I have always enjoyed modern celtic styled music and traditional irish, scottish, welsh, music (mostley the airs like Star of the County Down, Amhrán na Leabhar, An Feochán etc…). After visiting a local irish sessions a few times I decided to take up the whistle. My goal is to learn a few tunes and become proficient enough to incorporate the whistle into my own music.
So I bought a sweetone on Ebay. While waiting for it to arrive and being impatient, I bought an acorn (made by Oak?) from Sam Ash so I could get started. The acorn stays at home and the sweetone in my car so I can practise on breaks at work. I find the acorn harder to control, more squeaking and less forgiving than the sweetone. I’m sure that has something to do with my inexperience. after some time I am getting along OK with either but I wanted to find one whistle I can live with and then just stick to that one.
Last week I bought a few random whistles. A C/D set from Woodnote and an Ebay lot containing some sweetones a clarke original, a susato, and a dixon.
I was hoping the woodnote set would work out. They looked good and having a match set would have been cool and my search would have ended there. However, although the D whistle sounds pretty in the lower octave it is hard to play in the second octave and I can’t get the C# to sound at all. If there is a possible tweak to fix this I would like to hear it. The C whistle plays fine and I will keep it for now.
Out of alll the others I honestly liked the sweetones the best. With the Kildare I seem to have to blow harder on certain notes to get them to sound and the upper notes sound shrill (again I take with a grain of salt due to my limited experience) but the intonation is pretty dead on as checked with a chromatic tuner. The dixon is quiet, fairly easy to play and has a very pretty sound playing slightly sharp overall. The Clarke original sounds like the whistles I remember from my childhood but the sweetones are just easier to play. The intonation on all were good with the Kildare being near perfect.
So with this brief sojourn I have decided, I think, to keep the sweetones, the C woodnote, and the dixon, ditch everything else not buy anything else (yeah, sure) and practise
I Thought about that but my saxophone experience has taught me that it’s best to learn the nuances of your set up and quit chasing the magic bullet. In saxophone lore it’s all about the mouthpiece. This mouthpiece is better, that mouthpiece will improve my playing. Upteen mouthpieces later you realize what you need is to quit looking for mouthpieces and practise. I’m planning on trying to avoid this with the whistles.
Very wise indeed! The same advice applies generally: I can recall many heated conversations on trumpet, clarinet and low brass forums about this or that mouthpiece being the end-all be-all. Same goes for the whistle. Ultimately, if you ask a dozen whistlers for their opinion of a good whistle to start out on, you’ll get at least 29 different opinions.
I say if you’re happy with what you’ve got, you don’t really need to worry about those 29 other whistles. Just keep working on the ones you’ve chosen. As you play them, you’ll come to know their quirks of blowing and intonation, just as you did on the sax.
For what it’s worth, I think the whistles you’ve got are actually pretty good. Susato generally gets pretty good ratings; there’s nothing wrong with Clarke or Dixon either. Woodnote, as I understand it, is a Susato knock-off – some people have an ethical issue with supporting knock-off makers – but it seems to be rated favorably enough.
My usual advice would be to buy a really good whistle that is within your price range and then follow your own advice to practice! But if you’re happy with the current stable, then I don’t see much point in getting more. Except…that you will probably some time want to experiment with lower (and possibly higher) keyed whistles. You don’t have to burn that particular bridge till you cross the Rubicon, but that might be a good time to look into a “nicer”, hand crafted whistle.
Though there’s wisdom there, the analogy really doesn’t hold, I feel, and here’s why.
Those ‘umpteen mouthpieces’ were probably all high quality professional mouthpieces, of the sort that good players go through searching for the Holy Grail of mouthpieces. Indeed he could have picked ANY of them and focused on learning how to get the most out of it.
The whistle analogy would be to go out and buy a Copeland and a Sindt and a Goldie and a Burke and several other whistles in the $250 to $1000 range. Indeed the beginner might be better served to buy any ONE of those, and learn to play it well.
Inexpensive whistles are an entirely different matter. Their quality control can be practically nonexistent, so that apparently identical whistles from the same maker can vary from quite good to utterly unplayable. Many have terrible voicing and/or terrible intonation. These whistles are often marketed essentially as toys.
Yes with practice a player might learn to make a horrid whistle sound somewhat less horrid. But just as with orchestral instruments, high-quality whistles are EASIER to play: more solid stable low notes; easier to obtain high notes; more nimble ‘action’ etc etc.
I often see analogies with the Scottish pipes, my first instrument and still my main one. After around 37 years playing I finally got a REALLY good instrument, and time and again I discover that various specific things that beginners struggle with are MUCH easier on my instrument than on the good (but not sublime) instruments which beginners are playing.
But a sublime whistle doesn’t have to cost much! Still the best whistle I’ve ever played is the Generation C which I bought around 1980. I’ve recently fallen in love with Sindts but I have to admit that there’s a special magic in that Gen C that puts it a hair above the Sindts. (The Sindts, in turn, are clearly superior to most of the whistle I’d been playing.)
You make a good point but I think the Copelands, Sindt, Burkes, etc are more comparable to the handmade mouthpieces that guys like Phil Barone. Johanes Gerber, or Theo Wanne make. I never have ventured into that realm. Although they are beautiful works of art, particularly the Wannes and Gerbers, I have never seen the value as a workhorse mouthpieces. My mouthpiece ventures were all in the under $150.00 range. The Zagar that I play on tenor is a very consistent mouthpiece commercially made in Australia. I own four and they play identical. My alto piece is some unknown maker that I had tweaked by a mouthpiece guy named Brian Powell.
With that said the real value might be in the freeman tweaked whistles. I think I will probably check one of those out for sure. My thing is, I don’t want to make a career out of it, just find a whistle that I like that is consistent and buy a couple. Maybe a few different keys, C, low G, Low D and let that be that. I’ll be sticking to whistles under $100.00
I appreciate all the input from everybody.
On side note related to actually playing the thing. I think I have “The Wind That Shakes the Barley”, “Silver Spear”, and “The Maid Behind the Bar” under my fingers. Not quite up to session speed but close
I’m not sure I follow entirely, because Burkes for example are made in large numbers and I think I’ve heard it said that both Burke and Sindt use CNC machines. (Please correct me if I’m wrong.) Colin Goldie, perhaps, is a closer analogy because he voices his whistles to suit the individual’s preferences.
Mass-produced $8 whistles (usually mediocre, often horrid, sometimes wonderful) would be more comparable to the sort of mouthpieces which come on cheap Chinese-made saxophones. Yes if you played through dozens of them, hundreds of them, you might find one that (by accident) is very good.
I’m reminded of the friend who back in the 1980s worked in a guitar shop that sold what at that time were bottom-line guitars, $100 Yamahas. That shop sold those things regularly, and my friend would play EVERY one the shop got in. He told me “I think that sooner or later they’ll screw up and make a really good one” and they did! One came through that played like a $1000 Martin and he bought it.
Ah you say “just find a whistle that’s consistent” but that’s the rub! It seems that getting the voicing on a whistle to be very even over the gamut is not easily achieved. It’s exactly what the very best whistles do well. It will be difficult to find them in that under-$100 price range, save for the Freeman Tweaked whistles and the Killarney. (I have a Killarney on order to see if the hype is true.) Except of course if you get lucky and find a cheap Generation or Feadog that’s wonderful. I should include Dixon: I got a chance to try around a dozen Dixon high Ds with the thick metal tube body and injection moulded plastic head and they were good; one in particular was very good. However the Killarney would probably be the best-voiced high D in that price range.
I purposely didn’t include Susatos. I’ve owned Susatos in all the keys between Low C and High D (even Ab and Gb) and there’s just something about their voicing I’ve never cared for, especially with the higher ones. (I think the thing with Susatos and Burkes is having a bigger bore ID-to-length ratio, making the higher notes persnickety.) IMHO Susatos get better as they get lower and the Low D and Low C are pretty good.
