See-through whistle by D. Brooker, review
Whistle Reviewed: See through whistle (my name for it) by D. Brooker
Price: $15, including shipping
Available from: I got mine from dbrooker.com, but I was told it was the only one left and I’m not sure he’s making any more.
Presentation: This whistle came in a light grey colored cloth sack with a heavy red string tie, and a rod made from a dowel that has been sanded down nicely and has a metal end to loop cloth into for swabbing out. The rod and the whistle arrived inside the carrying bag with a business card attached to the outside with a rubber band.
Appearance: The reason I bought this whistle. I have to be honest that I didn’t expect much from it, based solely on it’s apperance. It was made from clear pipe, had what looked like a funky connector, and a LBW mouthpiece. But looks can be decieving, as we all know.
Holes: The holes resemble Feadóg spacing and shape. You can tell a lot of work went into the hole spacing and size. The OOO XOO hole is smaller than on any other whistle I’ve seen. I tried to scan a picture, but since it’s clear it didn’t show up very well.
Tunablitiy: This whistle was put together pretty tightly, so it isn’t tunable, but I’m sure you could make it tunable if you tried hard enough. I pulled the mouthpiece really hard and got the connector to come loose, so now it’s tunable, but I had to pull pretty hard and you have to use teflon to get it to stay in place.
Tuning: Tuning is spot on pushed all the way in, within a couple cents to my tuner. C natural is a little sharp if you finger OXX OOO, but that doesn’t bother me. You can finger it OXX OXO to get it perfect. I’m not very good at half-holing, but you could probably do that too.
Tweak/Playing/Sound/Volume: The mouthpiece has obviously been tweaked with fine sandpaper, and it’s a good tweak-job. The sound resembles the LBW, but it’s a tad quieter and less tinny/aluminum sounding (due to the plastic bore). It also has a slight hint of the ‘buzziness’ that you find in Sweetones. It’s more focused and the bottom D is actually more solid than my untweaked LBW. Across both octaves it transitions easily. All in all, it plays pretty much like a LBW with subtle differences. At first I wasn’t used to the hole size (smaller than most) so it was harder to play but now it’s easy since I’ve gotten used to it. I did the sticky tack tweak and it improved the whistle a lot.
Novelty: The main reason I bought this whistle. It is clear and it looks like you’re holding nothing for the first few seconds of playing it, but then it starts to get cloudy inside and you can see your breath along the tube of the whistle, which I think is cool. I’m not a spitty player, so there’s no slobber or spit (yuck) visible. I think it really gives you an idea of the humidity inside of wooden whistles when you play them. One thing I don’t like is that the tube has a small chip on the bottom, but it’s so small you wouldn’t notice it unless you examined it very closely like I did. It very well could have happened in shipping.
Other: This whistle is light, at 40 grams. I changed the mouthpiece with a Susato SB Bb and it fits very tightly, and makes a really cool whistle, but since the mouthpiece is so long, the tuning is insane that way. I think it might be in the key of C#. In tune with itself, just not anything else. The Elfsong head also fits tightly on the body, and a Sweetone D will fit with a few turns of Teflon. Each time the sound changes to the head’s original sound.
The End.