Pipe (instrument) Pipe (instrument) A pipe is a tubular wind instrument in general, or various specific wind instruments. The word is an onomatopoeia, and comes from the tone which can resemble that of a bird chirping. Fipple flutes are found in many cultures around the world. Often with six holes, the shepherd's pipe is a common pastoral image. Shepherds often piped both to soothe the sheep and to amuse themselves. Modern manufactured six-hole folk pipes are referred to as pennywhistle or tin whistle. The recorder is a form of pipe, often used as a rudimentary instructional musical instrument at schools, but so
Tin whistle tonic note of the first register; this makes it harder to accidentally drop into the first register and helps to correct pitch. Recorders perform this by "pinching" open the dorsal thumb hole. Various other notes (relatively flat or sharp with respect to those of the major scale) can be accessed by "cross fingering" techniques, and all the notes (except the lowest of each octave/register) can be flattened by "half holing". Perhaps the most effective and most used cross fingering is that which produces a flattened form of the seventh note (B instead of B on a C whistle, for example,