I decided to try a wooden whistle from Musique Morneaux. I was surprised to find out that I grew up about twenty minutes from their shop in Connecticut.
I have a little wait in front of me.
How do people feel about their whistles? I know people say that the material used to construct a whistle does not affect the tone. Still, I like the feel of wooden objects and used to build furniture.
I chose a in D. I think it is the easiest material to deal with because it is not on the CITES schedule.
Any thoughts from anyone?
I am a beginner whistler. If the whistle feels good in my hands, maybe I’ll play it more.
All thing being equal, perhaps. But things aren’t equal when comparing instruments made from different materials. From the thin-walled metal whistles to the necessarily much thicker walled wooden whistles there’s a rather large difference. Chimney heights, design of head etc., different materials force different designs and different designs bring differences in tone
Speaking for myself I have never met a wooden whistle I would want to play. I have never played a Morneaux but I did encounter a few Sweets, their predecessor. Let’s say these were as far from whistles I would like as you can get. Not a beginner’s whistle, I would suggest. But ymmv.
I previously owned a rosewood whistle by Sweet, which is now Morneaux of course. Very impressed with the manufacture quality and the tone.
It needs to be said loud and clear; material can affect tone, from a minor to a great degree, depending on the instrument and the material. I did a lot of research into tone before building an electric guitar from scratch, I built the body and neck myself, and acoustic and electric guitar builders comment on this very real issue of tone being affected by material, all the time, because it’s real. There is variability of course, in the tone affectation issue, across a range of instrument types, sizes and materials.
Here’s how it works: When a string or air column vibrates within a contained system, such as an air column in a tube, or a string between two posts on a guitar, the object that contains it is given energy by that vibrating force. That object will have it’s own characteristic in terms of absorbing some frequencies to some degree, more or less than other materials would. The vibrational energy is then immediately transferred back to the string or air column as affected by that surrounding body. Energy feedback. The housing, the object that contains the vibrational energy, feeds energy back to the original vibrating air column or string, which then becomes a combination tone. Some frequencies or harmonics will be enhanced by this interaction, while others will be reduced. The effect is that the string or air column is therefore a constant combined tone, a blended tone of source vibration and housing effect, not a pure original tone of the string or air column itself.
All else being uniform, an electric guitar made of ash with a maple neck will sound different than one made with an alder body with maple neck. And they DO! So, with whistles, they being far smaller than a guitar body, using air and not strings, the difference made by the tube material, while being real in a technical sense, may be noticed less, because the air column energy and the instrument size is so much less. Perhaps the difference between rosewood, brass or aluminum body low D whistles would be more pronounced than with those material differences used on soprano D’s?
If you think the wood in an electric guitar affects tone, you should play an acoustic guitar, lol.
I spent ten years studying classical guitar. Each instrument had a different voice, influenced by the wood and the soundbox. The material used to make the top influenced the sound quite a bit.
I wound up with two fine guitars. One was a cedar top, and one was spruce. I alternated day to day. The cedar had a sound that was more rounded, not as piercing as the spruce. Both were beguiling to play. There is something special about holding a vibrating guitar body against your chest.
The only tone control that classical guitarists have is their fingernails.
I think the dominant effect of material on the sound of a whistle or flute has more to do with the material’s indirect impact on acoustically relevant dimensions, such as the chimney depth of the tone holes, than on the differences in reflective energy between materials. Which, of course, is not to say that the reflective differences are absent. Its just that you can’t make a strong enough whistle from wood with the same dimensions, in terms of wall thickness, as those of a metal whistle, say from brass or nickel silver. The wooden whistle necessarily has much thicker walls, and hence much deeper tone hole chimney depth than the metal whistle, and this design difference definitely produces clearly audible differences. Whether you like or dislike the difference is a personal matter.
That’s the bit I’m not keen on. I want my whistles to sound like whistles, not miniature wooden flutes. They should have a hint of grit in the tone and a reediness that’s very different to the warm, rounded sound of a flute.
It’s all down to individual taste, but I prefer the traditional sound of a brass whistle.
Speaking of cedar, I was in a guitar store once, checking out the acoustics, and after going through steel strings I tried classicals too. When I got to a steel string acoustic by Seagull, with a cedar top, about the only one in the store with a cedar top, I couldn’t believe how good the tone was. The price didn’t reflect that the tone was worth triple of most other guitars. I’m a cedar believer.
Fair enough, and I can understand your desire to have those characteristics in a whistle.
To be honest, I was hoping for the warm, rounded sounded of a flute, haha. Maybe I should be playing a wooden flute but this seemed like an easier way to get started.
I have a brass whistle, the Wild D, and my wife complains she hears it in her attic office. That’s pretty impressive because she’s two floors up. She never seems to complain about the piano or the stereo.
I bought a Shush Pro D to try to help the situation and it is certainly a quieter whistle but harder to play, it seems to me.
Maybe I will become less offensive to the ear once I become more skilled at playing the whistle. One can hope.
One of my objections against the Sweet whistles, and I assume Morneaux followed the design, was the loudness of them. As well as a particular edge to the tone that made them wholly unsuitable for the music I want to play. They also don’t blend well with other I struments.
At one time we occasionally played music with John Killourhy, for whom one of the Sweet models was designed. Let’s say people dreaded he’d bring out his wooden whistle.
After playing tons of different makes of Low D, I found that there was sort of a baseline of performance established by the best aluminium-tube Low D’s I got my hands on such as
-Colin Goldie
-Ronaldo Reyburn
-Lofgren
-Reviol
-MK
-Michael Burke
plus the unique Michael Copeland conical whistles, the early ones anyhow.
These all sound and play differently to each other yes, but what they share are solid round low notes, acceptable high notes, good even overall voicing, and good tuning. These are things you could take to a session or play onstage with a group.
Yes there are makes of Low D out there I couldn’t ever get my hands on.
Well below that established baseline of performance was every wood Low D that I tried.
To be clear and fair I’ve never played a Morneaux thus I have no comment on those.
But like others I’ve played several wood Ralph Sweet Low D’s as well as a couple other wooden Low D makers who people rave about (costing three times what the professional-level aluminium Low D’s cost) and none could rise to being a standard-performance professional-level Low D.
I don’t know what the deal is. Perhaps the wood makers aren’t trying to make the sort of Low D you could take to a session. Maybe the soft sound works great through a mic. Maybe their goal is to make a Recorder-like thing with Irish fingering.
Well, to be honest, I don’t see myself wandering into a session. I know that’s where the fun is but I don’t see myself doing it somehow, which leaves me playing alone all the time. So, I wouldn’t care about blending with other instruments.
Is the sound from a wooden whistle both soft and loud? I’m a bit confused about that.
If the old Sweet whistles were loud, how loud is one of the Morneaux traverse flutes by comparison? My feeling is that the wooden flutes are louder than the wooden whistles.
Perhaps I’ve made a dreadful mistake. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve done that, lol. If I don’t like the wooden, I’ll sell it off. I can’t imagine it being harder to sell than the numerous classical guitars I’ve sold over the years, and a lot cheaper.
So, what whistles, of any material, will give me a quieter, pleasant home practice?
Should I take up the recorder? The flute?
The classical guitar was the perfect quiet voice for playing at home but I’ve lost track of that after ten years of lessons.
You know, I do have a touch of tinnitus in my left ear left over from being blasted by house music at a political rally back in 2025. I had only brought Etymotic’s 20dB cut plugs and they weren’t enough. I had tinnitus in both ears and the right one got better.
Sigh, maybe this is all a huge mistake. I’ll prop up a decibel meter when I play the whistle and the piano and see what I get. I could try the cut plugs when playing the whistle.
A Colin Goldie low D will give you a mellow tone that’s ideal for solo playing, but I wouldn’t advise looking for one until you’ve learned to play high whistle.
Low whistle’s a good bit more difficult for a beginner. Partly because you need to build up your breath and diaphragm control, but you also need the skill of integrating breathing into tunes. Once you have that control and can be flexible about where to put breath spaces (which depends a lot on how fast you’re playing), you’ll find your high whistles also tend to sound sweeter.
Give your Morneaux a fair chance before you make any decisions. As a beginner, you might need to play it for two or three months to know whether it’s going to be a long term friendship.
Oh, it’s not that at all. It’s just the possibility that all whistles are not a good match for me with my tinnitus.
Maybe the recorder would be kinder to my ears.
I also took violin lessons for a decade and don’t miss blasting that instrument into my left ear, but I like to play music so what do I do?
I’m going to practice on the Shush Pro and with whistles while wearing musician’s earplugs that cut sound by 20dB.
When I was playing the classical guitar, I always waited a year or more to make any judgements about the sound of an instrument. Three day trial periods were of no use to me.
My teacher told me to be patient before deciding about a guitar.
Whistles are relatively inexpensive, and easily sold. I don’t see a problem with experimenting with different whistles.
Now, my custom built acoustic contrabass guitar, which I played in a trio, has proven to be far more difficult to sell, but I might have a buyer for that, and it is far more expensive than any whistle on earth.
Life is short. Experiment.
And, oh, I’ve decided to switch to maple from mopane to see if a softer tone wood results in a quieter sound.
So, what whistles, of any material, will give me a quieter, pleasant home practice?
The whistle, as with any fipple flute, is an instrument of compromises. You are bound by the laws of physics to certain characteristics that are somewhat immutable, and changing any given characteristic usually has an effect on another. One of the reasons you see people talk back and forth here on C&F about various whistles is that everyone judges the exact balance of all those characteristics slightly differently.
But one of the constants is that as you go up the scale, each note gets louder. That is true of every single whistle in existence. The high B (or equivalent one-finger, second octave note) is always going to be louder than the low D (or equivalent six-finger, first octave note). This leads to a great debate: do you strengthen the lower octave, at the expense of a loud, sometimes shrill upper range? Or, do you go for a sweeter upper range, losing some amount of volume in the lower end as a compromise? Different people answer differently.
Either way, though, your high G-A-B is going to be fairly loud. There are workarounds; you can put some putty over the blade, or cover it up with a bit of paper, which will give you a sort of mute. But it will also alter the sound and playing characteristics considerably. If you’re looking for something quiet throughout the range, it may well be that the whistle is not your best option.
But try it out! It’s a lovely instrument, despite all that.
Yeah, I guess I wasn’t prepared for how loud it can be. I’ll try it out for a while and see how I feel.
I am rather sensitive to loud noises. After studying the violin for ten years, my teacher took me to a rehearsal of his community orchestra. He was the first violin.
They were rehearsing Mahler. My head was six inches from the timpani. When the guy hit that thing, I saw red. I left and never went back.
I have found that my whistle practice is more tolerable with a pair of cut plugs in my ears. I don’t know if that will cause people to look at me askance.
Isn’t it just. For its simplicity, portability, ease of playing and what have you.
What often strikes me on the forum is the appearance of new learners who will not accept the whistle for what it is, they want it to be something else and seem unable, or unwilling, to approach the instrument on its own terms. The whistle has its limits but you have a lot of room to move within those boundaries and create fine, expressive music. That’s where the beauty sits.
The whistle is not an ersatz wooden flute or anything else, it’s a whistle. Let’s put it that way,
Regarding volume, I just gave my regular whistles a little spin and while the volume increases as you go higher, none of them came near earpiercing volume.
And there’s that too, I never quite understood the drive towards ever louder whistles, if the environment is too noisy for your run of the mill whistle, why bother? And mund you, if you can’t hear yourself play in such an environment, that doesn’t mean everyone else can’t either. The sound of a whistle does tend to carry in unexpectd ways. I have described here hearing a busker play at the Cliffs of Moher, clear enough to identify the tune nearly a mile away on a windy winter’s day.
I’m curious, can you play into a decibel meter app on your phone? Ear piercing does not convey an exact sound pressure level.
Of course, volume is only one component of the sound, shrillness is another.
I do think the whistle is a lovely instrument in the right hands but perhaps it’s just not for me.
I’m going to go off and try the alto recorder. I’d like to play Baroque music. Great progress has been made with plastic recorders which can be purchased for $50, and some have been designed after 17th century recorders.
I think the embouchure requirements on a recorder are less demanding than on the whistle and I think it is a quieter instrument.