The chromophone 
World's 1st (affordable) chromatic whistle

LESSONS, FINGERING CHARTS, videos & reviews 

A collection of resources to help you get started playing your new chromophone.

Prehstoric Chromophones

beginner's tips

The first thing you will want to do is to get the feel of your new instrument.  Hold it, Feel its weight.  Position your left hand on the upper five holes with your thumb on the thumb hole, and your right hand over the lower four. Chromophones with indented holes also have an indentation for the right thumb. Let your fingers find and feel the holes, covering them with the pads of your fingers as shown to the left (above on small devices).  Blow softly into the mouthpiece.  If you have completely covered the holes, you should hear the lowest, or root tone of the chromphone. If you blow a little harder, the tone will go up an octave.  This is the second overtone.  Blowing a little harder still will produce the third overtone which is a fifth higher still. The fourth overtone is 2 octaves above the root tone.  There is one higher overtone that approximates  a major third, but it is not normally used.  It is good practice switching between the four overtones in order to get the feel of playing in the different registers.  Here is an example of what theses four tones sound like on the G chromophone.  

Before looking at the fingering chart, just go ahead and have some fun experimenting with your instrument.  See what you can do with it.  Can you play some simple tunes?   Learning to play well is a combination of discipline and enjoyment.  Learn a little bit at a time, and then take a break and see if you are able to apply what you learned as you are fooling around.  Now take a look at the fingering chart for your chromophone.  You can view or download a pdf of it using one of the links below.

Bb Fingering Chart

E Fingering Chart

G Fingering Chart

When you look at the fingering chart for the first, try to play each note,  Get used to the sound and feel of playing them.  As you play, associate the name of the note with the feeling of your fingers on that note's holes, and  with how much breath is required. The  overtones are indicated on the chart and you should find the first two easy to play.  The final six notes which are in the third and fourth overtones are not difficult, but may take a liitle bit more practice, especially on the smaller Bb chromophone.  The Bb one is more of a starter instrument designed as a fun learning instrument for youngsters and small whistle fans.  It can be more challenging to play the highest notes it is capable of.  Playing the notes in sequence produces a chromatic scale, and is a good thing to practice, especially in the first octave from the 8th note and above, where the cross fingerings occur. You wil want to master smoothly transitiioning through the two cross fingerings comfortably.  Once you've familiarized yourself with the notes, and assuming you are already familiar with some basic music theory, it is a good idea to start playing the major scales in various keys.  If you learn to play all 12 of them, you will be well prepared to play songs in any key.  More practice exercises will be available in the form of pdf files that can be viewed and printed, on the chromophone exercises page. 

video lessons and other videos 

Lessons and other videos will be added here as time permits me to record them.  The first is a chromophone promotional video, introducing its unique features.

Chromophone player comments

Once I have the time to figure out how to code a comments page, I hope I can add the ability for visitors to post their comments directly, but for the time being, I will add player comments manually.  There are only a small handful of chromophone owners presently--something I plan to change soon!