Thought I would start a tooting thread in which people can share their tooting experiences. Is tooting a technique you like to use? Are there didges you play that have much better toots than others? How many levels of toots do you use when playing a particular didge? What toot notes does your didge play? Do you circular breathe while tooting? And anything else you would care to share on the subject
of tooting.

I began my didge playing experience by tooting, as I suppose many people do, since I came from playing brass wind instruments. When I finally succeeded in droning properly I kind of lost interest in tooting, for a time. The first cylindrical ABS didges I made also tooted quite poorly. The quality of toots improved only when I got into sectionals using three different diameters of pipe. The best toots by far came from my Bass Didge in G. One great thing about the bass didge is that it's quite easy to blow a range of three toots. By good fortune the three toots on my bass didge in G ended up being C G D, all notes that fall nicely into the key of G:

Three Toots on the Bass Didge in G

Toots on most didges I've played start sounding very strained when you get above the second one, but since the bass didge is so low, it is not a strain to toot three levels at least. Toots are still not a favorite technique with me, as they still often end up sounding a bit forced...like interruptions by irritated motorists!

I found Ed Drury's Tutorial Etudes on the Toot to be very helpful. The sound samples for this tutorial require RealPlayer, but if you're like me and are quite appalled at the monsterous size of the current RealPlayer release (as well as its annoying invasiveness) you can play these samples on a smaller, older version of RealPlayer which can be found in the Real Legacy Software Archive. I suggest Version 8 which is only 4.6 MB.