banjoplayinnerd

Dara Korra'ti, the head wrangler of the Norwescon 35 music track, made a great score (so to speak) when she got a set of traditional Irish tunes popular in sessions around the Seattle area and added an Irish session to the Norwescon music lineup. I was going through the tunes yesterday, at first by just sight-reading and humming them quietly at work, then when I got home I worked out a few on my low whistle. Some of them are a bit problematic to play in the low register because they drop below the D at the bottom of the whistle's range. This is not necessarily an insurmountable problem. For instance in the case of "Foggy Dew" I solved it by playing the song in the upper register. It gets a bit interesting when the whistle enters its third octave, but so far no glass has shattered and the neighborhood dogs didn't cry out in pain, so I think we're good. The main problem I'm still having is coping with the piper's grip. It's not as bad as it has been, and if I allow myself a few mulligans I can get through a tune, but I still have trouble sometimes making sure the holes are covered properly.

I've figured out one aid to proper finger positioning. My whistle came with a plastic thumb rest that slides up and down the barrel of the whistle. I have it positioned exactly where my left thumb should go for my left index finger to properly hit the uppermost hole using the piper's grip. I occasionally have to reposition it, though, mostly because Igor the Younger likes sliding it up and down when I let him blow the whistle. (Surprisingly, he can get about three notes out of it if I work with him on it. I may have to hunt up a standard D whistle for him one of these days.)