An instrument you could own for life for the price of a decent 6-pack. Even if you aren’t in a hurry to learn, honestly at that price you might as well pick one up next time you’re shopping online, and give it a whirl.
Chiff and fipple uilleann pipes professional#
There are professional Irish musicians who spend decades playing $9 whistles (often doing a little fine-tuning on their own to smooth them out), so they’re by no means just toys.
The great thing about tinwhistle is you can get a totally serviceable instrument for literally $9 or so they’re just that cheap to make. Like a referee’s whistle but with control of the notes. Wind instruments had the huge advantage of being relatively compact, simple, and affordable, and some of them had a dual purpose for signaling or for military music, or just being heard above the noise of work and waves to keep a rhythm for work or dancing.Ī tinwhistle is a small metal pipe with six finger-holes, and a whistle-like mouthpiece that directs the breath onto a sharp edge that produces the note. I realized after I finished this article that all these instruments can be learned by ear and video without formal written study, and (with the exception of fiddle) beginner tutorials for them are written in “tablature” (numbers that say where your fingers go) rather than sheet music, making them even easier to learn for total novices. Fortunately, many of these instruments are relatively affordable, intuitive to learn (they had to be, to catch on with a largely illiterate population that just wanted to get to playing music without fuss), and often rugged and compact for travel. We’re looking largely at the instruments of seafaring European (and diaspora) folk of the 1800s and early 1900s, which you can note largely resembled the instruments of the working class on land, farmers and city laborers, just with an eye towards durability and portability at sea.
Chiff and fipple uilleann pipes full#
There are online communities full of geeks like me for each of these instruments, who'd be happy to chat with you about choosing a good one for your money, and how you can best learn to play. Plenty of bargains, just don’t get impulsive, do just a little research before each purchase and you’ll be glad you did. All the more so for used instruments, which can offer great savings, but you really want to buy from a reputable dealer or a musician, or have an ironclad strategy for DIY repair, lest you get something too out of whack to learn on and too pricey to repair. Don’t just say “oh, I dig Irish flute, and I see a new one on eBay for $50, sounds like a bargain!” and buy it without doing a little research, or you’ll get stuck wasting time and money on unplayable junk. I will note before we begin, especially in the budget category, there are some real bargains but plenty of junk, so please use this article as a starting point, but read up a little on best buys. NOT TRADITIONAL SAILOR INSTRUMENTS, BUT WOULD SOUND AWESOME WITH SHANTIES Being entranced by a new genre of music is a fine time to further expand your horizons by taking up an instrument and making music yourself. And I have for over a decade done little projects online to encourage people to push their boundaries and break away from the mainstream by trying musical instruments beyond the most common ones. I’m not a PhD musicologist, but I do have a lot of research background, been playing traditional music for over 30 years, and have a general handle on the scene and the era. In whatever case, in this little write-up I’m going to lay out some of the traditional instruments of the era which were favored by sailors, and explain for each how affordable and easy to learn they can be, and link you in some examples to listen to and places to learn more about each instrument. Maybe you’re an experienced musician looking to try a new sound after discovering sea songs, or maybe you’ve never played a note and hearing these great old tunes has inspired you to learn. While a classic shanty tended to be sung just with vocals, sailors played a variety of musical instruments popular in their eras, and in the Folk Revivals of the mid 1900s, lots of musicians did fine work adding instrumentation to the old tunes. What with the current fascination with sea shanties and sea songs, I figured that some folks might be interested in trying out the musical instruments of Western sailors of the 1800s and early 1900s.
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