One of the most irritating things as a whistler is the surgery and risk we take in tweaking whistles…after all MANY of the topics we speak of involve this delicate procedure. But what irritates me is the fact that it is so well known to the companies and the makers, yet it is still required in many models. Why don’t the makers inspect and spend more time on the product, and charge a few bucks more? I understand mass production is not without it’s lemons, but if a whole brand is often defined by it’s limitations something should obviously be done to fix this. On a positive ending note, I find the work of handcrafters to be far beyond the mass produced items, and this proves the value of these great peoples time and effort.
Probably because the mass producers like Walton’s Generation, and Feadóg don’t solicit real whistle players for feedback on their products. I bet they have a few scant people to test and decide what’s passable and what’s not. It’s just the communication gap between player and maker that’s so difficult.
More likely, it’s return on investment.
My last company got caught in a cost/value vise: we made what most of our target customers admitted were some of the highest (real) performance, highest-quality products in our field. We maintained a large engineering and in-house QC staff to keep us in that position. But when a commodity-level product (SW by the silicon vendor, HW mass-produced by fab houses in Asia) became available at a lower cost, most of our customers switched over, even though they admitted the commodity product wasn’t as good - because it was good enough.
Rightly or wrongly, I suspect that the makers of the inexpensive whistles believe that the extra 50 cents or a dollar per whistle to provide decent QC will lose them more sales than the improved quality will gain them. And the experienced players who play the cheap whistles are, mostly, used to tweaking them - the customers who have the most to gain (beginners) are also the ones most likely to buy on price alone.
I don’t think you start seeing good QC on whistles until you get into the $20 plus range. Though I’ve had good luck with Oaks ($12), if I wanted a good out-of-the-box inexpensive whistle (and disliked Sweetones, which I think are more consistant than most of the other cheapies) I’d look for a Serpent Polly, Dixon, or Susato. Or get a Jerry-tweeked.
Mind you, I’m not AGAINST good QC in cheap whistles - I just fear that the makers can’t/won’t do it because it wouldn’t pay.
I see both of your points. I guess that the small number of buyers puts pressure on the makers also.
One possible cause was ventured by a whistlesmith crfatsman:
Low-end whistles, and foremost Walton’s, are bought as souvenirs in souvenir shops. The top just be better green. Label in Gaelic, or with some “Celtic” font. The Guinness whistle is the best illustration, just as Guinness bodhráns.
99% percent of these whistles won’t be played, or just as a short-term attempt. The manufacturer chooses the 99% profit, also knowing that the players will tweak theirs, or pick the best playing in a rack of twenty…
The low limit of QC is, then, the totally unplayable, which would get you in trouble with European laws on advertising.
My old company, Casady & Greene, specialized in hand-made outline fonts (PostScript and, later, TrueType). Every tiny aspect of each font was carefully optimized to look good at any point size. Our fonts were also hand-kerned. When something wasn’t quite right, we went back and fixed it. We sold sets of two to four fonts for $85 a set.
Our sales were very good, and we saw them all over the place, including book covers and product labels. One year some of our fonts were used for all the on-screen type for the Academy Awards.
The last time Gorbachev came to the US as the head of the Soviet Union, all of his speeches were printed using one of my Cyrillic fonts, Vremya. (We got a call from one company asking about our Cyrillic fonts, because the Soviet consulate in San Francisco had told them that all printed materials submitted to them must use C&G Cyrillic fonts.)
Robin Casady’s “Gazelle” font has shown up on lots of TV shows, including “The Tonight Show” and “Fired Up”, and on cereal boxes–and I have a shipping carton for West Pak avocados that uses it. My simple Western fonts still show up on TV shows–just saw Abilene a few months ago on “It’s All Relative”, and I saw my Black Knight font on a bogus newspaper masthead on the old “Quantum Leap”.
Then someone came out with software that could outomatically produce outline fonts from scanned samples. Several companies simply printed out our fonts, and those of other companies, scanned them, and put them out on the market without touching them further. (Font designs aren’t copyrightable, only particular PostScript renditions.)
The quality was atrocious–especially at small point sizes, but they sold 200 fonts for $50 in stores like Costco, and most people apparently weren’t discerning enough to tell the difference. First we dropped the price of our entire font line (about 120 fonts) to $125. Then we simply quit designing new fonts, because it wasn’t worth our time. Finally, we dropped fonts altogether.
It’s too bad, really. Robin and I each had a half-dozen ideas for new designs, based on calligraphy, that never got done. Now, five or six years after we quit selling them, I still get email from people who just have to have some particular Casady & Greene font. All I have left to give them are the ones that I did, myself. http://www.coastalfog.net/computers/fonts/font_main.html
So, it’s true. Sometimes quality just doesn’t pay.
The innovation of the tin whistle WAS the cheapness of the product–the ability to mass produce and sell at a very low price. Today, there are more than enough brands to choose from with price points from $3 to $300. If a person wants quality, there are plenty to choose from.
More about the history, from
http://www.thewhistleshop.com/catalog/whistles/inexpensive/Clarke/blackclarke/clarke.htm
In 1843, Robert Clarke a poor farm laborer left his employer after having been unjustly accused of dishonesty. He was a talented amateur musician and played a wooden whistle. He developed the idea of copying his whistle but used tinplate to do so. He made the block in the mouthpiece out of wood which he cut into shape using a homemade saw. This saw started life as one of his wife’s corset stays! Then he decided to mass produce his new style of whistle. He loaded the necessary materials and his simple tools onto a handbarrow and, together with his son, walked all the way from Suffolk to Manchester. On the way he would set up his workshop barrow in market places, showing how the whistles were made and selling them. He would also play for the entertainment of the crowds that gathered round. His most popular piece was “Danny Boy”. It is said that the whole busy market would stop and listen when he played this piece.
While almost everybody ran toward a certain goal like a flock of sheep,the inconsistency of inexpensive whistles unexpectedly offered a variety of choices taken as ‘worthless’ ‘just classical’ ‘too much novel’.
I believe this was the good and important aspect of cheap whistles and to make ITM unique in the whole world.I dont know what most people in Ireland think about those cheap ones,you know,the lighthouse shine the light over the sea but does not flash its feet well(so typical).For example,most chinese I know and most Japanese around me dont care much of whatever their traditional martial art is,dont even dare turn back to rethink about their unique values and many good chinese artists was very likely to went overseas to meet those who (wanted to)know these real values.
Thus,anybody doesnt stay in one place anymore. 
The disappearance of Casady & Greene was a shame for the typographic community – if there is such a thing remaining after mass-market DTP made everyone think he has a layout artist’s competence…
I don’t know if it will soothe you, but theres’ worse on the way:
in its constant seek to plug its budget deficit, the French government is to sell “by bits and pieces” the whole Imprimerie Nationale–estate, collections and all.
It may well be that, just after this summer, they’ll auction, peice by piece, the original steel stamps (those you punch the “fonts” casting dies with) of the Cabinet des Poinçons, i.e. world treasures as the original Garamond, Grandjean, Didot, etc. as well as the world’s largest, unique, collection of “Oriental” alphabets and ideogramms, including the oldest steel stamps ever made for Chinese, Hiraganas and Kanjis carved in the 18th century, some of the oldest Arab typography, unique fonts for extinct languages (cuneiform, palmyrean, hyeroglyphs after Champollion’s own drawings…) etc.
Unfortunately, we’re too few in France to lobby for the handover of this unique fund, which disbanding would be a shame, to an international trust, f.i. UNESCO.
The mere disapperance of it as a publisher, with its unique if little-known bookshop is a loss for Paris (where else to find the only “Cape Cod” by Thoreau ever translated in French?), and the art of books publishing worldwide.
Anyone interested in typography, DTP, layout, or just “paper” generally should get “Les caractères de l’Imprimerie Nationale” while available.
Look it up on http://www.imprimerienationale.fr/impnat.asp?Page=IndexTitres&Langue=fr&Lettre=C
My old company, Waldco Enterprises, produced the highest quality conspiracy theory books on the market. Our conspiracy theories were espoused and/or adapted by journals on all ends of the political spectrum, from the National Review to the Weekly World News. We even had our own subsection at urbanlegends.com (bet you can’t guess which one!).
But the bottom fell out of the conspiracy theories market, just after 1 January 2000, and the market didn’t really rebound until about November of that year. We saw a slight increase in sales after the release of The Librarian Conspiracy, but it was too little too late.
The conspiracy theory community no longer cared about quality. They wanted quantity. With the rapid expanse of networks like FOX and BBC and PBS pumping stuff at them 24/7 we found there was no longer room in the market for Waldco brand conspiracy theories.
This weekend and this weekend only at the Convention Center Arena, there will be a total liquidation factory over-run clearance sale of Waldco Press Conspiracy Series books! Prices have been drastically slashed, to cut costs, and you, the consumer are sure to save, save, save! For more information call us at 1-555-WALDCOLIQUIDATORS, or order your copy of the soon-to-be bestseller The Librarian Conspiracy for just eight easy payments of $19.95 per case +shipping and/or handling. But wait, there’s more! If you call now get a free PBS tow sack! You’ll be 100% satisfied or our money back!
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Wonderful Walden, what will the Atlantians do for back up now.
John S
Probably not, really. When my son opened his restaurant, he grabbed my digital camera to take pictures of all the dishes and laid out his own menus, take-out menus, and flyers. He printed originals on my photo-quality printer and ran off copies on his color copier. Other than his time, his only expenses were ink and paper. Actually, he did a pretty nice job, but then he’s always shown some artistic talent.
I don’t know if it will soothe you, but theres’ worse on the way:
in its constant seek to plug its budget deficit, the French government is to sell “by bits and pieces” the whole Imprimerie Nationale–estate, collections and all.
That’s sad. I only fell into type design by accident (though I spent part of my childhood watching the linotype operator at my grandfather’s newspaper office, and had a background in pen calligraphy). I was hired by Casadyware (not yet Casady & Greene in early 1988) to convert Mac PostScript and screen fonts to Windows 1 format, and after I worked that out, I learned Fontographer in order to keep busy.
I did learn to appreciate it, though. There’s something about the look of printing using good lead type that’s hard to duplicate using more modern methods–and there are subtleties of analog design that we are just getting to the point of being able to reproduce digitally. (5760 x 1440 dpi in a less-than-$400 eight-color printer is hard to beat.)
Maybe the French Government could get Bill Gates to buy the whole mess as a unit–just to keep it together?