My newest whistle - a Dixon D tunable! It doesn’t look damaged, but ever since this happened, I swear it doesn’t work as well. I’ve only been playing for 3 weeks, so maybe I’m imaging things, but before the Dixon, the Oak D was my favorite. I found the Dixon easier to control and way less touchy.
Now, the lowest two notes are unpredictable and flip up way too easily, sometimes the low g refuses to work, and the high b is almost non-existent! It was always the tough note to get, but it sounds horrible.
Do you think it’s possible there’s unseen damage that causes this, or is it still my “beginnerliness”?
BTW, it wasn’t until trying the Clark Meg and the Dixon that I realized how buzzy the Oak was. I could feel where the buzziest parts of it were, and wrapped masking tape around those two areas, and it reduced the buzziness quite a bit - more than 30 %. It’s ugly, but it’s a much happier whistle!
Just out of curiousity, when was the last time you cleaned it? It took me a while to figure out that I sounded like crap because I was playing a dirty whistle. Now I need to find another excuse. I’m not an expert at all, but I find the hard notes get harder to play when the whistle is dirty, and my whistles need to be cleaned more often than I first imagined. God only knows how that stuff gets in there. Hope this helps.
Could it be that dropping it pushed it in? I’ve found that mine sounds best when it’s adjusted to standard tuning (which seems entirely reasonable). Sliding it very far in either direction causes a variety of problems.
Mine arrived with the slide pushed all the way in, so the transistion between C# and D didn’t sound right, and the upper half of the second octave was overly loud, but putting it exactly in standard pitch (using a digital tuner) seems to have solved that.
A few weeks ago someone showed me a Thin Weasel that quite suddenly went buzzy and awful. We talked about a few possibilities (including a four year old daughter who may or may not have found the whistle and done lord knows what). I looked at the blade and thought there might be damage.
He took it home, soaked a piece of cardboard in soapy water and ran it through the windway and cleared out all sorts of sludge that we didn’t know was there. The whistle plays perfectly again.
Maybe dropping the whistle knocked a bit of flotsam around…try a good cleaning and see if it doesn’t help.
My dixon went buzzy and fuzzy about a week ago after carrying it my toolbag one day. I thought for sure I had damaged the head, though I could not for the life of me see any damage. Then I spoted a bit of chaff sticking out in the middle of the 3rd hole down into the body. Just a bit of plastic, probably from manufacture, that had laid low and out of sight, and for some reason now was sticking out into the middle of the body. I thought there was no way it could cause the whole whistle to turn buzzy. It did. I cleared it out, and bingo, all was well. It could have been anything. A bit of paper, or some fuzz. But it had an effect.
Thanks to you all, I now have a cleaner and better behaved whistle. I hadn’t cleaned but once since I didn’t think there was really any ‘thing’ inside it to get grungy.
Now I know better.
It still isn’t as good as when it was new, and getting it back in tune just isn’t working, partly because the lubricant washed off and I haven’t found a suitable replacement for it.
I’ll wash it out again, and hope that will do the trick.
The Whistle Shop sells Susato tuning-slide grease, but I suspect that plain old unflavored chapstick would work just as well. (The Susato grease looks and smells suspiciously like chapstick).
I use the Susato grease on my Dixon Bb tunable with no detectable ill effects so far . . .