The Complete Irish Tin Whistle Tutor

by L.E. McCullough

Book by McCullough, L. E.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

80 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 1987

Reviews

[Linda Alldredge]

Hard to Read

Interesting and technical material, but you have to get the light just right to be able to read the thin font. It probably would be easier on a larger screen. This makes it difficult to read much at a time.

[Pearse R.]

At first I thought it was just my whistle. I was playing my Dixon. I checked it against my tuning app and the notes it was playing for the graces per McCullough’s fingering were wildly off - like a whole step. But then I used my nice heavy pro whistle tuned precisely to concert pitch and it was the same. I have the 1987 white cover edition so maybe later editions have been fixed but if not, this tutorial is seriously flawed. Example - on page 20/21, the first grace example writes the grace as a g note. But if you play his tab as written - on any of my whistles, anyway - and you uncover the third hole from the top leaving the other fingers down, you get a note between a and ab. To get a note only a quarter step off of g (an acceptable standard of deviation for Irish whistling), you need to uncover one hole lower, i.e., the third from the bottom. And every one of his examples is off by this much.

The repertoire is good and the background etc. is all solid and detailed. But this is unusable. Sorry to be so blunt. Do not buy!