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there are 3 Walton’s that I know of:
The little black ( I usually add an extra word to that name, but I’ll pass for fear of being called racist). There are variations of Little Black, including Guinness, etc.
The Mellow D, which has a wide bore.
The Walton’s D, which doesn’t appear to have a name at all.
The only one I’ve ever found useful is the Mellow D, but it needs tweaking to bring notes into tune.
Tom.
Being seriously broke, I’ve had to rely on the generosity of some of you kind folks to provide hand-me-down whistles. In the process, I’ve received five Waltons: a standard D, an old mellow D (not labeled as such), a Little Black and two Cs.
What I’ve observed is that even among the same type, there are variations in both the mouthpiece and tube. The variation in the mouthpiece is mainly that the position of the windcutter may be higher or lower in relation to the windway. The variation in the tubes is the usual one, that some are better in tune than others.
I’ve had excellent results tweaking the mellow D and one of the Cs, both of which are now wonderful whistles. However, the tweaks I’ve used on these whistles are technically challenging, as tweaks go. But even without tweaking, there have been at least three pretty nice whistles in the batch.
The ones with lower windcutters have been generally the better players among the ones I’ve tried. If you sight into the mouth end of the whistle against a bright background and see that the windcutter is no more than 30% or so of the windway height above the bottom of the windway, if my experience is any indication, you’ve a pretty good chance that’s going to be one of the better ones. (However, one of the whistles had a windcutter that was actually below the floor of the windway. That wasn’t a good player at all, but I removed some plastic from the underside of the windcutter with a triangular file to bring it just above the windway floor and ended up with a super whistle.)
Aside from being out of tune, the Little Black is one of the ones that played well untweaked.
Best wishes,
Jerry
P.S. It appears to me that the Little Black head is the same as a standard D head except for the color. The Little Black tube is aluminum and the standard is brass. The two metals do sound different.
P.P.S. The mellow D, with the same bore tube and mouthpiece as the standard C, has a less complex sound than the standard D. I would call it purer in the sense of less overtones, sweeter than the standard D. The standard D is similar to the sound of a Generation D. If you have good examples of both the standard and mellow Ds, you’ll have two nice whistles, each with its own personality (and a good Little Black would give you a third variation).