About Me

Hi there! I am flattered that you're interested in knowing more about me. I've put a slideshow on the left that links to my MySpace profile. Who am I? Just a guy that loves the tinwhistle. I'm no Mary Bergin, Kevin Crawford, Joanie Madden, or L.E. McCullough...though I hope to be that good some day! I've been playing since 1995, and have been fortunate to play alongside some top-notch irish musicians, like E.J. Jones, Larry Mallette, Turlach Boylan , among others. I was blessed in my early whistling that such great musicians lived and played in Houston where I lived, and were active participants in the Irish sessions there.

I played in an Irish band called Echoes of Ireland in houston, and in January 2003, we had the privilege of playing for Charles Sheehan, Consul General of Northern Ireland, in his first visit to Houston in 14 years, for a Special Olympics benefit. They unfortuantely broke up shortly after I moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area for work. For several years, I played with the band Paddy Gone Wild in Dallas, though I left the group a short time ago and am currently between bands.

Speaking of work, I'm a computer programmer, with three patents to my name. It's a good living--though things were tight after the whole 9/11-Enron-Internet Bubble Bursting trifecta! It usually pays me enough to keep buying new whistles, and trying them out. I started writing informal reviews on and offshortly after joining the Chiff and Fipple message boards, but realized in 2004 that many of my old reviews were gone due to C&F switching servers and losing their old messages. So, I started making an effort to collect my reviews and put them up on my own webspace, making a more formal affair of it. It's hard to believe I've reviewed something around fifty whistles since then!

In addition to whistling, I'm into martial arts--I've taken a variety of styles from Wah Lum to Bujinkan Ninjitsu, starting at a very early age. I also am interested in gourmet cooking...at any given evening in my house, I may be making something like lamb chops with rosemary-garlic sauce, mahi mahi wrapped in prosciutto and topped with crab, or boeuf wellington.

About the Archives

After I ran through my first couple of songbooks, I had a hard time finding free (important requirement!) information and music for the whistle on the Net. I felt rather cheated that the only places I could find traditional celtic music was on commercial pay-per-song music sites. Now, I don't begrudge anyone making a living, however I feel very much a part of the traditional bardic tradition, and feel that music should be shared out of joy and the love of playing. Therefore, this site was born to serve those who had a similar love of celtic music. Eventually, my site was receiving thousands of hits per week, and I was spending hours every day answering questions about whistles and music. Unfortunately, I didn't make much money from the site (though I did become an Amazon associate), and it was costing me a fortune to keep the bandwidth and drive space needed. During a job transition, I had to make some hard choices about where I was spending my monthly income, and so the whistle site came down off of the paid webhosting I was keeping it on. I archived it on Xoom, but that service was pretty terrible, and those were dark days for the Archive.

When I put up my original site in 1996, there was only one other whistle website that I could find (The Whistle Web, I believe the name was). Now, there are literally dozens! Every now and then, something happens in the media which gets people excited about Irish music, from Riverdance to the Titanic, to Lord of the Rings to Picard's playing of a whistle in the "Inner Light" episode. Irish music seems as popular as ever. So, as soon as I could, I brought the site back from free webhosting Perdition to where it is now, and hopefully, it'll live on for a long time to come.

Take care, and happy whistling!