Find a whistle with which you resonate and forget about the others. There can’t be any Generation whistle as good many of the others. I vastly prefer my Burke. Some prefer wood whistles. If still not satisfied tweak the sound in a recording studio. Your time is much better spent learing and playing than chasing the nonexistent whistle.
The Generation Bb whistles can be very nice too! Here is an example of an untweaked Generation Bb being used to good effect in a live performance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKShpfgGpaA
I find this statement to be contrary to my own experience and to the mountain of evidence in which top class whistle players choose to play their Generations whistles when they could play any whistle they wanted.
But that being said, I do think that most of the latest generation of Generation whistles fall short of the standard set by the best of the older generation Generations, and even within that lower strata, there is quite some variation before you start tweaking them.
I also think that these Generation and similar style whistles take quite a different playing approach to some of the modern, wider bore and louder whistles. In particular, the old Generations and Mk1 Feadog type whistles have a very light air requirement and do not take kindly to being given too much air or being too insensitive with breath control.
If you are too rough with your breath control they are not going to sound good, whereas some of the modern whistles will sound quite good. In that sense, I think some of these modern designer whistles are more forgiving. But once you have that light touch dialed in, those old Generations are so much better balanced in their volume across the octaves that they don’t need all that heavy compression and other post processing and audio manipulation that is necessary with many of the louder modern designer whistles in a recording setting.
And that difference is what I notice a lot when playing in a home setting, in an acoustically live space. In that kind of space, my ears just can’t take the volume of the upper second octave notes on a lot of modern wide bore whistles. And I don’t think I’m unusual in this regard, given all the discussion about the need for hearing protection for whistle players.
I think we should give a bit more serious thought to why hearing protection is needed in order to safely practice at home. High frequencies are only a problem if they are too loud.
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This may not be to your tastes, of course, but here is another example of how good a good older Generation whistle can sound in the right hands. But to reiterate the point I made in my previous message, I think it does require a delicate touch and quite a lot of sensitivity in controlling the breath at the gentle end of the spectrum. As a flute player myself, where you tend to use a lot more breath, I do find this to be quite a tricky adaptation.
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The reverb in that space is phenomenal. Any functional whistle would sound fantastic there.
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That’s a good recording (great playing too!). The YT video suffers from loss of top end, and there’s some fizz at around 8khz that’s probably from the transfer, but those are fairly easy to overlook. If there was more air in the original we wouldn’t know because the lossy compression algorithm chops off everything above about 10khz.
My Bb sounds fairly similar to that one.
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Here is another example of a great sounding older Generation. We could, of course, keep going like this all week. I think it shows that with the right input those older generation whistles could sound truly excellent.
Perhaps this is all just another illustration of how the player makes all the difference? I do think we have witnessed an attempt to make whistles both easier to play and louder, which has, as a consequence made them less musical (a subjective term, obviously), but quantifiable in the greatly increased difference in volume between the top and bottom end of the scale.
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Just as a sidenote to this use of the term easy.
This is an ambiguous term interpreted by different people in opposing ways.As I (and most players I know in real life )use the term easy playing means, without effort, responsive and nimble/agile. Like the Generation et al play, taking minimal breath effort to make them speak.
On these forums it has become to mean the opposite to some people.
At one point, some twenty years ago, I was sent a tweaked whistle and a supposedly unplayable Generation (in response to me saying I had yet to encounter an unplayable example). On opening the package I took out the first whistle, which was lovely and clear, as new whistles are, and easy to play. Not perhaps the best specimen I ever encountered but very much playable. The second whistle was stiff, hard to blow and generally unpleasant to play. The only thing was, the second one was the tweaked whistle, which had been made (as I called it at the time) foolproof. In other words, anyone could blow into it whatever way they wanted and it would make a whistle like sound. No basic skill or breathcontrol needed. I had several fine players try it and they all thought it as a terrible thing. Yet people on the forum were raving these things made them sound good when they bought them.
Make of that what you will.
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Thanks for pointing this out. I agree that the term easy is ambiguous and potentially misleading the way I used it.
I think Generations, and many of the other whistles in that general category (Feadog, Oak, etc) are easy in the sense of requiring little breath and being very responsive to light changes in inputs. So yes, they are “easy” in that way.
But the point I was trying to make was that this aspect of their playing characteristics means that they require more skill than many people realize. If you don’t have that skill and sensitivity, then you don’t sound good. In that sense, they are not easy to master.
In contrast, I think a lot of modern, designer whistles, for want of a better term, require more air, are unbalanced across the octaves, and are much stiffer to play. But they do give a clear sound for a wider range of inputs. In that sense, they take less skill or breath control and are more forgivig. This is the sense in which I was using the term “easy”.
I think that many of the newer designer whistles lead the player along the path to being loud, while actually complicating the path to being good. And I think this is especially tempting for people playing in a loud session environment, and has kind of led us down this path of wanting hearing protection whenever we play a high whistle.
Ok, to make up for all those words, here are another couple of videos of great sounding Generations.
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Specifically when it comes to sessions and tuning, I’ve thought about this a lot. Whistle seems to be one of those instruments where, to steal a mandolin joke, “players spend half their time tuning and half their time playing out of tune.” But what I’ve noticed among many is a strict adherence to the tuner/tuning app, and even in the YouTube review videos a lot of people seem to reference when trying to decide what whistle to buy, there is inevitably some section where someone is playing a scale into a tuner.
This IMO completely disregards the need to blow a whistle into tune, and shows that there’s an expectation that the whistle will simply “be in tune.” The need to blow a whistle in tune is true for any whistle, but my realization a while back was that it relates to proportion of breath volume/pressure rather than amount, giving stiffer whistles more leeway on either side of the “perfect” pressure. In other words, if blowing 10% harder pushes the pitch of a note 30 cents sharp, that 10% is much more in a fixed sense on a stiff whistle than on one that takes very little air pressure.
Probably not news to anyone who makes instruments or knows their physics, but it helped me to realize why some might be more popular than others. I’ve noticed, for example, that the various popular Sindt clones besides the Killarney all have slightly bigger bores than Sindt/Killarney (which are roughly the same as Generations/Feadogs/etc.). Does this again suggest a movement towards a different popular “ideal,” away from the Generation?
As an aside, this (over)reliance on tuners/tuning apps also produces one of my least-favorite phenomena, in which a whistle player dutifully tunes their lowest D on the tuner in a noisy pub. They push the D as much as they can to make it loud over the noise of the pub, but in doing so they’re pushing it more than they really should, and it’s therefore sharp in relation to the rest of the scale. The result is that the high G, A, and B are both the loudest notes and unbearably flat. Any questioning of the tuning results in a check against the tuning app, “confirming” that they’re in tune.
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I realize it’s been 20 years, but I wonder if you can elaborate on this any? I play Highland Bagpipes so to me all normal whistles take minimal breath.
To me, “easy to play” mainly relates to controlling the octaves. Like being able to cleanly jump from 2nd octave A down to the first octave D. I’m guessing that might be part of what you mean when you say “nimble.”
Also do you happen to remember what tweak(s) may have been used to make it harder to blow? Among the whistles I have, the ones that are harder to blow seem to be more responsive, by which I mean that it seems like the harder they are to blow, the more they respond to changes in breath.
Not Mr.Gumby, but here’s my take on it…
To me, “easy to play” would mean it plays in tune without having to wildly adjust my airflow to each note. “Nice to play” would be a balanced whistle, where there isn’t a massive difference in volume between the bell note and say, second octave B. I’m willing to learn the overall breath requirements of whatever whistle, but I dislike one that gets too loud up top.
As for hard-blowing vs soft-blowing, I’m not sure I agree with your take on responsiveness. The harder-blowing a whistle is, usually the narrower window of “sweet note” there is. You can’t bend a note as far, because blowing harder usually introduces harsh overtones, and blowing more softly just drops the note. Softer-blowing whistles, in my experience, have more pitch flexibility.
As for tweaks that make a whistle more hard-blowing, usually a narrower windway and a longer window. (Narrowing it top-to-bottom, not side-to-side.)
I’m of the impression that a lot of Highland pipers prefer Burke whistles, which I think satisfy the higher pressure desires.