Well…I can’t IMAGINE this hasn’t been done before, but I’ve never seen it.
I designed a 3 piece, conical bored, tuneable wooden flute that has an interchangeable whistle fipple…so you can play it as a R&R wood flute OR a low D conical bore whistle…are two heads better than one?! The tone doesn’t seem to “suffer” in either incarnation.
So. Has this been done before? By who/whom? Would the whistling/fluting public be interested in a hybrid of this nature?
I made a whistle headjoint for a conical piccolo, it actually sounds better than the piccolos headjoint - the original headjoint didn’t fit well and wasn’t voiced well either.
The only real trick is getting the whistle headjoint pitched correctly, but it’s really no big trick if you can move either the tenon or file the ramp down little by little until it plays in tune.
Something like this has been done, but the maker (who wants to be anonymous) only made a couple and is not offering them commercially. A few years ago he designed and made a couple of low whistle fipples to fit onto existing wooden flutes. Actually, I believe one of them was for an antique Boehm-system (cylindrical-bore) wooden flute by Haynes; the other was for a simple-system (conical-bore) antique 6-key wooden flute. It’s a cool idea, but apparently a lot of work to pull off well. I think you’re going the right route by designing the flute/whistle yourself rather than doing the “aftermarket conversion” as it were.
Sweetheart has come out with an interchangeable whistle/fife mouthpiece combination for its Professional model, soprano D. It’s a wood laminate instrument that some of us like quite a bit. I was talking to Walt Sweet a couple of weeks ago and he mentioned to me that they hope to come out in the very near future with the same deal for their Irish style flute. So it would be a conical bore, probably rosewood, low D whistle/flute combo. Could be cool.
