I recently recieved a whistle from Bill Whedon of Serpent Music. It is a high D tunable Copper D whistle.
Here is my review, and a couple of MP3 recordings.
First, the physical. The whistle is beautiful, made of a fairly heavy copper tubing with a sort of brushed satin finish. The tuning slide and block are polished brass; the contrast between the red copper and gold brass is visually striking. The workmanship on this whistle is quite good, the tops of the tone holes and all other sharp surfaces have been nicely smoothed, and there is a neat little engraving of a snake on the back of the whistle.
On the physical side, the only potential problem is the spacing between the fourth and fifth tone hole is quite tight. I don’t have a problem with this–I can play a Generation high G without too much trouble–but someone with large hands might have problems. The reason Bill said he did this was to improve the cross-fingered C-natural. And I believe him:
On tuning issues, this whistle is simply outstanding. With the tuning slide all the way in, it plays slightly sharp to A=440, just as my Hamilton flute does. In fact, I wish all instruments were made this way, since strings in particular like to tune very sharp relative to A=440.
Pull the slide out a bit, and every first octave note, including both C-sharp and C-natural, will just about center the needle on an electronic tuner. This is very very impressive.
The breath requirements for this whistle are slight to moderate; it doesn’t require the precise breath control of, say, an Oak, but it doesn’t have the back-pressure of a Susato either. The volume of this whistle I would call “medium”–an Oak whistle is actually louder.
The top end of the second octave gets a little breathy but this doesn’t bother me, especially since the top end doesn’t shriek at all, and is well-behaved.
Like any whistle made of metal, if you don’t warm the whistle a few minutes before playing, you are going to have some clogging problems. A very soft pipe-cleaner-sort-of-thing was included with the whistle so you would have something handy to get the water out of the windway when it clogs. I quickly got in the habit of warming the head of the whistle in my hand before playing, which eliminates clogging problems. Like the Oak, this whistle also simply sounds better when warmed up.
The tone it produces is chiffy and just a little breathy–in fact, it sounds a great deal like Clarke whistles from years go, before Clarke starting voicing its whistles softer and sweeter. It has a very traditional whistle sound, completely absent of any “edginess” to the tone. I would say that anyone who dislikes Susatos for their edgey tone would love a Serpent.
This isn’t my easiest whistle to play, but it is far from being the hardest. It is a very rewarding whistle to play, and playing tunes on it is just plain fun.
There ya have it, folks.
Here are a couple of tunes played on this whistle:
http://www.flutesite.com/samples/serp_ryan.mp3
http://www.flutesite.com/samples/serpstar.mp3
Best wishes to all,
–James
http://www.flutesite.com
[ This Message was edited by: peeplj on 2003-02-22 15:47 ]
