I’ve got a Burke Brass Pro Sessions and a Laughing Whistle- between these two I hear much purer tones from the Laughing(clean, clear notes)
BUT- my Burke is my favorite- tones are more complex sounding to me.
I was wait for someone to ask what the definition of pure is and I thank Jerry for stepping up to the plate.
Being familiar with electronics and MIDI sound, etc. I would say that the technical definition of pure is a close to a sine wave as possible. The closest wind instrument that I think can do this is the Turkish ‘Ney’ - it’s rim blown flute and sound is extremely pure but the mouthpiece is very hard to play. In fact, if you have a difficult time with the convential flute embouchure, spend a half hour with one of these and flute will be easy in comparison.
It’s interesting how people describe the sounds of various whistles, maybe someone could develop a whistle sound glossary for the C&F site.
Words like: Reedy, Bright, Woody, Sweet, Pure, Chiffy, Mellow, Dark, etc.
i believe you can’t describe a whistle by just one term, a term like pure can’t excist on its own in sound. you’ll have to compare every term like:
this whistle is: 40% pure
30%mellow
10%chiff…
but that’s very hard to do, the more along with back pressure, balance across the octaves, boresize,etc… but i believe it can be done. i still find the link below outstanding for sound difference
That’s what “pure” should mean, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the way the term is normally used in this forum. A good signal generator will produce an almost perfect sine wave. To my ears it sounds profoundly uninteresting, analogous to the ‘flavor’ of distilled water (which, in fact, has no flavor).
If you take a pure sine wave and add to it, say, the first 7 harmonic overtones (with appropriate amplitudes), it will still sound ‘pure’ in the sense that no beats or non-musical noise will thereby be superimposed on the sound, but the tone does gain in complexity and interest, analogous to adding oxygen and trace minerals to distilled water. This leads me to conjecture that when most people apply the term ‘pure’ to a whistle tone, they are referring to the absence of non-musical noise (such as chiff or breathiness). However, I don’t know for sure that this is what is meant.
I do believe that the key to understanding many of the aspects of whistle tone (sweetness, woodiness, reediness, brightness, etc.) lies in the overtone structure, but analyzing that is technically beyond the capability of most of us, so I suppose we may just have to make do with vague definitions.