Hello!
Welcome to today’s video, another one that I’m recording here in my office next to my old piano and you can guess from the closed lid of the piano that I’m not going to talk about any „key things“ today. But I’m going to talk about a new addition to my ever-growing collection of recorders, whistles and other types of flutes.
You might already have seen the video of me playing my new James Dominic low whistle in D. I’m going to put the link to this video in the description of this one.
Here it is!
My new and first ever low whistle in D.
I own quite a few high D tin whistles, this instrument is actually the very first one I ever bought, but I’m going to talk about this one and its story in another video. Just wanted to show it to you to compare the size.
High D – low D.
And, yeah, one thing that you as a recorder player have to get used to when playing whistles: not only – you don’t have a thumb hole, and you get into the next octave by overblowing,
but especially for the larger whistles like the low one in D you have to learn the so-called piper’s grip, which means that only your ring fingers close the holes as you know from the recorder,
and the other fingers, you just put them flat on the holes and close them like this.
And here is what this black beauty sounds like.
[Playing the scale upwards]
And the second octave
[Playing the high notes, and then downwards again]
It is not made of metal, it’s made from some kind of polymer, plastic, I can’t remember, honestly, what the material is called, so, sorry, James Dominic, if I’m saying something wrong now,
but anyway, it’s a very light instrument. That makes it easy to handle.
And the other good thing and why I wanted it is that it actually comes in two parts. You can move the upper and the lower part away from each other or bring them back together again to tune the instrument. So, if it’s too high, you can make it a bit lower and if it’s too low, you can make it a bit higher.
And with this warm and breathy sound it is really, really nice for slow airs and ballads and romantic songs, whatever. For example!
[Playing „Drink to me only“]
But of course you can also play lively, fast music, reels, jigs, marches, whatever – you can play them if you „can“.
Here’s another example.
[Playing „Portsmouth“]
So, this was a more or less short introduction to this low whistle in D.
Oh, yeah, I mustn’t forget!
Because I love size comparisons, obviously I brought a tenor recorder so that you can see they’re almost the same size.
The recorder has more holes and has one hole on the back and basically it looks different, it sounds different, it’s a different instrument. If you want to hear what this one sounds like, you can have a look at my other videos.
Thank you very much for watching today and thanks for your patience, because it has been a while since that instrument moved in and I just haven’t had time for a proper introduction, but here it is.
As always, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me.
Thanks for watching, and see you soon.
Bye-bye!