Hello all. I just recently aquired my first higher end whistle, the Syn high D. I am finding the upper register G, A, B, very difficult to blow. I have recently been playing the Clarke original, which I understand is one that requires more air for the upper register, but I find the Clarke to play easily compared to the Syn. When I do get the high A and B I am blowing so hard that for one, the volume is off the db charts, and two I am so winded after that I get dizzy. Is this a common characteristic of the Syn or did I perhaps get a bad one? Thanks.
Sorry you are having problems. I haven’t played a Syn; however, in high Ds, I do own a Copeland, Reyburn, Overton, and Sweetheart and they all require considerably less air in the second octave than a Clarke. Can you return it? It may be a lemon. Good luck, Cyril.
Syns have high backpressure, so they do need more breath control than most.
Keep practicing, you’ll get those high notes sounding good before long. Try
putting less of the whistle into your mouth, so you can narrow your embochoure,
making your airspeed faster. Concentrate on blowing fast, cold air for the high
notes, and warm, slow air for the lower octave.
My Overton has very high back pressure; still, it is not a problem. Of course I can’t comment on something I have zero experience.
It might come down to breath control and what was previously stated regarding embouchure. When I got my first low D, I was having breath control problems. I found that I had too much of the mouth piece in my mouth which in turn resulted in my exhaling as opposed to blowing: fearfaoin has an excellent point. Cyril.
It took me quite a while to get the second octave right on my Syn. I finally took some time away from it, and instead focused on my Feadog. When I came back to the Syn, it was like a whole new instrument. I’m assuming it was embouchure problems that I corrected on the Feadog.
Good luck to you.
Thanks all. I’ll work on the embouchure.
HI ofloyd,
The SYN and Clarke-original comparison is a classic way to learn the difference between air-requirement and back-pressure. Off-the-shelf, the Clarke has one of the highest air-reqs of any high-D whistle, while the SYN has the highest back-pressure. Also, the SYN is a loud whistle. Going from a Clarke to a SYN will be the greatest transition for your breath control. The SYN will allow for a lot longer duration before you need to pull another breath, but then one runs into the need to expell some carbon dioxide. You will find the appropriate technique and your body will adjust. Use your diaphragm to support the breath pressure on the higher notes, otherwise it will convert into higher blood-pressure (which will make you dizzy).
Concerning ears and whistles - particularly loud ones: The notes that whistles make are very rich in harmonics. Most have a very even fall-off along the harmonic spectrum which can persist well past 20,000khz. With whistles, the fall-off is just a little more than the frequency/energy curve that describes loudness (higher frequencies require less amplitude to carry the same amount of sound energy).
Unfortunately, the human ear is not very tollerant of these high-energy/high frequency sounds - if you expose them to a lot of it you can develop tinitus (this is where the little hairs in the cochlea get damaged and latch-up the nerve signal for their frequency-band - and cause a perpetual sound to be percieved in your hearing).
Tinitus is anoying and in many cases permanent. The higher frequencies are what our brain uses to discern constonants in human speach, so tinitus lowers our ability to understand what people are saying, That’s anoying as well.
I did read somewhere that the human ear has a function whereby the cochlea and ear-drum can do active things to cancel and filter various frequencies. This allows us to lower background sounds and cancel anticipated beats - which means that unexpected noise can cause more damage and continual environmental sound can lead to tension and fatigue in the tiny hearing muscles. In addition, the high fequency harmonics in whistles seem to get under the radar. Not so bad for an audience, not so good for a player.
Consider ear plugs when playing whistles - specialy loud ones.
Hope this helps!
Great advice Mitch. I suffer from Tinnitus due to whistle playing. For anyone out there who has this, there is hope. Look up TRT (tinnitus retraining therapy) and follow directions. The human mind has the capacity to tune out non-threatening noise…even loud noise. The trick is to begin to view the tinntus sounds as non-threatening, and there are ways to do it. The key is to “mask” most of the tinnitus (not all of it) by introducing a non-threatening sound.
BTW, there’s no need to pay big bucks for in-the-ear sound makers. I bought a $30 pocket radio and i keep it in my shirt or pants pocket, tuned to FM frequency 87.5 which, in our area of the country, doesn’t have a nearby station. The buzz from that radio does the trick for me. After 3 years of working on this I’m 99.999% “over” it (tinnutus, that is).
Feel free to contact me for more help on this.
I’ve been seeing over the last weeks/months a lot of posts saying that the Syns have a lot of backpressure and are loud. I have 4 of them (4 fipples and countless tubes) and none of them have any backpressure (and I hate backpressure in a whistle) and all of them are extraordinarily quiet. So I’m mystified. Has Erle changed the design?