I am loosing my job and my last day of work will be on the 19th. I have toyed with the idea of making a living by constructing whistles. I was thinking of at least selling them as I search for another job, although I was hoping to go the “keep the day job” route. I would like some advice on how to get started.
The design I like the sound of best is made from the white fipple of the commonly available plastic slide whistle on a copper body. The fipple will work down to B (I’ve had good luck playing a Bb whistle I built for my personal use, but some people find the Bb note hard to control).
I have no clue what to price them (I make and tune them each using an electronic chromatic tuner) how to get the word out about them, what to expect demand wise, who can give them a fair review, etc. I also have a design for the “penny-recorder” that uses the same fipple and copper pipe, but that uses the same fingering (and hole pattern) as the recorder. That would be a good instrument to corrupt your recorder playing friends with.
Rod, I’ve sent you email. I understand your situation completely, being in it myself. Jerry? Daniel? Thomas? Gary? Colin? Phil? Let’s get this guy in the fold!
Cheers, Happy Holidays,
serpent
Let me get this straight: you would like to make a living by selling whistles consisting of the white head from a slide whistle grafted onto a copper tube of your own make? Is that what you’re saying?
Assuming your post isn’t some kind of spoof… Let me say that your idea doesn’t seem altogether realistic to me.
I can’t see how you could expect people to pay more than $20 or $30 for such an animal, and I seriously don’t think you’d get many takers at that. Think about how many you’d need to sell to put pay the rent and put bread on the table. Sales to C&F members is not what is going to keep you alive.
Isn’t whistle making getting to be a pretty crowded field these days? The low end is pretty well covered by cheap manufactured whistles from Megs to Susatos, which are easily available. And if you want to compete in the higher end, from Sindts to Overtons to Copelands, you had better offer something pretty professional.
Don’t forget, John Sindt and Mike Burke have day jobs. In your position, I wouldn’t dream of giving up mine until I had developed a pretty competitive whistle, improved after testing by a variety of people who know what they are talking about. Unless you have a hard-working and indulgent spouse of course, like some “professional” musicians I know
I have to second StevieJ. There are 2800+ members registered on this board but only a small fraction of them are regular visitors and only a portion of those are frequently in the market for whistles.
If you had a stunningly good whistle design available right now (and you don’t, trust me) it would take three to twelve months to get the kind of reputation that would result in any kind of sales worth mentioning – and even then it’s doubtful that you could live on the proceeds unless you are planning on living in a lean-to behind your parents house!
There are a couple of makers with such stunning designs, workmanship, and reputation that they can actually make a living building whistles and flutes (and it took them years to establish themselves) – everybody else relies on some form of second income, be it a day job, a gainfully employed spouse, a retirement income, etc.
So, the short answer to your plea for advice is, “spend your time, money, and effort finding a new job – you can make whistles in your spare time after you do.”
Rod, Sorry to hear about your loss of job.
Unless you have a very well refined product, whistlemaking is not alway immediately rewarding from a monetary point of view. Actually, Whistlemaking or any other form of Instrument making is more an obession. You know your bit by the bug when every cylindrical tubular object you see brings forth visions of transformation.
I would suggest you learn to multitask. Continue to look for a day job, but don’t give whistlemaking if you like it. It has to be passion in order for it to work.
You should start out with the basic keys first and then expand from there.
They need to be attractive for resell, get them in the hands of some competent reviewers, and get some website photos.
Pricing deals with time, materials and comparative rating to similar existing products on the market. When you’re starting out, give a good break to your first customers - after all they’re taking a risk with an unknown product.
The “Penny-recorder” is an interesting innovation - let me tell you, new things don’t alway sell right away, they take time to catch on. I know, I think I make more strange things than anybody (well there are few other here that make strange instruments).
If you are using a commercially available whistle head, there may be some patent conflicts with the maker of that head. It’s one thing to make a whistle like this for your own use, and another to actually sell part of someone else’s work without their permission. Best to check with a patent attourney.
If you are using a commercially available whistle head, there may be some patent conflicts with the maker of that head. It’s one thing to make a whistle like this for your own use, and another to actually sell part of someone else’s work without their permission. Best to check with a patent attourney.
Eh? Patents deal with the design of something - if he were to take a patented design, copy it exactly, and sell it, there’d be patent problems. Using someone else’s part (that you bought from them), on the other hand, is fine(1). It’s the same as tweaking, once you buy something you can do whatever you want with it.
(1) Well, usually. Software these days is a notable exception, where a license restricts what you can do with what you but. I have yet to see people licensing whistles though…
I’m not a maker, but I would recommend, if you’re serious, that you try to find a well-known player/teacher/established maker with whom to work out the design. Having someone with knowledge and experience critique your prototypes would be an enormous advantage. Then you’d have the added plus of this person’s endorsement once the design was finalized.
I know that John Sindt had the input of a couple of well established whistle folks. Paul plainly acknowledges the help of Glenn Shultz, as does Dave Parkhurst. And I don’t think Joannie raving about his whistles hurt Pat O’Riordan any.
At the very least, hand a few prototypes out to the top whistle dogs at your local session. Don’t hand them out for public review to people on the board until you’ve finished your research and development.
I am quite aware that deciding to make whistles to sell is not quite a rational choice of careers if looked at from a purely practical point of view. Frankly I’m not surprised by and I agree with much of what has been said. I have been looking for a day job and have been tying up the loose ends of my old job in order to make a good impression with my old employer, which is why I have not had a chance to respond to what has been said so far.
I have discussed my experiments building whistles on this message board before, but I will bring people up to speed as to where I am now. I started out to build an inexpensive low whistle for myself, but ended up doing things like purchasing a drill press and a bunch of other tools, doing a lot of research and making lots of other whistles in the mean time. I have experimented with many fipple designs, but have never produced something I felt had a special sound that clicked with me, much to my frustration. My favorite whistles were still my D Generation and Feadog. In my experiments, I took the fipple off my plastic slide whistle and tried it out on a home made whistle body. The result was promising, so I contacted Trophy Music, the maker of the slide whistle, to find out if I could get fipples independent of the slide whistle. I was told they would cost 25 cents each, but I would have to purchase at least 100 and pay shipping, also. I did that. The fipples fit ½ inch copper pipe as well as brass tubing and rigid clear plastic tubing meant for repairing things like aquarium filters. To my ear, the copper whistles had the best tone I’ve ever gotten out of a whistle! I especially like the rather chirpy chiff on the start of staccato notes. Perhaps the relatively thick copper is soft and acrostically dead enough to bring out the best in a whistle. Copper tubing works in D, but can go down to B, Bb for me, but the Bb tends to pop up an octave for many people. The rigid plastic tubing is thinner, so it works well down to Bb, but in A it has the same problem as the Bb copper whistle. The Bb plastic whistle sounds as good as the copper whistles (but has the aesthetic issue of being clear plastic) as the whistles sound best with the lowest body that works well with the fipple. The D whistles might be a bit too breathy for many people’s tastes in the higher octave, but from C on down they are more solid in tone. I haven’t even begun to explore what tweaking of the fipples might do to the sound of the whistles.
As I feel morally obligated to only sell what I feel are my best whistle designs so far, so I would sell the basic designs described above in till I came up with something better. I was hoping as a new maker I just might possibly perhaps get hit with a wave of enthusiastic buying for having a new whistle out there. I thought that could perhaps possibly maybe get me through a jobless stretch as I looked for work. I now get the impression I was likely overestimating the power of WhOA. Then there would be a period where I would find out if my subjective taste in whistle tone corresponds to what enough people like that I could make some sort of go of it, even as just a part time job. I would have to do the usual setting up of a web site and giving whistles to reviewers, etc.
It’s the inner bore diameter that determines how low of a key you can make with a particular size tube before the lower notes get too weak and flip octaves too easily.
Good luck with your whistle making, but seriously consider switching to 1/2" CPVC for your tubes… most people just don’t like copper.
The 1/2" ‘copper tube size’ CPVC has the same outer diameter as 1/2" copper pipe, and works well on whistles ranging from soprano E to soprano D… with C# being possible, but pushing the limits of the length/bore ratio.
I know that some makers use 1/2" CPVC for C and B tubes as well before switching to something larger for Bb, but anything lower than C# is too weak for my liking.
Actually, I also did try ½ inch CPVC and other plastic pipes with the smaller internal diameters. I found with the fipples I purchased, the smaller internal diameters tended to be seriously flat up an octave. I will look into tweaking as a possible solution to that problem. I would also like to have some reviews of the copper pipe bodies, as they seem to work well with these fipples, at least to my ears, before I give up on copper.
Hi Rod, I have made a whistle using the Trophy mouthpiece. They are pretty good. I’d be happy to review your work on C&F and return the whistle to you at my own expense. PM me if interested. I’ve played a wide variety of high end and cheapo whistles. FYI, I like whistles that are loud, with a big round sound, and in tune with themselves. I don’t like a whistle that sound like a recorder. I don’t like a whistle that is very low volume at the low end, and screechy at the high end.
Rod, Do you have a website for your work?
Do you have photos?
When you have major area changes where the fipples connect to the tubing you will get some strange effects of the second octave pitch shifting.
I recently made a whistle mouthpiece for a piccolo for someone and had to put a brass tubing insert within the headjoint to reduce the area so that the octave tubing came together more accurately.
