuallly have to pay extra to download or mail order sheet music and mp3s of the complete versions of the tunes that get used in snippets as examples (the “tome” edition has 2 CDs which gives room for the example tunes to be included). These books are more reference books than tutorials, so while they’re about how to play your whistle, they’re not a how-to-play-whistle books. I’d recommend buying a Larsen book sooner or later, if you’re going to stick with whistling, but first buy something else to learn to play from.
For learning to play, I’d recommend something like the Bill Ochs or Cathal McConnell tutorials. I also have both, and they have different strengths.
The Ochs tutorial is the most comprehensive, starting from the very beginning of how to read music, and progressing very gradually up through the various kinds of ornamentation. It’s also the tutorial that seems to be recommended around here most often. I used it as my main tutorial for the first few months I played, and it worked out great for me. The CD has all the tunes and demos, and the book has many pages of explanation and a long tunes section, which starts out with traditional tunes from the US and UK, then segues into Irish tunes when you get to the ornamentation section.
The Cathal McConnell tutorial comes with 3 CDs and a very slender booklet. All of the instructional material is provided by Cathal talking to you on the CDs, interspersed with tunes being played, sometimes in both fast and slow versions. There are many fewer tunes in this tutoral, so it seems to progress a lot faster, which can be good or bad depending on how fast you learn (muscially, I’m slow…). Ornament-wise, he teaches only rolls, but in the third CD he goes on to do something I’ve never seen in another tutorial, which is to demonstrate different styles of whistling to explore. One thing this tutoral assumes, though, is that you can either already read music, or else that you can play by ear. All of the tunes he uses (about 35) are Irish. Oh, and just to make things confusing, there is a one-CD version of this tutorial available, which has most of the beginning material, a random bits of the intermediate stuff, and none of the advanced.
OK, since I wrote this, you seem to have switched your focus to the Geraldine Cotter tutorial, which (surprise!) I also have. This one starts with instructions on how to read music and hold a whistle, but moves quite rapidly (it was too fast for me, but I’m untalented) into ornamentation and how to play variations on a tune. And at the end there’s a section with 100 tunes. The one drawback to this tutorial is that, while there are CDs to go with it, they don’t come with; they’re a bit pricey and kind of hard to find. There is both a demo CD to go with the tutorial section of the book, and tunes cd with the 100 tunes on it.
Disclaimer: this is all, of course, just my personal take on these various fine products – your mileage will certainly differ, particulary if you’re musically talented. My only claim to authority is that I’m a slow enough musical learner that I’ve taken to collecting tutorials, so as to give myself enough beginner-ish material to stay amused with.
http://www.rogermillington.com/siamsa/brosteve/
I like Greraldine Cotter’s book, and the Comhaltas whistle tutor is good too.
IMO it is best to get several tutors. What you don’t understand in one book will probably be explained better in one of the others.
I’d particularly recommend these for beginners:
Cathal McConnell
Bill Ochs
There are lots of online resources that will help as well.
Thanks to all for the great posts on the strengths of the available tutors. I even got an e-mail from one of the whistle maker’s with his viewpoint. That being said, I am ordering the Och’s book to start with.
I’m sure I will try some of the others as well a little down the road.
There are a great bunch of people on this board!
Thanks again… 
I think you will be happy with your decision to go with the Och’s book. As others have pointed out, it starts really basic and progress to more advanced topics.
The thing to keep in mind is that no tutorial will be perfect, and certainly there will be songs you like and songs you don’t. I purchased this book some time ago and I found it to be plenty helpful. Some of the songs that I learned from it I still play, others I have never bothered to learn becuase I just don’t find them that catchy, a few I have forgotten because I didn’t find them fun to play, and of course there are still some that go beyond my current skill level.
I too would like to thank those that posted their opinions on this topic. Although I am sure the various books have been discussed before, it is nice to get “fresh” opinions. I have thought before about getting the Cathal McConnell book / CDs, and although I don’t need a book that covers “the basics”, I am sure there will be several things in Cathal’s teachings that I could find useful, or at the very least it will provide a good demo of songs that are interesting.