All About Pennywhistle

It’s the Most Wonderful Time of Year! Above is a video I made for a fun giveaway, check out our winner

Full of happy tunes that you can’t help singing from all the joy in the atmosphere.

One of the best ways to get through the colder and darker days is with music.

Do you or your kids have a musical instrument that you can easily play?

Do you have easy music to sing and play during this festive time?

 I want to help you get what you need for this season.

 The pennywhistle is one of the easiest starter instruments I have ever played. It is also known as the tinwhistle.

It has such a sweet, whispery tone and sounds beautiful.

I taught my kids to play it, and they loved it!

One of my most memorable performances was with my daughter and my students on Away in the Manger. She and my student played the ukulele and I played the pennywhistle and we all sang the three verses mixed with ukulele and pennywhistle. Everyone loved it! The kids sounded so sweet and so cute, just a perfect blend of cute and small becoming beautiful, reverent, and we blessed so many people.

I play the original tinwhistle in D with the wooden fipple plug mouthpiece (not plastic) made by Clarke.

I gave away two of these whistles, along with two of my winter festival digital songbooks with the digital album, to a lucky winner on December 3, 2021.

Do you know how to play?

 If you don’t know how to play it, I have The Magic Flute Course. In this course I teach you how to play it and then how to teach your kids to not only play it, but have fun with it, by doing all kinds of fun things with it.

The pennywhistle is in the key of D and you can play the pentatonic notes on it, so you can play it as a substitute for the Choroi pentatonic flute.

Once you get a grasp on how to play it, try playing the songs in the digital winter festival songbooks.

Can you read music?

You don’t have to! I made recordings that you can easily listen to along with the songbook and I wrote a cheat sheet for you that have the lyrics with the flute notes on top.

So for Away in the Manger, you get the sheet music, and you get something that looks like this

A1 A1 G1 F#1 E1   D1 D1 C# B A

Away in a manger, no crib for a bed,

A      A B   A     A E1   C#    B       A    D1  F#1

The little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head….

And if you love singing, you will love the songbooks, I wrote them for moms like you, who love music and children and celebrating life.

The songbooks have songs for Christmas, and the Waldorf festivals like the Advent Spiral, St. Nicholas Day, the Winter Solstice, The Epiphany, The New Year, winter nature songs like snow and stars, songs about knitting and sewing, lullabies, and even Valentine’s Day.

I love helping parents add musical skills. I want to encourage you and I am here to help you. Think of me as your “at home music teacher.”