I have been toying for a while with the idea of making a whistle that uses a chromatic scale around F. Has anyone else thought of this (silly question)? It looks like it may be possible to do with as few as 8 holes, if I can get a couple of cross fingerings working. I would also like to be able to play it in 3 octaves. I think that can be done with an “octave hole” maybe with a key operated with the thumb. I could go on and on, but I wanted t post a fairly vague idea and see what thinking there is out there.
No one has ever asked but a Chromatic Whistle could be made Alto in F or anything else just as well.
I have a spreadsheet now to make Chromatic whistles starting in any key that I want to make it in.
Spreadsheet: http://www.tinwhistles.us/flute-chromatic.xls
The High-D Chromatic hasn’t came into fruition yet because the keys are a whole lot smaller - harder to make
Errr. It might be fun to experiment with making a chromatic whistle, but why bother when the recorder already exists. 10 holes if you count the double holes on the two low notes.
Who’s experimenting? I’ve been making them for eight years. Experiment is over.
Chromatic whistles have bigger toneholes than Recorders for a different kind of sound and they play play a straight diatonic scale when you don’t use the keys so it plays like a whistle. And you can change the headjoint to make into a flute.
o Voicing is usually quite different from whistle voicing (though it need not be completely so).
o Shift of register break to D-E and the need to half-hole the thumb significantly affect the approach to phrasing.
o Cross-fingered high B and lack of high C# impair playing at the top of the 2nd register.
If recorders met the needs of whistle players for extending chromatic capability and key flexibility (AMaj, GDor, etc.) , they’d be ubiquitous in the core tradition, and they’re not. The trad ethos is clever that way.
Honestly, I think the 10 hole fife scheme and the like are equally clumsy for trad whistle, unless deliberately playing outside the trad envelope. IMO, what the trad whistler wants is a proven 6-key simple system analogous to flute or chanter, available in their whistle of choice. The last part is important. Examples like Sweet’s 3-key whistle were apparently a flop on the market. Maybe because 3 keys are only halfway there, maybe because the Sweet whistle is an outlier for trad players anyway. Who knows.
The first thing I did when I started thinking of this again was to head over to Daniel’s site and have a look around. Though, I did not find the chromatic instruments.
If I take a G whistle, then all I have to add is a C# to get the D scale. If I add a F, then I can get a C scale as well. 8 holes, 8 fingers… If I can get a couple of cross fingerings working, too, then I may be able to add a couple of more notes. Who knows whether they would be useful.
I want to keep it simple. Trying to avoid keys. I want to play anything that I currently can on a D to be able to still play the trad stuff on it. (The D whistles are a little small to be making a bunch more holes in.) I picked a G because of the size and the proximity to D and C. Suppose I took my trusty G (that I made in a previous life and I don’t want to ruin it) and poked a C# hole in it. Do you think I could get the same notes that I can from a high D whistle? I think that there would be some upper notes that would not be possible. Does that make sense?
One last thing. It seems as though it should be possible to poke an “octave” hole in a whistle that will allow a lower instrument to get at least part of a 3rd octave. It would have something to do with the nodes and anti-nodes in the whistle, but I don’t really know how that works, or if it is even possible. Has anyone ever tried it?
Thanks for read this ramble. All the best!
-=chuck=-
Since one can play most well-voiced whistles well into the 3rd 8ve - to at least the high A fingering, with cross-fingering akin to that for the Baroque Flute, why would you need an 8ve “speaker” hole? Such things have never been generally adopted on flutes and whistles because they don’t help much, and less so than other things one could be doing with the available fingers. More to the point would be an Eb hole for the R 4th finger to facilitate some/more of those 3rd 8ve fingerings… and F natural is a bit of a swine/just not there without half-holing/having a Bb tone-hole to vent (Bb thumb-hole is not a bad addition on smaller whistles, BTW, though having it precludes a C nat thumb-hole)…
I agree with Jem, the third octave is there in most whistles, not that most whistles are really bearable playing up there. The Burke wide-bore brass actually sounds good up to around the third G.
Rather than change the way that whistle makers make their whistles, why not learn to half-hole? It’s really not that difficult, just takes a little practice. Less practice than getting the music right.
o Voicing is usually quite different from whistle voicing (though it need not be completely so).
o Shift of register break to D-E and the need to half-hole the thumb significantly affect the approach to phrasing.
o Cross-fingered high B and lack of high C# impair playing at the top of the 2nd register.
Yup, but the poster said nothing about the basic sound issues. I assume you’re talking soprano recorders here BTW. I think it is the voicing issue that has kept most folks from playing recorder in traditional music. They just don’t sound right to many people’s ear. There are some players though, notably Dick Hensold, who can make them work.
The second and third bullet points really go to fingering and phrasing, not tone.
I’m talking C fingering here, for reference. That would be: soprano, tenor, contrabass, garklein recorders. Analogous to D whistle.
Sure, it’s both, voicing and fingering. Paraphrasing Samuel Johnson: “A recorder playing ITM is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” Or perhaps: “A gentleman is a man who can play ITM on the recorder … and doesn’t.”
You can make it work, and there are tricks. But IMO it’s a lot of effort unless you really need more chromatic firepower than the usual whistle techniques give you. For example, I know some hornpipes and French musette tunes that are definitely saner on recorder.
Sorry for my sloppy “soprano fingering” reference. Put it down to too late at night.
And, to clarify, I’m not one of those folks who argues that the recorder should be the basic ITM instrument. I was a lo level professional recorder player for some years. But, I play whistles for ITM for the reasons you mention. They are not the same.
cboody, I think you and I are pretty much on the same wavelength.
You know, I while back I bought an Adri’s Traumflöte (soprano recorder) for the express purpose of having a “chromatic whistle” to use in sessions. It’s a wide bore Renaissance/modern hybrid, and is voiced much closer to some whistles than to a typical Baroque recorder.
It’s a lovely instrument in itself, but somehow still no cigar for Irish trad, at least to my ear. As soon as I pick up a recorder, even with the tricks that I know, a little “recorder” switch gets flipped in my head, and the darn thing still ends up sounding like a recorder. It’s not a bad sound at all, just not what my session mates prefer to hear from me.*
[* What they often prefer to hear from me is complete silence, but that’s a different story … ]
I bought an Ardi Traumflöte because it was an amazing sound for a recorder. Got a soprano and an alto. I love the sound, but as you say they won’t match up for ITM playing. I’ve often wondered what it is about the tone quality. After all, whistle and flute are very different instruments with very different sounds and they both “fit.” Is it just what we are used to or…
Anyway we’ve probably highjacked this topic 'way to much so I’ll stop now…
Well I don’t know what the relevance of a fiddle player is to this topic unless you are intimating that a fretless fiddle is comparable to a key free whistle.
