Lifting a Finger

Currently my only flute is a three-piece, tunable eight-hole low D PVC flute made by Doug Tipple, which I received as a gift. I was skeptical at first about just how good an inexpensive cylindrical flute made from a PVC pipe could be, but the rave reviews on the Chiff & Fipple forums convinced me […]

This is my collection of whistles, all of which fall into the “inexpensive” category. I don’t see myself adding much to this list, though at some point I would like one of Jerry Freeman’s famous Mellow Dog whistles, maybe as a D/C set. Sweetone D whistle This was my first whistle, chosen based on the […]

Even when I first started learning the tin whistle, I think I always had the idea that someday I wanted to move on to learning to play the Irish (aka simple-system) flute. Don’t get me wrong, the whistle is a great little instrument and lots of fun, but the reason I started with it was […]

Several years passed, during which my whistles sat untouched in a drawer, and then in late 2005 I decided that I wanted to give playing the whistle another try. In an effort to give myself some extra motivation, I let it be known that there was a particular whistle that I’d like to get as […]

Back in 1997, I decided that I wanted to learn how to play the tin whistle. The initial investment was pretty low and I was listening to a healthy dose of Irish traditional music, so I wanted to give it a shot. I found Chiff & Fipple, and though I didn’t actually register on the […]