I normally do not do reviews mostly because of my lack of experience. I have a D and 2 Bb fifes and a flute that I play enough to stay familiar with and G penny whistle that I play at times for a joke (my hands don’t really fit it). So a whistle is pretty foreign to me.
I keep a “look for” list on my computer, odds and ends that I am not exactly going out of my way for, but just a reminder. For example I have had “cloth suit bag” and “starship troopers (the book)” on the list for about three years. It comes in handy if some one asks if I want something for Christmas or if I am ordering something online from Amazon, etc.
Last night my wife said “I got you a birthday present, do you want it now or on your birthday?” I said I’d wait the two weeks, but she being almost more impatient to give a gift as she is waiting to open one, the box was in my hand after 15 minutes. Well, she must have remembered that the Oak whistle has been on that list for quite some time decided to buy me an oak penny whistle.
Looks
I was pleasantly surprised at how the whistle looks. The chrome plated body looked nice with the black head. The finger holes were cut nicely. There was no indentation nor bits of metal on the underside of the tone holes and the tubing felt solid. The head was free from residual sprue or flashing of the molding and was a consistent black with no ripples from molding. The label, while secure, was easily removed.
Playing
It took me a while to get use to holding the thing in front of me (rather than the side) but after about fifteen minutes I was able to play some familiar tunes. It sounded pure with few overtones and little if any wasted air.
It was in tune with itself and seemed to have a bit of resistance that helped give some feeling on how hard you needed to blow. I had tried a Clark in the past and remember that it felt quite different.
Put on the tuner and all of the notes were about 25 cents sharp. Afraid that I would have to drown the head of my whistle in hot water I pushed the volume to see if I could bring it up. No luck. So I decided to give the head a gentle twist and it moved (If I had read the box I would have found that it said “tunable”). The head was bottomed out and pulling it back ~1/4” seemed to bring it into tune. It will no longer fit into the plastic box that it came in, so I wonder if this is consistent with all Oaks fresh out of the box.
It seems that I can blow the thing softly and get it to cut off at 15~20 cents flat or blow it until it starts to Warble at about 15~20 cents sharp on many of the notes except for the bottom D. I was surprised that you could bend a note that far and still have it sound nice on a whistle.
It’s volume sounds fairly consistent up until the second octave g then it seems like the volume needed to get a pure sound goes over what I would considered balanced (this might be due to what I am use to from the flute). I did not venture into the third octave past D.
I don’t think I will be tweaking it in any way, I like it and it seems to be what I wanted out of a whistle.
Some tunes seem to fit it better than others. When I first started playing the flute, it seemed to take over some of the tunes that I played on the fife, and some tunes just could not be played on the flute. I can tell the same process will happen with the whistle.
