Does anyone know a maker in the USA that is willing to modify aluminum whistles, either by slightly altering hole sizes or adding undercutting? It’s a long shot, I know, especially for the undercutting. I’m wondering if anyone on the planet does this other than Colin Goldie, and it’s looking like no one does.
I’d try doing it myself, but apparently that’s a really bad idea given what a delicate art it is.
Why do you feel the need?
I’m quite picky when it comes to intonation, and I have some whistles with unique properties that I love playing, but a couple of notes are off.
I’m wondering if anyone on the planet does this other than Colin Goldie
Undercutting and voicing of toneholes is a common practice in making wind instruments. It is not some dark art. In fairness, a lot of metal (high) whistles will have walls too thin to use the technique effectively so it is not something mentioned very often in whistling context.
You will have to wonder which makers would be willing to modify instruments other than their own.
If they are made by small independent makers and arent mass produced cheaper whistles, perhaps it’s worth reaching out to the maker directly first and asking? I would be more insulted if someone disfigured my work and rendered it unplayable rather than ask if I could do it first. If you ask first, you’ll know what is possible within the capacity of the voicing and intonation of the instrument. Sometimes there isn’t really any room for adjustment without affecting the timbre of the instrument itself. The traits you like about your whistles right now may disappear if altered for intonation purposes, but you won’t know unless you reach out first.
Also, if the intonation has issues in general, I know that I would personally want to know so that I could potentially rectify those issues in the future, or at least make the tuning compromises known in description otherwise
That’s a decent point. The problem is, 1) the maker is in Europe, and I would rather not spend an insane amount on import fees, taxes, etc., and 2) even if this maker accepted the criticism I have of his work, he doesn’t do undercutting, so I doubt he’d ever fix some of these issues even if I asked him. But I guess it can’t hurt to ask.
Yes I suppose that’s a real possibility if somebody doesn’t know what they’re doing.
But I’ve had to modify many whistles over the years because they simply weren’t tuned well as they came.
It’s strange, but even makers of high reputation will sometimes make an instrument with a wonky note.
Over the years I’ve encountered some odd things with various makes of aluminium Low Whistles.
There was one where the bell-note was considerably flatter than all the notes produced with the fingerholes. My options were
to put electrical tape covering around 1/3 of each finger-hole, or
chop the bottom to bring the whole thing into tune.
I chopped the bottom. Did I disfigure the maker’s work? No, I did a clean job. Did I render it unplayable? No, I rendered it playable.
A couple Low Whistles I’ve owned had the tube too short so that the bell-note was sharper than all the notes produced with the fingerholes. My options were
to carve out all the fingerholes to bring their notes into line with the bell-note, or
to attach a tube onto the bottom to lengthen the tube.
On one of them I played it for a few years with a telescoping tube slid over the body at the bottom, before finally biting the bullet and carving out all the fingerholes. Once again it was a clean job which rendered a useless whistle perfectly in tune.
One of the strangest out-of-tune Low Whistles had the three upper-hand holes placed to produce notes at one pitch, but the three lower-hand holes placed to produce notes at a different pitch.
I think I know what the maker (a quite famous maker) was attempting to do: bring the bottom hand higher to make the reach easier. But leaving the upper-hand holes in the same place made the lower-hand holes a quartertone sharp of the upper-hand holes and the bell-note. I just put electrical tape on the three lower-hand holes which made the whistle fairly playable.
These are the outliers. The usual thing is to have just one or two of the fingerholes produce notes that are flat or sharp in relation to all the other notes. If it’s just one sharp note I’ll put tape on it, if it’s just one flat note I’ll carve it.
The goal, the only goal, is to produce in-tune music. If an instrument won’t play in tune it’s useless to me.
What’s wrong with the whistle? It might be a very easy fix.
Mainly a flat F#. But high G is a tiny bit sharp already, so I want to sharpen F# (especially in the first octave) without sharpening second-octave G at all.
The easier thing to fix is that it also has a flat C#, because it’s tuned so that OXX OOO is an in-tune Cnat. I don’t like this, because I play Cnat as OXX OXX anyway. Honestly, I could probably fix this issue myself, by simply making the top hole slightly bigger. It’s mainly the F# that I’m worried about.
Not to open this can of worms again, and I’m sure you’ve already checked this, but when you say a “flat F#,” is it flatter than what would be expected in just intonation? Even the whistle isn’t fully tuned that way, I’ve found that many have that flatter/sweeter major 3rd.
Yeah, I’m ok with a slightly flat F# for that very reason. But this one is just too flat. It’s flat enough that I can’t really play in F# minor, for example, and even A major sometimes sounds funny. Call me nit-picky, but it sticks out like a sore thumb to me.
To put things in more objective terms, F# with just intonation is about 13 cents flatter than F# with equal temperament tuning. On this whistle, F# is 20+ cents flat in the first octave, and 18+ in the second.
Assuming it’s a D whistle, and working under the assumption that the octaves are true, and setting aside the C#/Cnat issue, is this what you have?
Bottom D: baseline pitch
E: baseline pitch
F#: a bit flat
G: a bit sharp
A: baseline pitch
B: baseline pitch
If this were my whistle I wouldn’t hesitate to carve out F# a tad, and I’d put a bit of tape on Hole 4 to flatten G a tad.
Presumably the entire gamut would be bang-on then.
If you don’t want to live with ever-present tape on Hole 4 you could use the G produced by Hole 4 as your new baseline pitch, which involves bringing the bell-note and the notes produced by all the other holes up to that pitch.
I had a wonderful-playing Generation C with that exact issue that I played for many years with tape on Hole 4 until one rainy day I bit the bullet and chopped the bottom and carved out Holes 2, 3, 5, and 6. I left Hole 1 alone because I WANT that note to be flat in order to facilitate crossfingered C natural.
That’s the way I want my whistles to be. I hate flute and whistle makers ruining C natural in order to make C# match Equal Temperament.
Since I used to do a lot of Studio Work I needed my instruments to be in tune to Equal Temperament.
But for sure if you’re playing in a pure Trad environment you’ll want the F# to be that flatter/sweeter Major 3rd.
Thing is, it’s easy to transform an Equal Temperament whistle into a Just Intonation one, you just do this
Going the other way, not so easy!
Thanks for the advice! The only issue is that only second octave G is sharp - and only about 10 cents sharp. First octave G is, if anything, slightly flat (I have to really blow hard to bring it into tune), so I don’t want to make it flatter than it is. Plus, I don’t really like the look of tape from an aesthetic perspective. So that’s two reasons I don’t think tape is a solution to the G issues. Instead, I’d like to just leave the Gs as they are and fix the F#s in isolation. And the only way I know of to do that is by undercutting (or maybe overcutting).
I’ve found a few makers who have told me they’d be happy to do this for me, but no one in the USA.
Yeah, I used to agree with that sentiment, until I changed my fingering for C natural. But I understand not wanting to do that.
So your whistle has a problem with the octave relationships, not a problem with the fingerholes.
No carving or taping of fingerholes, or shortening or lengthening the bottom of the tube, can fix bad built-in octaves.
Now it’s true with traditional wooden flutes, which have much greater wall thicknesses and much deeper chimneys, things can be done with the tone-holes to create a pitch differential between the low octave and the 2nd octave. Makers would also introduce “perturbations” into the bore at various points to make fine tuning adjustments between the octaves.
But whistles made out of metal tubing don’t have “chimneys” per se, at least not deep enough to do anything much.
Trevor Robinson, in his book The Amateur Wind Instrument Maker, says in his chapter on wooden flutes:
“Notes in the upper octave are apparently more sensitive to hole diameter than notes in the lower octave, so if the lower note is in tune, but its octave is flat, the tone hole can be enlarged enough to sharpen the octave without noticeably sharpening the fundamental.”
Whether this works as well, or works at all, on thin-walled whistles, I have no idea.
It’s a thick-walled aluminum whistle, so it does have chimneys, and undercutting is theoretically possible. For example, both Colin Goldie and Mazur undercut on their aluminum whistles. I believe Dante does as well.
My thought was that I know undercutting can fix flatness of a particular note in one octave without affecting the other octave that much. So I figured maybe it could also be used to sharpen an F# without affecting the G too much. Since F# is flat in both octaves (especially the first), maybe undercutting the hole in both directions would sharpen that particular note in both octaves. And perhaps doing so wouldn’t affect the tuning of G at all in either octave.
But all this is completely speculative. I was just trying to come up with a way to fix this issue.
All I know is that some makers of aluminum whistles have told me they have methods for modifying a whistle that fix a single flat note without affecting the others. What exact techniques they’d use to accomplish this are not clear, but I was speculating that perhaps undercutting is one method that could work.
A Low Whistle which has relatively thick walls (as aluminium whistles go) has walls much thinner than a traditional wooden flute, still not thick enough to have much of a chimney.
I think the thickest walls I’ve had on a Low Whistle were the plastic Susato ones.
Keep in mind that Baroque flutes, which used these tricks to fix tuning, had small fingerholes, so the chimney might be around as deep as the hole is wide. So it’s not just the wall thickness but the ratio of hole diameter to chimney depth.
What I did notice, when I recorded myself playing a dozen or so makes of Low D Whistle just to hear how they recorded, was that the Susato Low D, the only whistle having a thick plastic tube rather than an ordinary metal tube, was the only whistle to retain character in the 2nd octave.
All the metal-tube Low D’s, regardless of how complex or rich a tone they had in the low octave, became bland in the 2nd octave.
But that was before I got an MK, which does have a somewhat complex dirty tone in the 2nd octave, especially 2nd octave E, perhaps the whistle’s best note.
How thick are the walls on your whistle?
What make is it?
All of Colin Goldie’s whistles - low and high - have undercutting on various notes. The wall thickness on Goldie high Ds is about the same as a Susato - so yeah, the chimneys are big for a whistle, but still relatively small compared to a flute’s chimneys. But undercutting still makes a significant difference; if it didn’t, I’m sure Colin wouldn’t bother doing it.
The whistle I’m currently talking about retuning is a Kerry Busker, which has about the same wall thickness as my Goldie (and my Susato); hence, I see no reason why it couldn’t be undercut. In another post, I praised this whistle, because I really do absolutely love it. The only slight imperfection is this F# / C# problem. Other than that it’s pretty much perfect for the style of whistle it is.
What’s strange is to have E, F#, A, and B give true octaves but for there to be a clear pitch differential between the octaves on the single note G.
Is that how your Kerry Busker is tuned?
Generally with whistles what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, at least with the notes emitting through fingerholes (Bottom D and Middle D are sometimes outliers).
In any case I play Goldies as well and the walls are just too thin to have much effect. Yes you can undercut them but it’s going to be of negligible effect, not on par with, say, undercutting on wooden Baroque flutes, or uilleann chanters.
I should note that the Burke Viper Low D that I played for a few years had an odd tuning quirk: B was noticeably sharper in the 2nd octave than in the low octave, while everything else was bang-on.
Michael Burke had mentioned in an interview using perturbations in the bore of his Low D to adjust the tuning, so I’m guessing that this sharp High B was intentional.
And that happens to be a tuning quirk of many Concert D uilleann chanters! Pick your poison: if you put Low B at its Just Intonation -16 pitch then High B is around Equal Temperament, but if you need Low B at Equal Temperament (like I did, doing Studio Work) then High B is too sharp. (My ideal uilleann Concert D chanter would have a thumb-key for 2nd octave B.)
In any case getting a whistle to do that probably wasn’t easy, and makes me think that Burke had collaborated with a piper.
I dunno, as far as I can tell, octave difference isn’t always uniform for all notes. I have plenty of whistles that have funky characteristics like this. On my Morneaux, for example, high G and low G are perfectly in tune with each other, but high E and F# are flat in comparison to low E and F#. On my Susato Kildare, the entire second octave is flat in comparison to the first, but problem is way worse on F# than on any other note. Etc.
I don’t see why this would be surprising, given what you posted earlier about hole size. Notice it said that changing the size of a hole seems to affect one octave more than the other. Given that most whistles have significantly different hole sizes depending on the note, it stands to reason that some notes would have slightly different octave spread than others.
Also, on my Busker, it’s not just the G that is sharper in the second octave. As I mentioned, the F# is also a lot sharper in the second octave (and is thus more in tune than it is in the first).
In any case I play Goldies as well and the walls are just too thin to have much effect. Yes you can undercut them but it’s going to be of negligible effect, not on par with, say, undercutting on wooden Baroque flutes, or uilleann chanters.
Then why does Colin bother undercutting? All I know is that Goldie whistles have by far the best tuning of any whistles I’ve played, and he most certainly uses undercutting. Maybe this is a coincidence, and his whistles would all be just as good without any undercutting. But if that were the case, I don’t see why he’d bother doing it. Speaking to him over the phone, he’s definitely been adamant in claiming that undercutting is beneficial and can fix tuning imperfections.
I’m sure you’re correct that the effect is small in comparison to the potential effect of undercutting on a flute. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a noticeable or beneficial effect on whistles.
Also, keep in mind that, although it’s true that Goldie high Ds have walls that are far thinner than the walls of a flute, they’re also smaller instruments overall, so you’d expect a smaller change in the chimney to have a larger effect on them. Put differently, if you scaled a Goldie high D up proportionally so it was the size of a flute, it would have pretty thick walls indeed (though admittedly still a lot thinner than a flute’s).