I bought a low g chieftain in my local music store. After 5 minutes of playing I noticed the 7th note of the scale was out of pitch. Id say nearly a semitone flat. It was noticeable any time I went up and down the scale. I brought it back and they had one more in stock. This might sound strange but the second one was flat also. I compared both flat notes with a Shaw low g and it was even more obvious. Now this is my first time in 28 years of playing basic tin whistles that I decided to buy a chieftain. Am I wrong here but is what I have described uncommon. The woman in the music store said she would send them back for a replacement. Was I just very unlucky or is this common.Any suggestions would be most welcome.
I can not help with buying a chieftain low g. Perhaps you could contact Phil Hardy directly at Kerry Whistles and inquire about your experience with two different low g whistles. Maybe there is an explanation. Might be worth finding out whether flat is common or a rarity. Good luck and let us know what you find.
Thank you for the reply. I am really just wondering if I was very unlucky or if it common enough to try a whistle and discover that one note is out of pitch. I know flutes can be out of tune and be tuned but my flute is just one bad note. Is this common.
“the 7th note of the scale was nearly a semitone flat.”
Do you mean the note with all fingers off? The note that would be C sharp on a D whistle?
That’s normally a hair flat, and I prefer it that way, because the note I want to be bang-on is the crossfingered C natural
oxx ooo
and to get that note exactly in tune with normal blowing, the C#
ooo ooo
on most whistles is a bit flat, perhaps 10 cents or so.
A semitone flat, like you say, would mean that the open note
ooo ooo
would be C natural, which is very strange. (C natural is a semitone lower than C sharp.)
Unless by “semitone” you mean a quartertone, that is, 25 cents flat, a note halfway between C natural and C sharp.
Anyhow my experience with Chieftains has been that they’re hit-and-miss. Some are quite good, some not so much.
Hi I had exactly the same problem with a Chieftan low G which I bought about 6 months ago. It was so far out of tune that it played somewhere between F and G. No matter what I do I just cannot get it to play in tune.
With mass produced whistles (chieftain among them) it wouldn’t be surprising to find a number of whistles with exactly the same problem, since they are made in batches. It’s easy enough to make a mistake and not realize it when measuring and setting up for the drilling of tone holes, and with production numbers being done, you have the same mistake carried to each instrument in the batch once the machinery set-up is done.