Hi all.
I’m sure I’m not the first to have picked up a whistle for the first time after playing the flute for years. I’m interested in any tips and tricks people may have. For example I’m trying to not use glottal stops all over the place . Can I simply replace these with tonguing? Breath control and blowing effort is different too. Hard not to blast out a good low D!
Any advice much appreciated.
I think when you start on whistle, it’s useful to keep the tonguing to a minimum and try to slur most of the notes (maybe use tonguing to switch octaves, but try to slur everything else). Practicing without tonguing gets you to move your fingers more precisely, and it generally builds good habits.
But over time, it’s of course fine to introduce more articulation. And yes, in general you want to use tonguing for articulation, not glottal stops. But the tonguing generally shouldn’t be too harsh. Try to avoid a hard, explosive “t” sound when you tongue. Instead, it should be somewhere between a “t” and a soft “d” sound. Also, in my opinion you should avoid tonguing more than half the notes - that much tonguing sounds too choppy and interferes with ornamentation.
Beyond that, lots of styles of whistle articulation sound great. The particular pattern I tend to fall into most often for non-ornamented, fast-moving eighth notes is to tongue every third, fourth, and sixth note in jigs, and every first and fourth note in reels. So jigs end up sounding a bit like “uh-uh-duh, duh-uh-duh” and reels end up sounding like “duh-uh-uh-duh, duh-uh-uh-duh.” (But I usually only tongue notes that aren’t ornamented, so the more ornaments I add, the more I depart from this pattern.) I could be mistaken, but I think many whistle players use these as their go-to tonguing patterns (I’m pretty sure I picked them up listening to a lot of other players). But of course, not everyone uses these particular patterns - in fact, some great whistle players don’t tongue much at all. So it really is up to you whether you want to go with heavy tonguing (my personal preference), light tonguing, or basically no tonguing at all. And there’s an infinite universe of tonguing patterns to choose from.
Breath control and blowing effort is different too. Hard not to blast out a good low D!
Any advice much appreciated.
Breath control on whistle is way easier than flute embouchure (in my opinion), but it does take some getting used to. The main piece of advice I have is to practice scales with a tuner every once in a while so you get used to blowing each note with the right amount of air to play it in tune. Other than that, breath control will come naturally with practice.
Once or twice I’ve heard really good flute players pull out whistles in a session, and their pitch was way off. My guess is that these were people who didn’t practice whistle much (if at all) at home, and they hadn’t learned proper breath control. They assumed they could play whistle well because they were good at the flute, but this isn’t always the case.
Thank you very much Cyberknight for your extensive reply.
For sure it’s possible to pick up whistle and play it like you play flute.
However (and people will probably argue with this) there’s a distinct dedicated whistle style that I hear most people do which has quite a bit of tonguing.
That’s not to say it’s anything like the tongued style heard on Recorder and Boehm flute- it’s fundamentally different.
It’s the same legato flow you often hear with fluteplayers, but it’s judiciously punctuated with tonguing here and there.
I had a perhaps unusual path to whistle
Uilleann pipes > Irish Flute > Whistle
and on the flute I did almost no tonguing. It took many years of playing whistle for the articulated style to become natural and intuitive.
I should say that everything above is concerning traditional HIGH whistle approaches.
The Low Whistle is a relative newcomer, beginning in the 1970s. When I started playing Low D Whistle I didn’t know how to approach it. It plays the same notes as an Irish flute, so should I play it like a flute, with little or no tonguing?
But it’s a whistle of sorts, so should I use an ordinary traditional High Whistle articulated style?
When I listened to good trad players they were all over the map, some doing loads of tonguing, some none, and everything in between.
So I didn’t think any more about it and just played, letting the instrument tell me how it wanted to be played. I ended up sort of in the middle.
However (and people will probably argue with this) there’s a distinct dedicated whistle style that I hear most people do which has quite a bit of tonguing.
Not disagreeing, as far as modern (post Mary Bergin perhaps) styles are concerned. But I was listening to, revisiting, the playing of previous generations of players recently, say, the last generation to play and have been formed by the rural housedances, and was once again struck by how their approach to rhythm, breath pulsing etc was very flute like. So there is that.
Possibly the introduction of Generation whistle spurred on different stylistic possibilities, moving further away from flute based takes from the 50s/60s onward.
It’s a broad church with many stylistic choices open to you.
Wot he said.
I sometimes argue there is no whistle technique — not because people don’t develop one or tutors don’t have favoured approaches, but because there are so many different versions of what’s “best” or “right” and some of them are mutually incompatible.
It really comes down to what you like. I sometimes get sent whistle recordings that other people think show impressive skill, and what I hear is impressive skill in ornamenting tunes out of existence. I find it really irritating, but others like it.
My two ha’porth on tonguing would also be that it’s over-used. People just seem to get into the habit of doing it. Sometimes it’s almost unavoidable, but mostly it’s best deployed when you actively want an articulation, not because you always do it between those two notes. I like to hear whistlers who take a leaf out of the piper’s book and don’t interrupt the air too much. (There may be other opinions on this. 
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As @alser already plays flute, s/he will already know how they like to approach phrasing, ornamentation, etc. In some respects a high whistle’s nimbler than a flute and it’s nice to make the most of that, but there are others where it’s a lot more limited. Those might be the avenues to explore once the basics are in place.
Thank you all for replies