Like many of the posters here, I often temporarily modify my whistles to make them more quiet – usually by putting a rolled up piece of paper in the windway. I got a hankering the other day to build a more permanent quiet practice whistle with an intentionally smaller windway.
To do this, I took the head off a Generation G whistle and put it onto a D Sweettone. I accomplished this by removing the head of the Sweetone and then opening up the body slightly so that the lower part of the Generation G head would fit into the Sweetone body.
The results were interesting. The mutant whistle was quieter, although not as quiet as I had expected. Unfortunately, the whistle was more out of tune with itself between the two octaves with the new head, so that when I tuned it to put the first octave in tune the second octave was noticeably out of tune. (Sharp, I think.)
The tone of the whistle also changed considerably. It became much more “pure” – close to a pure sine wave, with very little “breathiness” or overtones. I’d notice this before with another whistle with an adjustable windway – with the windway small the tone became more pure.
A question to the whistle techs here – is there anything I can do to pull the two octaves into better tune with each other?
– Scott