It plays great except....

Whistle
1

My tin whistle, it plays great, well better than it did, I tweaked it. The notes are fine and the articulation is better but the octave it takes effort.

I am going D to et cetera, and it works but when going from the the D, E, F sharp to the octave D it fizzles until you put the right force behind it.

My question is not whether I should ditch it, I never will I have a personal attachment to it. But what I am wondering might this have to do with the fipple, or maybe the blade where the air exits.

Any suggestions? or ideas what the problem is?

2

I’m just guessing, but this line suggests to me that the whistle is doing it’s job, but that you have some work to do in terms of developing your breath control.

Just to have a good basis for comparison, I suggest getting a decent, cheap, non-tweaked whistle, (say a Generation, Feadog or Oak), and leaving that “stock”. If you also have trouble with the “stock” whistle, then you can be pretty sure that you just need to do a bit more woodshedding. If that plays well and the tweaked one doesn’t, then you can experiment some more with your tweaking techniques.

Enjoy!

3

Well I have been playing a while, and this may be home made, I have played other instruments like this, also flutes and the like.

I know I have a long road ahead of me, but also the shape it is in, dented everywhere I have not taken thought about breath control, if you saw it you might say the same.

4

I am also not the only one who has played it, I will be having hopefully some fine players give it a go and see what they think.

5

It might help to know what you have done so far to tweak it.

6

Um

fix the mouth and blade adjust the steadiness of fipple

get at least one dent out of the rest of the body

7

What fingering do you use for 2nd octave d? If you vent the top T1 hole with oxx xxx, that note should pop right out, regardless of how you approach it.

But breath control, too. You should be able to play a legato DdDd (low high low high) with breath alone, without tonguing and without changing xxx xxx fingering.

If the instrument plays OK otherwise, I doubt that tweaking is the issue.

8

If you are not personally attached to the whistle, I would recommend getting a new one ot work with. Tweaking an older instrument is a lot of fun, but to seriously learn, it really helps to have an instrument that works out of the box. Once you learn more about playing on a good instrument, you will likely have a far greater knowledge of how to make the older whistle work better, or the knowledge to know if it is a lost cause.