I was told this is a good whistle to get, but is the difference between it and the regular Walton?
I’ve got one and enjoy it. It’s a decent whistle, especially for the price. I believe the Mellow D is a wide body whistle. The body is made from the same diameter tube as their C whistle. I don’t have a regular Waltons D so I can’t comment much further as to the differences between the two.
I only have a ‘Little Black’ but I find it to have a pleasant tone.
I use one to learn on while I wait for my Freeman order. It is a wide-body whistle with a very nice sound for a cheap whistle. It does require a lot of air in the top half of the upper octave, though as a former trombone player, this bothers me not at all. Doing the 'blue tack tweak" stabilizes the air flow a bit making the upper register a bit easier to hit without shrieking. Seems like a great beginner whistle to me, though as a beginner my experience is obviously limited.
I’ve had both-- the regular Walton’s as it came out of the box (I did add blu-tack; not 100% certain I needed it once I got past the beginner stage) and the Freeman-tweaked “Mellow Dog.”
It was okay, but it’s hard to compare because being two different whistles, they simply sounded different. I ended up preferring the regular Walton; it had a unique almost “reedy” sound that I suspect many people wouldn’t prefer, frankly. (That’s the one I broke. I recently found a new one, still in box, in a secondhand shop, and that one has a bit different sound, not as reedy; it’s okay, but I miss that interesting-- or weird, perhaps, depending on who you ask-- tone of the old one. I’ve not put blu-tack in the new one yet; we’ll see what that does for it; I might experiment with different amounts of blu-tack.)
I’ve heard a lot of people say that of the two, though, they definitely prefer the Mello D. I honestly don’t remember much difference in whether one was easier or harder to play, but I feel like that would maybe be a comparison I’d have to make as a beginner, rather than between a whistle I already knew well (regular Walton) and a new one I’d just gotten (Mellow Dog). It’s also hard to compare between a tweaked whistle and one that’s untweaked.
The Mellow Dog set now lives with a friend who picked up whistle; otherwise I would’ve been interested in going back to compare the new “regular” Walton to that one, as I think the sound of the two would match better and I’d be able to make a better comparison.
(So, TL;DR: still not much help, sorry.)
I had a Walton’s Mello D several years ago and I liked it better with the putty cavity treatment. I think I gave it away at some point. This thread has reignited my disorder; I ordered a Walton’s Mello D a few days ago. Thank you very much.