Piercing D Whistles?

Whistle
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The thread on earplugs for soprano whistle practice got me wondering: Is a shrill, piercing sound at the upper end of the second register endemic to high D whistles or are some known to have that issue?

And are there whistles known to be better in the second register?

The “nicest” whistle I have is a Wild D whistle. But it is really shrill and hard to control starting around B in the second octave. The D at the top of the second octave can be murderous. Is this a common issue with the Wild? With the “Sindt” style in general? As in, would a Killarney be better or basically the same?

I have a cheap 20+ year old Walton that I bought at a tourist shop in the Town of Killarney and it is much more sonorous and easy blowing at the high end of the range. I used to think its low air requirements were a flaw and I had trouble maintaining low notes. I liked the higher air requirements of the Wild (I came to the whistle from the trumpet). Now I’m not so sure about the Wild. Definitely the most shrill whistle I own in the upper range. I also have a generation in nickel and a black aluminum whistle that I think is also a Walton.

I’m sure the issues stem from my being a relatively new player as well. Despite buying that Walton 20 years ago, I didn’t really start playing it until 2-3 years ago.

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The best of the whistles I currently own, with respect to pleasant and musically balanced high notes that don’t seem to require ear protection is a Mk1 Feadog, closely followed by a 1970s or so Generation (red head with seam down the middle). After that, and still relatively pleasant are my Sindt whistles, and some Freeman tweaked whistles (a blue bird based on a blue headed nickel Generation, and a blackbird based on an Oak). And I have one older Clarke whistle on which I very carefully tweaked the wind way myself, that is also quite pleasant.

The modern untweaked Generations, Feadogs, Oaks, Waltons, etc are all borderline too loud in the top end of the second octave for my personal tastes. Compared to their predecessors, their design has been modified to increase volume, but at the expense of a balanced top end. Already, I think you start to enter the need for ear protection if you play a lot. But these whistles are still at the quiet end of the spectrum compared to many modern wider bore whistles.

After these, and already too loud by my standards, are my Shaw whistles and various Tony Dixon whistles. And then Susato whistles.

Of many louder whistles that I’ve tried and immediately passed on, the best were an Oz whistle and an aluminum Burke session D, which are both beautifully made whistles, and very forgiving to play, but just way too loud at the top end. Because of this, I almost never play them, but still hold on to them as useful references.

One reason I think the Sindt whistles became so popular is that they exhibited consistency and predictability in their construction, and hence don’t need tweaking, while still having a roughly similar sound and volume to the early Generations they were intended to mimic. In practice, they don’t quite sound the same, and are not quite as sweet in the top end, but they are close enough, and they are consistent. I don’t know if this still holds across all the Sindt clones though.

One reason I have so many whistles (70 or so still) is because I spent some time making whistles myself, and exploring various designs. When doing this it is nice to have examples to compare against. After spending (wasting?) a ludicrous amount of time, I ended up concluding that its really difficult to improve upon a good early Generation whistle. You can improve some aspects, but only at the expense of others. And given how inexpensive they are, how do you justify the time and work?

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I think it has something to do with harmonics, more than actual volume. When I use a sound level meter I see that my low-D whistles are much louder than my high-d whistles, but neither low-d is at all shrill.

I think my Carbony high-d is probably the least shrill that I have. It’s also fairly loud, according to the meter, but in a noisy environment it gets completely lost. At the other end of the spectrum, my Thornton V6 is really loud in my ear and I’m sure the sound would cut through in most situations. I think it’s a musically pleasant sound, but it’s louder than I want to play regularly without earplugs. It’s outward appearance is similar to Sindt, but I’ve never played the later, so I can’t compare the sound. It’s easy to control the upper octave.

I have one of those black and tan “Guinness” Waltons from about 20 years ago. Not sure if that plays the same as your Walton, but I find the top of the 2nd octave borderline shrill. Mine /is/ easy to control, but I find the sound kind of wonky.

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I think you’re right that playing comes into it as well as whistle design. An under-blown high B can sound particularly grating.

There’s also a big difference between good diaphragm control and tension. I find high B can sound shrill on any whistle when I’m not relaxed, and my tuning tends to get less reliable right across the scale.

But I can’t remember coming across a whistle with a murderous high D. Some are better than others, but it’s a run-of-the-mill high note that should be fine. I always think the high G is the strongest note on a D whistle, loud and clear without being uncomfortable.

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I’m referring to the third D in the range of the whistle. Not the second one, which also might be called high D. If we are talking about the same note and you consider it run of the mill, I definitely need to practice more! Thank you for your thoughts!

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I wouldn’t worry too much about third d. It’s not really a useable note on any whistle, you can touch on it briefly but anything over second c is best avoided. Queen of the fairies is off the menu for whistlers ([added:]You can actually get away with it, I just tried, but that high d is not a particularly musical sound) ). But you can get away with tSean bhean bhocht Trim the velvet, Sean sa ceo and tunes like that.

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Ah, I see. My answer to the third octave tends to be that the tune sounds better in a different key, and I can be pretty sure the flutes will back me up. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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I don’t know if this is helpful or not, because it’s very whistle-dependent, but I find that recorder fingering (XXO XXO) works beautifully for high B on some of my whistle. On some whistles, it’s way less piercing and shrill (and also more in-tune) than the normal XOO OOO fingering - though it takes some practice, because you need very precise breath control to get it to play cleanly.

(You can also do rolls on high B when you finger it like this - just cut with your top finger (OXO XXO) and tap with your bottom finger (XXO XXX), and it sounds perfect.)

I now use this as my main fingering for high B on my Goldie, McManus, Morneaux, and Mazur whistles. It just works better on those whistles, in my opinion. But I’ve never tried it on a Sindt-style whistle like a Wild.

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I’d say there are some folks in Dingle who might disagree that it’s best avoided, but in fairness there may be some people just trying to have a quiet Stephen’s Day who agree wholeheartedly!

I find the OXXOOO 3rd octave D on my Killarney useful when busking, and woudn’t say it’s necessarily unmusical, but it is loud enough that I wouldn’t subject anyone to it indoors. On wider-bore whistles it ranges from unbearable to unplayable.

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True, you can’t beat Sraid Eoin (I haven’t encountered the other groups in person) walking past while playing Old comrades etc to raise the spirits. Still, the experience is more about the joy and excitement of the rowdiness of it than a purely musical one. It’s where the piercing end of the whistle’s sound becomes the point of the whole exercise.

As a case in point, I was just now playing the Queen of the fairies (I may have been too quick to take it off the whistling menu entirely in my post above) when the cat sleeping in the corner quietly got up, walked to the kitchen window and gave me a look that said ‘I want to go out now’.

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The nicest whistles I’ve played are narrow-bore, usually tweaked, traditional style whistles (Generation, Oak, etc.) They aren’t loud whistles overall, but they all have what I consider a decent bell note, as well as sweet high notes. A Dixon whistle that I have (slightly wider bore) is just too… brash in the upper octave, anything above a high G.

Isn’t the Blackbird based on a Feadog? I just got one about a week ago, alongside an Oak, and the Oak has a bump at the base of the blade ramp, while the Blackbird is completely smooth, and it wasn’t filed off.

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Hmm, that is a good question. I’ve never heard Jerry actually say what the blackbird is derived from, but the reason I assumed that it was an Oak was because I had a non-tweaked Oak C whistle that had a head that was the same design (only slightly larger) than that on my Freeman Blackbird. But looking at a, possibly newer, Oak D, I see that the head design has changed.

Take a look at the picture below, with older Oak C on the left, Freeman Blackbird in the middle, and newer Oak D on the right, and tell me what you think. I’m inclined to think that the older Oak D whistles had a head design like the C, but scaled down a bit, and that this was the starting point for Jerry Freeman’s tweak that resulted in the Blackbird. But I don’t know for sure. For completeness, I should probably try to find myself an older Oak D … I think this may be how I ended up with so many whistles in the drawer! :thinking:

Blackbird - 1
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Indeed they do look very similar, so much so that I thought I must be completely off base! So I looked it up, and according to this thread Jerry says that they start off as a Feadog.

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Ah, I’m glad you found that! That is good to know. I just spent quite a bit of time looking at pictures of older Oak D whistles, and they all have the ridge and bump that you pointed out. So, it was my mistake to assume that the head shape on my Oak C was representative of something that was once on an Oak D.

I wonder what Jerry does to that black Feadog head. His blackbirds certainly play a lot better than the newer Feadogs that have that head shape. I do still like the oldest (mk1) Feadogs though.

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Definitely looks like a Feadog

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Here is what is detailed on the ebay listing for the Blackbird.

HERE’S WHAT I DO WHEN I TWEAK A WHISTLE:

~ I remove the whistlehead. With some keys of whistle, I enlarge the socket so it fits the tube correctly to be more easily tuned.

~ I fill the cavity under the windway. This helps stabilize the whistle’s response and clean up the sound. What material you use matters, I’ve found. Some materials that people often use (e.g., poster putty) can deaden the sound. I fill the cavity with a lattice I’ve developed that is acoustically transparent, but that the air stream encounters as a solid surface. That preserves the resonance to retain the birdlike brightness while reducing turbulence in the airstream.

~ In the mass produced whistleheads, where the windway floor connects with the voicing chamber, there is a square edge. That is necessary because an appropriately chamfered or rounded edge would be an undercut that would make the whistlehead impossible to remove from the mold. I correct that by working a radius onto the end of the windway floor. Different keys and models of whistles require different radii.

~ I laminate a thickness of plastic underneath the soundblade to correct the position relative to the windway floor. I also place the lamination differently in different whistles to achieve the different voicings that distinguish Bluebirds from tweaked Generations, etc. I’ve modeled the tweaked Generation’s voicing to match as closely as possible the classic voicing of the Generation whistles that were produced between the middle 1950s and the early 1980s when Generation replaced their tooling and the whistles changed.

~ I press a brass ring around the whistlehead socket to protect it from cracking from the pressure of the tube inside. That has always been the demise of these mass produced whistles. Occasionally you see a performer playing an old Generation whistle that has electrician’s tape wrapped around a cracked socket.

~ Depending on the key and model of whistle, I remove some material from one or both ends of the tonebody to bring the bell note into tune and increase the range the whistle can be tuned. Mellow Dog and Bnat, alto A tenor G, low F and low D Generation tonebodies I make myself.

It bears mention, some of these adjustments are interrelated. If I change one of them, another adjustment will need to be modified to make it work correctly. If you were to only do one or two of the tweaks, even if you could duplicate them exactly, you would not get the same result.

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I’m glad you posted about this, as I’ve been wondering about this also. I’m surprised to hear the Wild D is shrill in the second octave…I’ve been sorely tempted to get one but haven’t made the plunge yet. The main reason I’m tempted is because all the advertisements I’ve seen say that the second octave isn’t shrill.

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McNeela certainly makes a lot of claims in his advertising. Whether or not his products like up to his hype is another question altogether.

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A couple of people play them in local sessions, and I’ve never noticed either sounding shrill. I don’t know what they’re like to play, but they sound okay.

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I will be the first to admit that it could be my playing as much as the whistle itself, but I find it sounds unpleasant at the 2nd B, 2d C# and 3rd D in the upper register. Admittedly most of what I play doesn’t reach into those notes other than the high B. But I was playing a tune at a “tune teach” and every time I hit the high B, the woman next to me would make an exaggerated grimace and sometimes cover her ear…which of course instilled me with confidence :wink:

Anyway, that was over a year ago and I’ve improved as a player, but I still feel like the sound of that B is not pleasant. I’m using the term “not pleasant” as someone above noted there can be a difference between “loudness” and “shrillness” Suffice it to say that the Wild can take (requires?) more air than my older Walton and it is louder. That loudness may contribute to the unpleasant sound of the highest notes. As could my inability to dial back and control them. Obviously take with a grain of salt, but in my personal experience with the Wild D whistle it is somewhat shrill at the top end of the second register.

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