Ive been messing around with a low D i got for my anniversery so am very new to it. ive watched some fantastic video on youtube that id like to mimic, bet kind of an irish sound from my practice. I cant read sheet music but have seen some stuff done in what i can only call “tab” it shows open, half open and closed holes ect…
is there a site that offers this kind of translation for good celtic music? or am i perhaps calling it tab when its called something else.
Welcome to C&F. The most frequently used form of tablature for the whistle is the ABC format. ABC is easy to learn and very compact and easy to write. You can learn more about it here.
There is a form of whistle tab just as you describe but it is not used as generally as ABC. You can get a whistle font for Windows that will let you type ABC as the tab with closed/open holes. But it leaves a few things unsaid in describing a tune, IMO. I can’t find a link to the font just now though.
Sources for music in ABC are plentiful and searchable. I might suggest these sites as a start:
ABC is a way of notating music in text, but which is easily converted to sheet music by the computer, given the right software (many cheap or free options). Some of this software can produce whistle tab from ABC notation as well. If you know the names of tunes you want to learn, you can usually find ABC for it (and listen to MIDIs versions) here: http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/cgi/abc/tunefind
The old thread mentioned above does not include info about getting whistle tab on the Mac. If you use Barfly you can add the -W 1D command (where D can be replaced with the key of the whistle) into the command line that shows up when you go to export to abcm2ps. That’s all that is necessary. I haven’t found a way to make it work with either of the on line converters that I know of.
And, like other folks I’d highly recommend just learning to read regular notation. Of course if you are playing whistles in several different keys that can be a bit of a problem…
I know the tab you’re talking about, and I call it tab as well. You won’t find it in common use, but you will find it in many of the learners whistle books that are on the market. You will be needing to either take your time with practice, or if you want to learn what that bloke is doing in the video, upgrade your allowable download MB and learn patience as you play it little bit by little bit, over and over again until you can play along with him.
Good luck with your playing.
Some dyed in the wool traditionalists will disagree, but I recommend learning to read sheet music. It really is NOT difficult and once you get the hang of it you’ll have easy access to literally thousands of terrific tunes in many genres. Tutors like Bill Ochs’ The Clarke Tinwhistle start you off from zero and gradually teach you to read music as well as playing the whistle. A skill well worth acquiring, IMO
markbell hasn’t checked in yet but his site at www.whistleandsqueak.com has lots of the finger tab that I think the OP is referring to (illustrations below each note showing which holes are covered/uncovered).
But personally, put me on the side of those who advocate learning to read music. It really isn’t all that mysterious and makes one less reliant on someone else to convert a tune to tab. Of course, if you are around other musicians, learning by ear works even better.
I am not particularly skilled, but I will add my ha’pence worth for learning dots rather than tab. I started with tab, and found it limiting. I took the plunge and started learning dots - and found it easier than I thought, at least for identifying pitch. I still cant read rhythm at all - I need my ears for that.
Hey, great tip! I didn’t know that, and I’ve been using Barfly for years. I’d just been cutting & pasting to the command line, or just using concertina.net (faster than firing up my terminal window).
[edited to add}
Hmm, wait, it seems that I can’t get the tab to appear, just the dots, What’s the precise protocol iwht adding “-W 1D” to the command line? I’ve tried the following:
I am not a particularly skilled whistle player, but I have been using a trick I learned from playing bluegrass mandolin. I do read music, but not incredibly fast. In my songbooks or on printed pages of music we were going to play, I wrote the key down in letter form off to the side. Then I would very lightly pencil the numbers 1-7 on the staff on or between the lines to correspond with the 1st through 7th of the key’s major scale. Then I would write the note’s number underneath the standard notation (indicating if it was flatted the few times it was). I would pick an anchor point, which was the 1st, and I knew the relative scale from there (how many frets and/or strings to move up or down to play a particular note of the scale). The mandolin is fully chromatic, so playing anything as written was no big deal. But this method had the added benefit of making transposition amazingly simple. That was important because banjo players want everything in G . (Any banjo players here? ). I just moved my anchor point and I was in whatever key they wanted.
OK, so what does this have to do with whistles? I am doing the very same thing to find songs to play while learning. With some exceptions, music played solo is more about intervals than absolutes. I take out my music, ignore the key and look at the numbers I penciled in. Subtract 1 from the number and that is how many holes to uncover. If it sounds way too low blow harder.
Note that when you start playing with others, you will need a whistle of the proper key.
Dangit, I still can’t get this to work. I removed spaces, rearranged paramenters, etc until I finally I re-read MTGuru’s post here https://forums.chiffandfipple.com/t/whistle-tab-and-dots/62877/6
where he’s actually using the same version of abcm2ps that I have (doh!) but still no luck. While abcm2ps generates no errors when it runs, both MacGhostScript and Macps2pdf choke on the output file.
[edited to add:]
Much dogged experimentation has ensued, and I have perhaps narrowed down the problem. With three different approaches, the command line response in the terminal window complains that it either can’t find or can’t open the file flute.fmt, even when I explicitly tell it where the file is.
If you can play from tabs or ABC, you can “read music.” Boiled down to its most basic element, “reading music” is taking something written on a page and translating those marks into sounds. The skill to look at a black dot with a straight tail on the bottom line of the treble clef then play an E quarter note is the same skill as looking at “E2” in a ABC file and playing that same E quarter note which is the same skill as looking at xxx xxo and playing that same E quarter note. If you can learn to play from tabs or ABC then you can learn to play from dots.
I think we sometimes get confuse “reading music” with “sight reading at speed” or the ability to play a new tune perfectly at full speed from sheet music. I’m guessing not many people can actually do that - probably about the same percentage as people who can join in by ear on a tune they’ve never heard and be note perfect by the end of the A part. Reading music well enough to play through a tune slowly and find all the notes and problem areas is relatively easy and is a useful skill.
Hmm, wait, it seems that I can’t get the tab to appear, just the dots, What’s the precise protocol iwht adding “-W 1D” to the command line? I’ve tried the following:
In Barfly if you go under the file menu choose “Export” and under that “abcm2ps” That will bring up a screen that has the location of your abcm2ps file on the top of the page but on the bottom in the field marked command line you’ll see something like this:
What this shows is 1)the location of the file (/Users/chuck/desktop/abcm2ps) 2) various commands (-s 0.90 -N 3)..see below 3) the file to work on (infile.abc). Barfly creates that automagically. Don’t mess with it. 4) the output file (-O test4.ps). The commands already shown in my example are scale (-S followed by the scale chose on the page) and Pagination choice (-N 3 sets even pages with number on the left and odd pages with number on the right). You can add the whistle command along with the others in the command line.
You can’t type in the command line field until you’ve clicked in some other field first. I just click in the fields where you can enter format files or location for format files. This is a bug in Barfly that Phil knows about but hasn’t fixed at this point.
Be sure you have clicked the “Send Output to” choice and chosen “Macps2pdf” as your option. Then the postscript file (test4.ps in my example) will be automagically opened by the “Preview” application and converted to a pdf file. If you’ve a really old Mac operating system you’ll have to have Macps2pdf available somewhere but that is so many versions of the operating system back that I can’t even remember where you have to have that file or anything else about it!
Hope this helps (and doesn’t get to geeky for those who aren’t interested in this at all!).
Oh Yeah… One more thing. At least on my machine the first time it fires up Terminal creating the postscript file (test4.ps in my example above) takes so much time that Barfly passes the test4.ps file on to Preview before it is created! I always use that same postscript file name so what I get the first time is the PREVIOUS file I created. Once terminal is open this problem disappears. So, if I’m creating a big pdf file I always have to do things twice if terminal isn’t already running.
I use a similar method. If I have the dots I write the numbers 1 - 6 under the corresponding note (or 0 as required) and underscore the numbers in the higher octave. This way I’m learning to read the dots as well. The centre line of the five line stave corresponds to 1 (ie cover only the top hole or T1),the space below corresponds to 2 (ie T2 or two holes covered and so on down the whistle), the space above to 0 (ie no fingers or ‘C’, whether sharp or natural at which point either half-hole or use cross fingering as appropriate) and the line above that to 6 (ie the upper octave) and so on up the whistle.
Hope that makes sense.
This system, combined with lots of listening and lots of practice seems to work well for me.
The stave note indicates the lowest covered hole. You can just see the bottom of the whistle appearing at the top of the diagram for the second octave.
Part of the reason I use the numbers 1-7 (major scale notes) instead of 0-6 (number of open holes) is from playing other instruments and also from playing with others. It is the language that others will speak. Besides playing bluegrass mandolin, I have played bass for guitarists that play blues and rock. I wasn’t all that good at bass either (notice a pattern here? ) but could provide a reasonable bass line for them to practice with. Again, they would call the key and tell me the chord progression using the same numbers (nearly all blues and much of rock use the root, fourth and fifth) and once again it is all about displacement from the root. And if they gave me advice about something to try, they could easily say it in a way I understand.
IMO, learning about intervals and knowing how to construct a scale is as important (and possibly more important) than being able to read music at playing speed.
BTW, here is something that may flip on a lightbulb for some folks. Ever wonder why the holes on a whistle are spaced and sized like they are? Hold the whistle sideways in front of you with the mouthpiece on your right. Now look at, or think of, an octave of piano keys starting on C (and forget about C versus D or whatever the key of the whistle is). The holes correspond to the white keys and you half cover (“half holing”) to get the black keys. The first little hole (3rd from left) is one you never need to half hole because there is no black key in between it and the previous note. That is also why it is crowded a little closer - it isn’t skipping 2 intervals, just one. The last hole (one nearest the mouthpiece) is also usually slightly smaller but that has to do with airway physics.
I absolutely agree that both reading music and learning by ear are needful skills. I think folks will do best starting out with what they do best (tab, ear, dots), and going from there. For a person who can translate music notation directly into played tunes, there is no need for tab.
. (Any banjo players here? 
). I just moved my anchor point and I was in whatever key they wanted.
) but could provide a reasonable bass line for them to practice with. Again, they would call the key and tell me the chord progression using the same numbers (nearly all blues and much of rock use the root, fourth and fifth) and once again it is all about displacement from the root. And if they gave me advice about something to try, they could easily say it in a way I understand.