So I’m at a baseball game with my father-in-law the other night, and I’m trying to get the attention of the waitress who has just walked by me and managed not to notice my yelling and arm-flailing. My FIL turns around, sticks his pinkies in the corners of his mouth and lets out a high, sharp one. Of course, she turns around instantly and takes our orders. Immediately afterward, my FIL turns to me with a grin and says, “You’ve GOT to learn how to whistle!”
Now, I know how to whistle in the manner of puckering my lips together and blowing so that I can carry a tune. But I’m talking about the piercing whistle that can be heard from blocks away, or from the other side of a stadium. The type you hear basketball coaches use to get their players’ attention, or that construction workers use to signal their work-mates.
Bear in mind that I didn’t learn how to blow a bubble with bubble gum until I was 26 years old. I read a how-to online for whistling a few years back, but I was never even remotely successful.
Tell me, Dopers. How can I learn to be a whistling stud?
I feel your pain. My mother could blow her fist and even make a little music that way, and Daddy had the piercing whistle down pat.
One way to start getting the feeling of the whistle you speak of is to get a blade of grass and place it between and alongside your thumbs, thus making a sort of reed like a clarinet or saxophone would use. By using different placements of the grass as well as pressure between the thumbs and, of course, differing positioning of your lips, after some practice you should be able to make a whistling sound by blowing past the grass blade.
Now do the thing same sort of thing with your tongue and teeth, adjusting the distances and pressure until you get a bit of sound. From there, it’s just practice until your find “the groove.”
Fingers in your mouth’s corners may or may not help. I’ve seen several placements for that, too. I do two or three variations of teeth and lips whistles, but it’s hard to describe them in detail. Just work on the notion that “I will make sound here.” Keep at it until you do.
Wow. I dunno what to tell you about learning to whistle loudly, I was just dropping in to say, I couldn’t whistle at all until the age of 18, and blowing a bubble with gum took until I was 12. I thought I was a freak in both cases. Glad to know there are others out there like me.
My problem in both those cases, when people were trying to teach me, is that they were completely unable to describe the position of their tongues/lips etc. I had to stumble upon it myself. Maybe that would be the best in this case too.
Purse your lips like you’re kissing a blowfish, and then blow a tight stream of air. You should get some sound from that. After that it’s all practice.
(1) Bring the middle finger and thumb of your right hand together (like you’re making the “OK” sign - except with the middle finger). Keep all the other fingers extended and out of the way.
(2) Stick the tips of your middle finger/thumb (pressed together) into your mouth - up to about the first joint. Rest them on your tongue.
(3) Rotate your hand downward so that the the palm of your hand is almost touching your chin. It can be actually touching, in point of fact.
(4) Here’s the tricky part. You’ve got your hand in your mouth. Fingers touching, and your hand rotated so that your touched fingers are pointing up. What you have to do now is hard to explain, but here goes: press the tip of your tongue into the back of your lower teeth. Now flex your tongue upward so it’s bent into a downward facing U.
The object is to make a sort of tiny triangle between your fingers and your tongue, with the tongue being the bottom of the triangle.
(5) Blow air through that tiny triangle.
It takes practice - and it’s tough to describe in words. But there you go.
Here’s a somewhat helpful youtube link to help you visualize it. (And there’s more videos where that came from).
ETA: Let me assure you this method works. Last weekend in Vegas, the bellman or whatever stepped away from the taxi stand and there were no taxis because they all cue up about 100 yards away and he whistles for them. I just threw my fingers in my mouth and called one up (much to my amusement and the taxi driver’s amusement when he figured out it was me calling him up and not the bellman with his whistle).
Thank you all for the responses so far. I’m looking forward to trying Zeldar’s and Dr. Who’s methods. Thankfully, I should be able to practice this without any negative consequences. Unlike when I was in the process of learning to blow bubbles and shot a wad of bubble gum out of my mouth and onto the floor of the car while driving on a road trip. Still makes my wife giggle.
I wanna learn too! I’ll practice every time I see this thread. I read somewhere that making a small hole with the tips of your front teeth and your fingers forms a beveled barrier which acts as a whistle. I’m making some progress and some vaguely whistling bursts are starting to evolve. Does it hurt to have huge front teeth? Do you have to trim your nails? Wish me luck. I’ll report on my progress if I succeed.
You know how to do it now. Practice. That’s what I did: Asked how it’s done, and then practiced. Now I whistle like hell. You should hear me. Man, I’m whistleling.
If you want to learn it so you can whistle at waiters, my advice is DON’T. When I was tending bar, whistlers found they had to wait a long time for a drink. Whistling is how you call animals.
It took me forever to figure out that the main reason I can’t whistle is that my top front teeth are slightly crooked and I have a few milimeter underbite. I can’t bite the front of my teeth together and not leave gaps, which prevents the necessary airflow blockage.
Just throwing that out there incase you were in the same boat.
