Hopefully I won't ressurect any ill-feelings on this topic, but I wanted to drop in a few of my own thoughts. Firstly, thank you all so much for the thoughtfulness of including me in the list of these 'Angels', I was frankly shocked when I saw this but I must admit, there were alterior motives when I started...
I started putting air through a whistle around '98 or '99. I say putting air through it because it was not anything remotely close to traditional music and was probably barely tolerable to listen to. I was trained classically (percussionist, unfortunately) so, with very limited resources on the Internet at this time (and didn't learn about C&F until only several years back), I continued on this downward spiral of doom.
As time passed by, my fingers slowly acclimated themselves to my awkward playing and, without any mentoring or lessons available (I live in Delaware, meh), I thought I was actually doing fairly hot... Till I decided to switch from classical music (I was performing weekly with community orchestras, bands, etc) and hit a local session I had discovered that was actually 10 minutes from my home -- this was aboout 2 years ago.
There were two other whistle players there who also didn't play in the traditional style and it wasn't until DarthWeasel's return to that session that I had actually heard how a whistle was actually supposed be played in terms of ornamentation and style. That was wake up call number #1.
Over the next several months I had actually started researching more and more about playing the whistle -- learned a few basic ornaments and *tried* to apply it to how I was already playing and thought, once again, I was hot stuff. So, my day job is a PHP/MySQL developer -- I put my talents and hobbies to work to build a YouTube-like site for whistle players...
Ah, the dreams of fast cars, faster women; the dollar signs -- the amount of money I could make... Really were all in my head.
Granted I grew up in open source age and wanted more than anything just to share what I knew with others. Then, about 15 months or so ago, WhistleThis opened it's doors.... Dale was nice enough to let me get a few plugs in on the forums here and that's all it took -- a website specifically for the discussion of technique and style, while being able to post clips of yourself for critique by master whistle player (cough cough) me.
All went well for a few weeks, then some real whistle players showed up and knocked me down a few notches in terms of my ego and realizing how little I actually knew. I basically scrapped everything I thought I knew and took the stance of starting back at the begining, trying to unlearn my bad habits in an attempt to learn properly.
The thing being, without that site and my misguided thoughts of being able to tutor others with my (*very*) limited ability, I never would have made the leaps and bounds that I have in my playing. I know that sometimes bad advice can be very detrimental to a new players' learning process but, believe me, as someone living in Delaware where the closest thing we had to authentic Irish in the late 90's was a Beniganns.
My thanks to Dale, Eskin, Kilfar, MTGuru and Nico whom, without their help and skill, WhistleThis would probably have been left in the dust or, at the very least, in a sea of mediocre tutorial websites. Along with my playing.
Thanks again.
Rob/Wynder
