Just wondering if anyone else had had success with this type of adjustment. My wife is out this morning at a marching band competition and I’m supposed to be doing my honey-do list but as you might have guessed by the fact that I’m posting on this forum, I’m playing and tinkering with my whistles instead.
I got an Oak the other day and have had MAJOR issues with it flipping up to the higher register when trying to play in the lower. I read Jerry Freeman’s whistle tweakery info on the C&F site and decided to give it a go. I used a chop stick (not a typical Irish eating utensil) to gently push sticky tack into the mouthpiece cavity above the window and also tried dulling the sound blade. After getting nervous that I was taking too much off the blade and not having any success with the octave jumping problem I decided to try altering the shape of the sound blade with a piece of scotch tape to see if that would round out the blade enough to give me more volume and less flippage (new whistle term). I gently folded an edge of the tape under the sound blade and again, with my trusty chop stick, pressed firmly against the inside of the mouthpiece, then fiddled with different tension levels to get just the right dull edge on the blade. To my amazement, it seems to have worked. I know that as soon as the tape collects moisture it’ll end up flipping into the window and making my whistle sound like a kazoo, but in the mean-time until I come up with a water-proof way of doing the same thing, it serves its purpose.
Just thought I’d put that out there to A - see if anyone else had come up with this idea and what improvements you’ve made, and B- pass along the info to others who are nervous about doing permanent damage to their instruments.
Uh oh… Wife’s on the way, better get on that honey-do list. Happy posting and halloween.
Good you have developed your eye hand coordination and understand how to work the blade.
Pull the tape out and use a piece of plastic like from a spousal credit card, phone card, gas card etc… Some of these can be found around a pay phone or on top of a gas pump.
Or invest in a guitar pick, but there is extra expense. Now cut the plastic with a scissors to fit in the window. ( caution, do not use a grand mothers sewing scissors. When you cut paper or anything but cloth with them they will never cut cloth again. According to grandma.)
Try three differant ways of cutting the plastic. A piece that fits on top of the blade, a piece that fits under the blade, and one that you can fold and fits on top and under. You may have to bend the plastic several times to get the bend to stay. Use a finger nail file to fine shape the new blade. Use sticky tac to hold the plastic in place. The sticky tac will hold longer than tape, and may last a long time. Later you may put the new blade in with super glue.
I’ve mentioned this acoustic feature in some previous posts. Your windway velocity is too high on the lowest notes (I suspect too much back pressure). When you added the tape to the leading edge of the Labium Ramp, you created a “round leading edge”. This lowered the windway velocity required to begin oscillations and cured your octave flipping trouble.
Here is an animation of this acoustic feature called a “Von Karman Vortex Street”. The degree of roundness regulates the windway velocity required for oscillations to begin.
