Add a drone to your tinwhistle
                     ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
                 

A fellow employee here on Mackinac Island obtained a very pretty 
ceramic "double tinwhistle" that produced beautiful droney music.

It consisted of two parallel whistles, one with the conventional 
six holes and the other with no finger holes.

Upon hearing how nice it sounded, I set out to very simply 
duplicate this double whistle & in a few minutes came up with the 
following device that honestly sounds just as good as the "real 
thing":



         ,------,-,---------------------------------------,-,----,
         | []   |t|       o    o    o    o    o    o      |t|    |
         |------| |---------------------------------------| |----|
         | []   | |   ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| | |    | 
         `------'-'---------------------------------------'-'----'
          
          
                            o = finger holes
                   |||||||||| = masking tape or electrician's tape
                                covering all finger holes
                            t = masking tape or electrician's tape
                                used to bind the two whistles
                                together
                                
I prefer the mellow sound of Clarke type tinwhistles (in the key 
of C or D) to the plastic mouthpiece type. In addition, it's 
harder to physically tape two of the latter style instruments 
together --- the mouthpieces get in the way more. Another favorite 
is the $3.00 Cooperman "D" tinwhistle -- works great.

When taping the two instruments together, roll each slightly 
outwards to better follow the curve of your lips. That makes it 
easier to blow the two whistles at once.

The obvious drawback to this system is that it requires twice as 
much air to play! This is no small concern, but nice music is 
still playable on it with just a bit of getting used to.

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Dennis Havlena - W8MI
Mackinac Straits
northern Michigan