Today I received a Technopipe by Anders Fagerstrom in Sweden. You may have seen his website: http://www.technopipes.com .
He offers several different models of pipes with different fingering methods programmed into them. One model, the Galician Open fingering, is also whistle fingering! I have just played several Irish jigs on this model and it does work.
The downsides?
- *It doesn't sound like a whistle - it sounds like pipes (but you can turn off the chanters.)
*It's pricey - it cost me £210 including shipping to England, and the dollar is still much weaker than the pound. (You can also get a quote in Euros.)
*Because it does not sense air pressure (you don't use air at all) you have to use your left thumb to change octaves, which takes a bit of getting used to.
- *It is silent. Not blue-tack silent, or Joanie-Madden silent, but I-can-play-this-on-the-train silent. Also, since you don't have anything in your mouth, it's safe to play in a moving vehicle.
*You can change the pitch through a wide variety of choices and also instantly jump to one of four pre-set common keys.
*It's MIDI compatible (so it *could* sound like a whistle).
*It has a built in metronome, a recording facility, and you can play along to something that it has previously recorded (I think it can only save one thing at a time).
*Anders can customise his standard model for you - mine is set to default to the key of D, and he was willing to programme in special fingerings for me if I needed them, for example an unusual Cnat fingering.
(edited because after a year and a half I realised I wrote Galician CLOSED instead of Galician Open. D'oh!)