OK, I’m ignorant, I admit. I know that chiff has something to do with whistles, but I don’t know what. The closest my dictionary has is “chiffchaff”, which is a small grayish European warbler. But that doesn’t seem to be what I am looking for. Besides, trying to identify small grey nondescript birds is what has made me feel anxious about bird watching in general. Like, they all look alike. I like cardinals or bluegays. At least I feel like I have made a correct identification. But with small gray birds, that generally are way up in the top of the trees, it makes me want to give up bird watching and go back to playing my banjo. Fipple is easy. It rhymes with Tipple. But Chiff, now that is a mystery.
It’s that part of a whistle’s sound that isn’t, technically speaking, a musical tone.
Hi Robert,
Chiff in simple terms (that I can understand and relate to) is the grit in the tone that pure toned whistles don’t have.
The bit of tone you get at no extra charge that makes the tone interesting-airy, reedy, buzzy, overtones you hear when you play a note on a “chiffy” toned whistle.
Chieftains, Howards, Overtons, Albas are amply blessed with chiff, among others.
Oh boy. A blast of nostalgia. Two years ago we used to do this every month.
Walden’s answer covers (tactfully) two competing theories. I’ll come back to them in a while if someone doesn’t beat me to it.
Of course, there is the alternate definition:
The screwey place that a lot of twist…um nice people come to talk about whistles and such. 
Its the funny sound you hear when you sit down 
having eaten a whole can of beans to your self
Go for it Wombat, I’m not touching this one again. 
Loren
http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~bodinew/Pages/Glossary.html
http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?p=21938&highlight=#21938
on this board, when we say “chiff” then we usually mean the extent of airiness in the tone.
pure tone: no airiness
chiffy tone: lots of air
hope that helps.
Think of it as onomatopoetic in the context of whistle tone.
I know just what you mean, Loren. Oh well, here we go. It’s dirty work, but someone has to do it.
Once upon a time there were the pipe-organ geezers. I suppose there were also whistlers but the POGs got in first and used the word ‘chiff’ to mean the raspy sounds made by a pipe at the point of attack. This fact gives rise to the first-up-best-dressed school of thought about whistle chiff or the FUBDs. The FUBDs maintain that since the word was used with this meaning originally, anybody who uses it to mean anything other than raspiness at the point of attack is just wrong. So there.
This theory might well have settled the question were it not for the fact that almost nobody uses the word chiff to mean attack raspiness any more. Almost everybody uses it to mean the raspiness of a note as manifested as the note continues to sound. Not only whistlers but designers of synth patches clearly use the word in this sense so, whatever the FUBD geezers might think, their meaning is a thing of the past—gone, overpowered, forgotten, outvoted. Adherents to this school of thought are known as might-is-right dorks or MIRDs.
FUBDs and MIRDs fought eachother bitterly on a regular basis on this board until everybody got sick of it. Then, as happens here, for no particluar reason, everybody stopped talking about it and quiet descended on the land until Doug brought it up again just now. Maybe that was because of the growing popularity of a third school of thought: the have-your-cake-and-eat-it theorists (HYCEITs, pronounced high-seats). No doubt emboldened by the success of people like the new vicars—but that is another story—these whores to compromise suggested that we could actually talk about attack chiff (thus hoping to appease the FUBDs) and sustain chiff (thus hoping to please the MIRDs) without having to make up our minds at all. And as if spoiling a good fight wasn’t enough, some HYCEITs even had the gall to get smug about it claiming that groundbreaking linguistic fission was taking place in this very society.
I rest my case, or, failing that, my butt.
I think that I understand it now. “Chiff” is kind of like immaginary numbers (for example, the square root of -1) in mathematics. It’s useful to talk about, but it doesn’t really exist. The other alternative is that it really does exist but isn’t useful to talk about. This is all very confusing.
OK, I understand that chiff is a good thing for whistles or organ pipes. But what about flutes? Do they talk about flute tones being chiffy, or not? What are other descriptive terms that apply to ITRAD flute tones?
No Doug. Chiff in both senses exists. Some whistles are raspy at the point of attack of a note. That’s real; that exists. Some whistles sound notes that remain raspy as you hold them. That’s real; that exists too. What folks couldn’t agree about was whether to use the word ‘chiff’ for only one of these phenomena—if so, which?—or for both. That’s what the fights were about.
I think “fights” is a strong word…I mean, I only had to have six stitches.
I agree with everything Wombat said. Thanks pal, that was relatively painless, for me 
Loren
Short answer: Chiff does nott apply to flute, becaus, clarity of tone depends primarily on the the player’s skill (embouchure), not the instrument. Sure, some styles of embouchure hole promote getting a clean sound more easily than others, but in the end, a skilled player should be able to get virtually as clean or as “dirty” a sound as they want.
So…essentially, the term chiff applies to instruments where the sound in question can not be significantly varied by the player, in other words, that particular element of sound is “built into” the instrument.
Loren
“Chiff” in literal terms is the momentary sounding of several high frequency harmonic tones on the initial “attack” of blowing air into the windway. The Airstream “chatters” above and below the labium lip before settling into the proper oscillation. After this initial “chiff”, the whistle settles into the proper tone selected by the players fingering.
Usually, whistles with a shallow angle on the labium ramp have more “chiff”,(e.g. Tabor pipe) but other factors can add to this. One example is the inner open cavity above the voicing window on a Generation Whistle. It sort of acts like a small panpipe, resonating high harmonic chiff frequencies produced by the labium.
“Chiff” is commonly (and wrongly) used to describe “Tone Color”, such as “Flutey” or “Reedy”. This term suffers improper use like “Fipple” (this term describes the plug only), used to describe a whistle’s voicing. I’m not trying to be “anal”, but it would be easier and less confusing to talk about our whistles if we use the correct terms. Yes? 
oh puuuuuuleeezee…stop being so anal!
For the sake of clarity, considering that different people interpret the word chiff differently, when I talk about a whistle’s sound, I try to define more specifically what I’m referring to under the general heading of “chiff.” I like terms such as:
Attack chiff (Thomas-Hastay’s explanation is good)
Breathiness
Buzz, rattle and squawk
Pure/sweet, birdlike, husky, edgy, raspy, reedy, complex (descriptions of timbre that sometimes get used in overlapping ways with the word chiff)
To say that a whistle is chiffy often means that it has some noticeable attack chiff (usually heard as an interesting little chirp at the beginning of notes). On the other hand, some people would say a whistle is chiffy if it’s breathy, even with no attack chiff, and some would say that it’s chiffy if it has a tendency to buzz, rattle and squawk.
Basically, there are two definitions of chiff that people around here use:
-
Attack chiff, as defined above.
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Any non-musical sound a whistle makes in addition to the musical notes being played (examples above).
Non-musical sounds made during the playing of a whistle, by spouses, cats, dogs, etc. are not included in either definition of chiff.
Best wishes,
Jerry
Last spring I searched C&F to understand the meaning of chiff but came away from my search unsatisfied because of the two competing uses of the word. This thread helps.
If I now understand correctly, the complexities / overtones that provide Overton’s trademark cosmic-drainpipe sound, for example, are referred to by some as (sustained) chiff. Is that correct? Maybe not since overtones are not non-musical sounds.
What other whistles have (attack) chiff, besides Generations? Is chiff typically characteristic of inexpensive whistles and not expensive ones?