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Learning to play the Tin Whistle

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With my recent re-ignition of all things Gaelic and Scottish, I’ve been listening to more traditional Scottish songs, which are full of the sounds of fiddles and tin whistles. I find the sound of the tin whistle to be quite relaxing and very enjoyable.  I decided to buy a tin whistle (or a penny whistle) off E-Bay.  Well, that in itself was a lesson.  I went and did a simple search for the device.  What I was confronted with started me a quest to learn more about this instrument.

I’d made an assumption that all were created equally.  Not so.  The standard tin whistle is in the key of D.  Most people play this instrument.  However, there are many others to choose from.  After learning about the differences and having found a huge number of tutorial sites and free sheet music sites I’d decided I better just stick with the norm and get me one in the key of D.

tin_whistleSo, that’s what I got., except mine is blue.  I think I would have liked the silver one better though.  Oh well, next time 🙂

After searching for a while on YouTube to find some good tutorials I came across a chap named Angus MacKenzie and his channel “FeisRois”.  The first couple videos of his that I found were in Gaelic, which would have made things interesting to learn from.  I could understand bits and pieces of what he was saying, but wow, I have a long way to go in learning Gaelic first.  Anyhow, I finally found his English videos.

The first lesson is here if you wish to have quick listen:

The first song I have learned to play is from the above lesson, An Cóineachan  (The Fairy Lullaby (English Lyrics)).  Skip ahead in the video to 3min 15sec to hear him explain the song and then he’ll play it for you.  Listen to his playing of the song, then listen to the recording I made of myself after about 15 times of practicing the song.

Click on the link, it should either play in your browser or open in something like Windows media player.   Fairys Lullaby

I think all in all I’ve not done too bad for one night :)  I was also playing around with twinkle twinkle little star and Mary had a little lamb.  Lisa was like those because she can play them on the piano, so she wanted to play along with me.  That didn’t work so well because as I started to play she stopped and got side tracked haha.

I’ll try and post some more of my progress with the Tin Whistle.