Does anyone use drills/finger excercises for practice and technique building or is it all just learning and playing tunes? Also, my second octave G is often very flighty. I can play the notes around it but it squeaks and squaks a lot. Is it me or the whistle? The whistle is a Faedog D about 4 years old. I guess I’ll find out Friday when my Susato (finally) arrives.
My Feadog is pretty flighty too, I don’t prefer it. You will love the Susato though!
Coming from a classical music background, I grew up on drills and etudes and the like. To this day, I play more method than anything on saxophone. But, when I play whistle, I play tunes. I bought Grey Larson’s Essential Guide to Irish Flute and Tinwhistle because it had the method and excericises I was used to, but I never really took to it. I, for one, learn tunes.
I grew up with formal training on piano and sax. With sax especially I was encouraged to perform various fingering drills. Any given song in the Irish/Celtic tradition seems to inherently be a finger drill so instead of playing actual finger drills I just play a tune or two (or two dozen). 
Like Congratulations, I come from a classical background, and so I am used to exercises. I also have Larsen’s book, and I am finding it very helpful. I do play a lot of exercises, probably more than I play tunes by myself. But I make sure to play tunes every day, too.
I think that the key to using exercises is knowing what you want to accomplish and picking the exercise to do that. I have found that if I am just doing exercises, without knowing what they are supposed to accomplish, that I don’t feel that I am improving, and I don’t stay with the exercises. OTOH, if I have a goal, I can choose the exercises for that goal, and watch myself for improvement. Knowing what I want to accomplish, and working towards it is a good motivator for me.
I tend to rotate my practice around – I always play tunes, but I might spend one month also working on tone, the next month working on some new ornaments, the next month on intonation, the next month on scales in flat keys, then back to tone, etc.
Grey Larson exercises are good when your playing is in the doldrums. Before I got his book, I would do rolls up and down the scale. He has some good challenges in there, like the double-cut long rolls, which are very fun on G, hard elsewhere. After doing some of them, it invigorates my playing on normal tunes.
I mix tune practice with mindless scales and ornamentation,ie, lying on the couch and blowing into the thing. Dont overlook breathing and breath control as an exercise in itself.
I also play along with unknown tunes moreso to concentrate on the beat of the tune, regardless of melody. Fingers move all wrong, but I learned ITM style very well. The melody comes with practice.
Yes, I use exercises. . .scales, three and four note patterns, arpeggios and such. I use a book intended for fifers, but it works nicely for me, and has helped me improve my finger coordination and breath control.
A lot of people scorn exercises, but it is a matter of whatever works for you.
Many tunes have excellent exercises built in. Whenever I run across a bit that seems tricky, like an arpeggio or a B-Cnat-D triplet, I play it a whole bunch of times as an exercise but I trick myself into liking it because it’s for a tune. I figure if I learn that bit for this tune I’ll be able to play it in all tunes in the future.
If you practice a lot of different tunes, you’ll probably get the drills you need just by playing them. When I find myself stumbling over a particular passage, I repeat it a bunch of times slowly and it eventually smoothes out.
I wouldn’t talk you out of practicing your drills, but make sure they sound like ‘Irish music’ in their execution so you don’t sound like a classical drill when you play tunes.
Tony
Why not, Tony? What if classical 
music is the goal? Or Kwela, or Jazz or whatever? 
Yeah, it kinda bugs me when someone ASSUMES (you know what you get with THAT) that IRISH music is the goal when flute or whistle is played. Renee and I play a LOT of church styled music with our whistles. We are playing in services this Sunday, as a matter of fact. 