I’ve gone through hundreds of Generations over time, and there definitely is a quality control issue with them. I believe it’s mostly because their molds are worn, but some of it (see 1 and 6, below) may also be sloppy workmanship.
I see several things:
The D whistleheads often have some plastic missing from the exit end of the windway floor so there’s not a clean, straight front surface at the windway floor exit. This would be because in the molding process there wasn’t enough plastic or pressure or heat to force the material all the way into that corner of the mold cavity. A similar defect occurred in a run of Waltons Mellow D whistleheads a couple of years ago. The defective Waltons whistleheads literally were unplayable, or nearly so, and Waltons replaced any of them that were reported by wholesalers or retailers, with new stock. (In general, the Waltons whistleheads I’ve encountered have been consistent and clean.)
There’s often a lot of stray “flashing” plastic in the voicing window area. (Flashing is the term for material that squishes out from between the parts of a mold and creates a thin, extraneous bit that isn’t supposed to be there.) This is evident on the D whistles in many cases, but it’s even more of an issue with the Bb whistles. The front edge of the Bb soundblade often has a quite prominent, unintentional extension of flashing.
The soundblade bevel is often quite rough and varies in shape from whistle to whistle.
On some Bb whistles, there’s a distortion in the windway such that the plastic has a swell in the middle of the windway floor, causing the windway to narrow at that point. These whistles blow very differently from ones that don’t have this defect.
On Bb whistles, there can be quite a lot of variation in the “step” – the amount of daylight you can see above the windway floor under the soundblade when sighting into the beak through the whistlehead. I have to measure this variation to do a consistent tweak, and I’ve found that I have to use different thicknesses of lamination in different Bb whistles to produce the same finished step.
On many Generation whistles, there’s swarf (shreds of material) inside the socket of the whistlehead that the sharp corners of the cut off end of the tube have scraped off the sides of the socket. I also see this sometimes with Waltons whistles, but never with Feadogs.
The best things about Genreations is that they are worth the money. They are cheap in price, but they are not cheap in quality. Of course they don’t all sound as good as a $300 whistle right out of the box. Gens make the best and least troublesome pre-tuned whistle pipes. I wish I could buy 'em headless.
Even if you spend an hour tinkering with the fipple, it is still worth it. Filling the area before the window is my favorite tweak.
Or better yet, toss the heads and make your own!
Truthfully, we all get a bit frustrated from time to time in our playing. It is then that we start blaming the whistle instead of the player. Kind of like blaming the dog!
Yea there are bad whistles out there (of all makes), but I believe 90% of all whistles are usable. …and all are tweakable.
Again, I don’t want to give the impression these whistles are flawless and are all fine, and while they are variable and always have been, I do think the majority of Generation/Oak/Feadogs is serviceable.
What I’ll do, during the week I’ll go into Custy’s or some other place, I’ll try a half dozen and buy one and post anther clip. I’ll also talk to Brid O Donohue who deals with 150 whistle students all playing cheap whistles on a weekly basis, a majority of them are playing Generations and I’ll ask her about her experiences. As I said in the other tweaking thread we played for and with a group of her students just before Christmas and they all sounded really lovely but just for the record I’ll ask about any problems occurring in the supply of instruments.
Yes, they do. I have read endless threads about how brand A guitar is a piece of crap and brand B is always good. The reality is that any guitar maker can make a dud. You just don’t want to pay $10,000 for it. I have played hand made guitars from the world’s finest makers that were really dead.
The best and most unbiased method to buy a good guitar is to play it without looking at the maker’s name.
BTW, the guitar world has it’s form of WhOA. It is called “guitar aquisition syndrome” or GAS for short.
Mike
Jerry Freeman makes a list of things that indicate worn molds/sloppy workmanship
with Generation-whistles.
I’ve seen the same things up through the years, and it doesn’t annoy
me too much as long as it takes less than an hour to fix these issues
with the Gens I buy. -After all,-these are cheap mass-produced whistles
and some quality issues are unavoidable looking at it from a manufacturing
point of view.
As time goes by, manufacturing equipment will slowly wear down,
resulting in more and more ocurrences of bad specimens coming
off the assembly line.
If Generation were to replace their molds, it would cost them
quite a bit of money and a lot of work and it would be time
consuming as well, which means a loss of income.
If the numbers produced are high enough, quality control quickly
becomes an expensive task
What bugs me a bit more is when you purchase a whistle costing
twenty times or more than that of a Generation, only to find that the quality
from one specimen to another varies greatly.
Usually the maker will accept a return and try to fix the flaws, but that is not
really the point. The point is rather that with such a price-tag you’d expect
a decent quality-consistency from one specimen to the other.
Hand-made is not always synonymous with well-made, which is why I haven’t
started making my own designs of whistles. Neither will I, until I find
production-methods that ensure a high degree of quality consistency.
What bugs me a bit more is when you purchase a whistle costing
twenty times or more than that of a Generation, only to find that the quality
from one specimen to another varies greatly.
Usually the maker will accept a return and try to fix the flaws, but that is not
really the point. The point is rather that with such a price-tag you’d expect
a decent quality-consistency from one specimen to the other.
Hand-made is not always synonymous with well-made
Hmmm, interesting. My experience has shown that hand made whistles have a VASTLY higher degree of quality control, and consistency from one to the next. There are several makers who will customize the sound or playability to one’s liking, and granted there are better makers than others, and some who no matter what they try can’t deliver a good product. But they seem to be the great exception rather than the rule when looking at hand made whistle and their makers as a whole.
I have some expensive whistles and I play them regularly. However the whistles that get played the most are one of my brass Feadogs, my nickel Feadog Pro, some of my Gens and a particularly nice Waltons C. I go where I can try them. I play a couple, pick out the ones I want and buy them. If I buy another expensive whistle it will not be because I think it is much better. It will be because of a certain sound or other personally desirable quality. I bought 12 Gens from the Whistle shop a few years ago. Thom picked them out and shipped them. There is not a bad one in the bunch. You pays your money and you takes your chances.
What I’ve seen is that Generation whistleheads have the most variation, along the lines I posted earlier.
Feadog, Oak (which I believe may be manufactured for Music Sales Corporation by Feadog) and Waltons are very consistent and clean in the quality of their castings. These three are strikingly different in that regard from Generations.
I’ve found the D Generations I’ve encountered to be consistent across a hundred or so whistles at a stretch, purchased within a span of a year or so. My sampling of a hundred or so over a year or so probably would be representative of many thousands or perhaps even tens of thousands that would have been distributed worldwide within the same timeframe.
With the D’s, I’ve encountered two groups:
Whistles that were more or less consistent except possibly for some variation in the amount of extraneous “flashing” and the random amount of swarf inside the socket, and
Another stretch of 100 or so whistles, again purchased within a year or so of each other, but more recently than the group above, all of which have the defect at the windway floor exit from insufficient plastic reaching the recesses of the mold. Almost every Generation D I’ve purchased within the last year or so has had this defect.
Within each of these two groups, I would characterize the D Generations as consistent, but over the longer span of time, I would say they’re not consistent at all because these two groups of whistles are different from each other, if not in playability, then at least in the actual geometry of the castings. It may be that these two groups are from only two factory runs of whistleheads, since it’s possible to run tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of injection molded plastic parts in a short time and then stock them for distribution over a long time.
I’ve seen considerably more variation in the Bb Generations, which have several variations that can show up in any given handful of them that I receive. This may be because fewer Bb Generations are made, and I’m getting older stock and newer stock all in the same order from my wholesaler, whereas the D Generations sell more quickly and any that are received will almost inevitably be newer stock.
The other variation I’ve seen is that older Generations of the same type tend to be cleaner and more precise in their dimensions than new ones, which show more evidence of the molds being worn and not fitting together as precisely as they would have when new.
It’s maybe worth noting too that some of the ones considered nicer than the average are deviants as well. The one Donncha O Briain played was a known crooked one and one of Brid O Donohue’s favourites, used on Tobar an Duchais, is definitely crooked too:
Ok, I am just back from Ennis. Custy’s had a jar with a leftover dozen of Nickle Generation Ds. I don’t know if I was scraping the bottom of the barrel but in fairness they were the scratchiest bunch I have ever gone through. Six were varying degrees of scratchy in the octave, one very much so. Two of the non scratchy ones a a bit of a hissy G but I am not sure how many people would mind that. The other four were pretty clean, I bought one of those.
Overall none were worse than the untweaked one Jerry sent me some years ago, scratchy but not unplayable, tuning was pretty consistent through the lot.
Here’s a quick maybe not terribly inspired, clip of the whistle :The Knotted Cord recorded while the dinner is on the range, cooking. I suppose it gives enough of an impression to show you can go out and get a nice playing whistle for 7.50. The whistle is as is, I haven’t taken the head off it yet and recorded this in one go without ‘playing in’ .
If we have any psych majors present, this might make an interesting dissertation: the Feadog is called “challenging” and “requires good breath control” while the Generation has “poor quality control.” Is the difference real or is there some group psychology at work here? I think Dale should fly the lot of us to Hawaii in DaleForceOne and conduct a week-long study of the issue. I can get free next week.
