2010-05-30 music

Since about a year I’m playing a tinwhistle, or maybe should I say I’m learning to play tinwhistle, even though there is hardly any progress recently. I’ve chosen tinwhistle as my first musical instrument because of three reasons:

• This thing must be the easiest instrument to pick up and start playing. I’ve did some experiments, you can teach people to play in, like, 10 minutes. Then you lend them a tinwhistle and a book of songs with tabs, and they can play them all in a week. Of course mastery takes as much time as with any other instrument (or maybe even more, as with many simple things) – I still can’t play jigs properly.
• It’s extremely cheap and rather easy to get, even in Poland. I bought my first one for about 8 PLN, not counting the delivery costs. Again, there are tinwhistles out there that cost a hand and a leg, but you really don’t need one of those to start.
• As a child I learned to play the recorder, but I hated it, and I was very bad with it (they wanted me to memorize notes, I could never learn things by heart). So I thought that choosing a similar instrument would make it easy for me. Then again, recorder is kinda dull and laughed upon. The transverse flute is so much cooler, but hard and expensive. Then I remembered how I always liked the irish songs and all kinds of pipes. So there is is, a flute that is actually cool!

If you always wanted to learn to play some instrument, and you don’t have a piano or guitar gathering dust on the attic, tinwhistle is a great choice for beginners – go get one right now and start playing. You even avoid all the difficult music theory related to chords – just simple plain melody.

Unfortunately, after a short while you start noticing the downsides of a tinwhistle:

• Depending on the make it may be rather loud. You can try practicing quietly, but it’s harder and the sound is much worse.
• You can carry it around much easier than, say, a guitar or piano, but you can’t really put it in your pocket. Even if you do take a bag, you usually leave it somewhere. And it’s possible to even bend or break your whistle if you are harsh with your luggage.
• Unless you paint flames on it, like I did, it looks rather plain. The shiny metal ones look better, but you can’t compare it to, say, saxophone, with all the shiny valves.
• It’s surprisingly unpopular on the Internet – there are a few strong communities, but it’s hard to find tabs for anything except folk music. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against folk music, but when you want to impress your friends you want to play something they know. Yankee Doodle gets you only so far.

There is, however, a musical instrument similar to the tinwhistle, but without those downsides. It’s slightly more expensive (again, there are insanely expensive ones too) and much harder to get (forget about finding it in any small or medium-sized music shop), it is also slightly harder to pick up. Well, it’s extremely easy to pick up if you already know the tinwhistle. On the plus side:

• You can wear ocarina on your neck as a pendant. They even make them specially for this. This lets you carry it with you virtually everywhere. There are also larger ones that you can simply put in your pocket – they are much more compact than tinwhistle.
• They come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. There are shiny black ones, there are raw clay ones, there are beautiful wooden ocarinas and even the plastic ones look much nicer than plastic tinwhistles. Then there are novelty ocarinas shaped like fruits, animals, dragon fangs, sculptures or even tea cups! You can actually drink from them! There is also that crazy japanese guy on youtube who makes them out of vegetables...
• There are lots of ocarina fans on the Internet, mostly because the “Legend of Zelda” fans who bought them and learned to play because it was featured in one of the computer games. Once they did, you started learning and transcribing other songs, so there are lots of scores and tabs with music from computer games, movies and popular songs. Plus you can play most of the folk music you got for your tinwhistle.

If you play a tinwhistle and enjoy it, you may want to also try an ocarina. There is however a number of differences you must remember. First of all, ocarina is not really a single instrument (well, there are many kinds of whistles too, but they are all pretty similar, with the same fingering, etc.) – there are four major kinds you may encounter:

• Sweet potato, also known as transverse ocarina is the kind we know from the Legend of Zelda game. It’s also the kind you might see most often on youtube. It has a lot of holes, at least one for each finger, and the fingering is slightly different from tinwhistle: you use your pinkies, the left hand holes are in reverse order compared to the tinwhistle, and the thumb holes are uncovered instead of blowing harder. Well, it’s not an accurate description, but it gives you an idea. They are also rather big and more expensive than other kinds, and probably easier to break.
• Inline ocarina, also called mountain ocarina by the company which makes a lot of them, looks like a small box with two rows of holes on the top. You can think of it as of a tinwhistle that is bend into a letter Z to be smaller – you put your hands next to each other, instead of one under another, but that’s pretty much it. Since you can’t blow harder to get higher sounds, you sometimes have more holes to compensate for that. They fit into your pocket.
• Pendant ocarina, or english pendant is my favorite kind. They have four distinctive, differently sized holes at the top, and may have zero, one or two additional holes on the bottom. You play using your index and middle fingers – and thumbs for the bottom holes. You still get a range of more than an octave because of finger combinations. They come in all sizes, from a tiny pendant you can wear on your neck, to a huge bass ocarina the size of a grapefruit. You’d think the fingering is difficult, but you really get used to it fast, especially if you know tinwhistle.
• Peru ocarinas are usually just souvenirs, and you can’t serious play the kind of music we are talking about on them. They are simply not tuned to western tradition, and have too small a range to really be useful. Avoid them if you want to play them, not just hang them somewhere as a decoration.

Another difference between the ocarinas and the tinwhistles is in how the tabs are written. In tabs for tinwhistle you use numbers telling how many holes to cover – so 6 is the lowest note you can play, and 0 is the highest (not counting the second and third octave). For some unknown reason ocarinas use a reverse notation: 1 is the lowest note, and 7 is the highest (in the same octave). To convert from one to the other, just subtract the numbers from 7.

Of course there are lots of differences in tuning of particular instruments, in various advanced techniques you use (although cutting, tapping and rolling are there for both), etc. – I will leave all that for you to discover.