I bought two Generation D’s last week.they buzz and sweak terrible.Is there a fix for them?
That tends to happen with Generations as their quality varies. My first Generation (a nickle plated) had a very metalic squeaky sound, but the most recent two I bought (both brass) have been great. If I were you I’d go buy some others and see how they sound
That’s kind of like telling someone who got bad food at a restaurant that they need to eat more of it.
Oh, pish. My best Generations D’s, F’s and Bb’s are fine players, easily my best cheapies. The worst of them are still better than my Waltons, Sweetones or Clares. Opinions will vary, widely (cavernously?).
There. I did it. Sue me. Maybe they send all the good Gens to British Columbia, Canada. If, where you live, they only sell chud Gens, then I’ll gladly mail you one of the B.C. ones for $65. 
Have you tried the standard tweaks? See the C&F main page. I would suspect there’s some crap in the windway that needs to be cleaned out.
My first whistle was a Generation D, and I had the same problem. First I thought it had something to do with me, but then I purchased a Clarke and got it confirmed that it was the whistle itselfe (bad quality).
My advice is maby to have it tweaked, though I recomend you to get another whistle. It will save you both time, monney and frustration.
My Jerry Freeman squeaked, er, tweaked, Gen D is my current favorite whistle. If you search for his posts on tweaking he gives away all of his deepest, darkest, tweaking secrets for free. Shhhh. Don’t tell anyone else, it’s a secret.
I personally played around with tweaking Gen D’s and others, but decided that the pittance that Jerry was asking was significantly less than the time I was investing in tweaking when I should have been playing.
Have fun whichever path you choose.
-jeff
Yes, practice. I never beleived this when people said it here, but I
bought a Generation just to try to convince myself, and I have. The
Generation is demanding, but once you get used to its quirks, you can
get nice sounds out of it, and the chiff is wonderful.
I think I still may tweak it a little, because the G in both octaves is
terrible… but I’m loath to mess up the sound. I suggest trying the
tweaks on this page: http://www.chiffandfipple.com/tweak.html
on one of the Gens, and leaving the other alone. See if you can get
the untweaked one to sound better just with breath control. It’s
surprisingly rewarding. The same thing applies to Feadogs, for me.
Buzz and squeak on a Generation may mean you are blowing with a bit too much force, particularly in the 2nd octave.
A truly bad Generation, in my experience, usually:
–won’t easily (or sometimes at all) play down to the lowest D
–barely speaks when blown
–won’t stay in the lower octave no matter how softly you blow.
I’ve had decent luck buying Gens…slightly better than half of them have been good.
–James
The best tweak for a Generation, or any whistle, is more practice. They require breath control. This does not come quickly. Many people buy a more expensive whistle and then come back to a cheapie a year later and find it plays beautifully. I have only seen one Generation that was actually unplayable. Most are pretty good.
Ron
I am honestly amazed at the devotion still shown to Generation whistles. They must have been really great in their heyday.
Obviously, their heyday is over.
Don’t buy more Generations; try the tweak (with VERY fine sandpaper). If that doesn’t work (it ALMOST worked for me) get a “whitecap” from Mack Hoover to slide right on that Generation tube. They don’t cost that much.
Send me a PM or email if you would like them tweaked for free.
An easy tweak that improves any whistle with an injection molded head is to fill the cavity under the windway with blue tack. It removes a lot of the squawkiness.
Or buy a Jerry Freeman tweaked Generation–
they really are very good, as mentioned above. And a good value too.
The Irish Flute Store has em, yes?
Thanks Jim, Jeff for the kind words.
For the sake of clarity, I think it might be OK for me to describe how my tweaked Generations might differ from self-tweaked whistles.
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I’ve made an adjustment to the voicing so they match, as closely as possible, the voicing of the pre-1980’s Generations. This is a little sweeter, smoother, less raspy than the voicing of the current Generations.
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I’ve adjusted the position of the soundblade relative to the windway floor. This is one of the factors that tends to be inconsistent in some factory run whistleheads and is often the main factor that distinguishes a “good” one from a not so good one off the shelf.
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I don’t use poster putty (blu tack) or similar material under the windway.
For some reason, the geometry of a Generation whistlehead has a unique quality to the cavity under the windway (I don’t find this with other brands of Generation-type whistles), such that the open cavity resonates to create a certain birdlike ring to the sound, adding character to the sound.
Poster putty dulls this effect, so I’ve devised an accoustically transparent material that allows the birdlike resonance, but closes the opening in place of poster putty to help stabilize the whistle’s response.
Best wishes,
Jerry
So speaks the maestro.
I´ve got a couple blackwhistle heads issued under the James Galway label during the 1970´s. In almost every respect they resemble the modern Generation head, so my assumption is that they were made by the Genereration factory for the Galway lable. They sound very much better than an ordinary “of-the-shelf” Generation. However, under the magnifying glass, one can clearly see that there is some minor differences in the construction. The end of the wind way, for example, is slightly different. But there is other differences to.
Do you think my assumption is right - that it really is a pre-1980´s Genereration head? And have you observed these differences in the construction of the pre-1980´s generation heads too? One might wonder why they changed it? But that question will probably be impossible to answer!
To spot the differences between an old and new style Generation a magnifying glass is not really required: differences in the ‘hump’ and size of the ‘window’ are dead give aways. As is the line across the mouthpice vs the newer rounded model.
The older type was more quiet, and sweeter with a better balance between the octaves. The change was likely made to heed the call, often seen to continue on these forums, for a louder sounding whistle.
While Jerry maintains he tries to match the voicing of the old style generation in his tweaked version I (or any of the whislteplayers who I had try a whistle Jerry sent me at one point) don’t really think they are in any way similar. Jerry produces a fine whislte but his is a a totally different animal when compared to the old style Generation.
To me, the James Galway whistle looks like a normal, current configuration Generation whistlehead (not pre-1980’s).
There are differences, as I said, from one run of whistleheads to the next, and the older whistleheads (like the black, Galway whistleheads) would have been cast when there was less wear and tear on the molds. I’ve seen the same variations in pre-1980’s Generations as in the current ones.
Best wishes,
Jerry
Peter, for heaven’s sake.
“Totally different animal” is a bit over the top.
If you listen to clips of Tony Higgins playing his pre-1980’s Generation and one of the tweaked Generations, the differences are subtle and, in my experience, less than the typical differences between two pre-1980’s Generations.
If you listen to clips of a pre-1980’s Generation or one of my tweaked Generations against a current model Generation, the current model Generation sounds more noticeably different compared to the other two.
Best wishes,
Jerry