Let me tell you a little story. I have a Feadog high D that I bought a couple of years ago during a trip to Ireland. This was not one of the “good ones”. In fact, it was barely playable. After we got home, it got tossed into a drawer and I moved on to other whistles until one day, I heard about folks “tweaking” whistles to improve them. Needless to say, I carefully followed the instructions and managed to tweak the Feadog from merely bad to totally unplayable. The whistle got tossed back into the drawer just because I can’t stand to throw anything away.
Then recently, while lurking around this board, I saw a reference to a guy named Mack Hoover who makes whistles and also makes fipples that fit on standard ½ inch whistle tubes. People seemed to say good things about these Whitecap thingies so I thought, what the heck, I should give this a try and ordered one a few days ago.
Well, it arrived today and all I can say is holy cow! I put this little puppy on that old Feadog tube and it went from being a piece of crap to my favorite whistle in about ten seconds. I am not an advanced player nor am I an experienced reviewer of whistles. However, I can say this is now the best sounding whistle in my collection. It plays beautifully in both octaves with modest air requirements, transitions between octaves are a piece of cake, there is just a hint of chiff and only modest back pressure in the upper register so your not blowing your brains out on the high notes. The tone is now rather more mellow and more pure than some other whistles I own but, beautiful and not nearly as monochromatic as my Susato. This is now just one hell of a fine whistle. Next, I’m going to try this Whitecap on a Walton that I’ve got around here somewhere.
$6 old whistle + $20 Whitecap = Sounds like a $1,000,000
Mack, thank you!
