I am the queen of quiet whistling. Not only do I live in an flimsy old apartment complex, but also in the apartment right next door to the manager’s apartment.
I would say that the Shush whistle from Big Whistle is my go-to whistle for late night playing. It is one of my two quietest whistles, and has quite a pleasant tone, kind of soft and sweet and round, like a cross between a Sweetone and a recorder. On the high notes it is sweet and not piercing. My only problem with this whistle is that I find its tone weirdly chiffless. After playing it a while, I miss my chiff.
My favorite quiet whistle is my Hoover Whitecap. It’s tone is very sweet and pure, and there’s a edge to its sweetness that the Shush whistle’s tone lacks. It’s a little louder than the Shush, but still pretty quiet. The high notes are sweet and not shrill, though on the top notes my whitecap does put out some noticeable overtones at the upper range of my hearing. These are merely interesting to me, but apparently quite objectionable to our cat. Of all my quiet whistles, my Whitecap is the most satisfactory as a whistle, though it is a hair louder than the other two I mention here.
Both the Hoover and the Shush have very low breath requirements. This can mess with your expectations for how many notes a single breath can buy you when you switch back to a regular whistle. In contrast, the Everywhistle still requires a normal amount of breath, even when in quiet mode. When its tone ring is adjusted for quietness, it’s tone becomes quite windy and whispery sounding, but it is very quiet, as quiet as the Shush whistle.
Next I want to get a Dixon SV to try out – does anyone have one that they can tell me about?
I’ve also tried all the various strategies for quieting regular whistles. My favorite is to take a little sausage of sticky-tack (blu-tac, poster putty) and use it to cover one side of the voicing window – the sausage runs lengthwise, parallel to the length of the whistle. This makes the window only half as wide, and the whistle gets quite a bit softer, though it also makes the whistle’s tone a bit lower (flat from concert pitch).
If you can’t get sticky-tac, you can do achieve the same thing with a longish, narrow strip of flexible plastic inserted in the voicing window, again running parallel to the length of the whistle. I run it so it’s outside the whistle at the mouth-ward end, then ducks under the blade and continues on inside the whistle. It should be pushed over all the way to one side of the window, and the width of the plastic strip should be about half the width of the voicing window. I’ve used strips of yogurt container lid, or that clear plastic packaging they use to make small iitems too big to shoplift.
MTGuru can mute a whistle with just a paperclip, but he’s magic. Sometimes that one works for me and sometimes it doesn’t. My Susato seems to favor it more than some of my other whistles, but the Susato is pretty loud to start with.
However, since I had to use common paperclips, it didn’t work as well…
