if you overblow a D’ while fingering xxx xxx instead of oxx xxx,
you may hit an A’, not a D".
From this A (xxx xxx), you can go up B (xxx xxo) and with quite a push maybe C# (xxx xoo).
I find this can be useful, esp. with those whistles getting really shrill above G’ in second register. The third register A and B seem more balanced to me.
There are also tunes where it can be just comfortable–the start of second part in Chicken Reel comes to my mind (g a g d g d A B).
Does anyone else use (or attempts to) this “false register”?
The only trace I found of such use is on Silkstone’s page.
Look at his alternative fingerings for A’, B’, C#’ :
I have used it for fun sometimes. I haven’t study a lot of the physics of whistles, so this is just a theory of mine, but it seems that the overblowing is just working off of the overtone series. You know, there is the fundamental note, then the octave, then the fifth above that, then the octave above that other octave, then a major third above that, then a fifth above the octave, then a flat seventh, etc. it goes on forever theoretically. The reason I ask this is because it just didn’t seem like a coincidence that I could play on a D whistle the D, then the d an octave up, then the a, then the d’’ another octave up, then an f#‘’, and then really stretching it I can get the a’', all with the same fingering. Can someone confirm this or am I just crazy? Anyway, overtones are fun to play with!
picardy
Here is the harmonic series written out partially if you don’t know what I’m talking about. The usual write it in C but it works for any note out.
Yeah, it is very cool. One of my nicer acoustic guitars (it is rosewood which tend to produce rich harmonics), I can get to about the 11th or 12th note in the harmonic series. You get to a point where you can’t get any more. Plus they really start sounding sick. Now on a piano, if you stuck your hand in side the instrument and played harmonics on one of the low stings, I’m sure you could keep going up the series for a while. The first few on guitar are very nice to use. On whistle, if we didn’t have overtones, we couldn’t play more than one octave (since the notes at the first octave are simply the 2 second notes in the harmonic of the series.)
I discovered the A by accident during a recent attempt to build a low D whistle. I got the windway cut and was trying to tune the bell note. I was blowing into it the way I do my Clarke original–way too hard, as it turns out, which caused it to sound the upper A (well, in the neighborhood, anyway, since it wasn’t cut to the proper length). I knew it couldn’t be the correct bell note 'cuz the pipe was the right length for a D. So I backed off a bit on the pressure and it came down to a near D.
However, having played trombone for years I guess I didn’t think about it–I can play 4 B flats on the trombone in first position, and the higher you get, the more notes you can play in between the octave notes. F’rinstance, between the low Bb and the second one, there are no other notes in first position, but you can play an F in between the second and third Bb’s. And in the third octave you can play D and F in first position. So I guess you could technically play an F and another A above the third D on the tinwhistle. 'Course, you’d have no eardrums left…
A friend of mine is a terrific Native American flutemaker and performer on flutes and whistles of all sorts. He made himself a pair of overtone flutes, which are whistles with no fingerholes at all. They are very long and skinny which allows them to overblow into many different overtones easily. You can get a whole other set of overtones by covering the open end of the whistle with your finger.
Eric plays both of them simultaneously and does the most outrageous rendition of a Ukranian polka imaginable !
One of the whistles that, sadly, I unintentionally sacrificed to the advancement of tweaking science was an Oak (I think, or maybe it was a Generation) C that decided it wasn’t interested in the second octave upper register at all, and played the fifth scale instead. It was interesting, but I didn’t spend much time after that trying to figure out exactly what or why it was doing.
The same principle was used for the early French horns and trumpets, which were just a coil of pipe with a mouthpiece on one end and a bell on the other (no pistons or valves). With the French horn, the bell could be closed with one hand to give another set of overtones. Modern chromatic French horns are essentially played the same way, but with the addition of 3 or 4 valves to give still other sets of overtones. With the trumpet, the technique of playing in the really high overtones has apparently been lost. (Maynard Ferguson could get way up there, but without the careful control required by baroque and early classical trumpet compositions.)
LOL! It does sound like it could cause a hernia. I heard that he would rotate the trumpet so that the mouthpiece would twist his lips and tighten the embouchure to extremely high tension.
