I’m sure that’s what I meant to say. I don’t know all the technical terms. It is a smaller bump on the ramp than the newer Gen’s
Thanks for clarifying that
Tres
I finally got a chance to listen to those clips today. That’s stunning playing; her phrasing is absolutely beautiful. I’ll be buying a copy for sure.
What exactly are you saying here Peter? Did she simply walk into a store and ask for a Generation C without trying a few? Is that the only one she has? Would she do absolutely no tweaking—not even remove the daggy bits of plastic you sometimes get?
I’m especially curious because I don’t get the chance to try whistles in local shops. I have a completely untweaked Generation Eb which I once thought was unplayable but which I can now control fairly well. (I haven’t done the bluetack tweak because I don’t want to lose brightness and I want to see if I can meet the challenge of taming it fully.) Played back to back with a Gerry-tweaked, it’s still harder to control though and I can’t imagine it ever being as easy. Maybe I’m wrong there; I can now play it without maybe 95% of the unwanted noise I got when I first bought it a few years back; at least I can after a minute or two of adjusting to it. Unscheduled shrieks and farts don’t happen very often.
I think it was given to her by her uncle when she was 14. But that’s beside the point, the whistle is untweaked and if you’d try it there’s nothing remarkable about it, in fact it’s exactly as any of the three Generation Cs I have, which were all taken off the shelf without trying (well, I was given one of them. Another was a favourite of Micho Russell’s who borrowed it for concerts or used it whenever we played) and never tweaked or anything. What I am saying is, there’s nothing special, it’s just another whistle. Some of you may even think it’s unplayable. If there’s magic, it’s up to the musician to blow it into them.
This is the whistle on the Banish Misfortune clip, just another old C with the children’s bitemarks on it:
It’s a matter of what you’re used to. I don’t particularly fancy Jerry’s tendency to make his whistles harder to play, I just don’t buy into the ‘more tolerant’ idea. When that CD was just a first spark of an idea and we tried a batch of whistles he had sent me at the time and they just weren’t in the running because they wanted a lot more effort to hit the high notes.
Again, it’s a matter of perception, when you’re used playing these whistles they are easy to play and responsive, if you lack the control all these stories about unplayable Generations crop up and people invent things to make them ‘easier’ to play that would not necessarily agree with experienced players. I think I once said to Jerry part of his work was to make perfectly fine whistles ‘foolproof’. He didn’t agree ofcourse 
Looking at the pics presented in this thread, the fipples on the genreation’s I have seem to be made of a different type of plastic. the plastic on the pics presented on this thread looks hard and shinny. the plastic I have seems softer in texture and more matt in color. I like cheap whistles (never bought a whistle for more the $35, the vast majority of whistles I buy are under $15) but generation would be at the bottom of my list.
I can say with a high degree of certainty that what you are seeing is a result of the limits
of photography. If you could get ahold of the generations in these pictures, they would look
to your eye exactly like your whistles, but to the camera, they look different. Lighting, color
balance, lenses, whatever software on the camera does to “idiot proof” the images, and
many other factors affect how the picture will look. In fact, the picture probably looks very
different on my computer monitor than it does on yours, just because of the differences in
monitor manufacturing.
I used to have a lot of trouble with Gens being “unplayable”. I did the stick tack tweak, etc. Eventually I bought a Gen D off the shelf so I could have one totally untweaked. I cleaned it removed loose plastic and then began to play it. It is a nice whistle. When I want the Gen sound that is the one I play. I have other Gens in various keys that are untweaked. They all play fine and I am a rather poor player.
Ron
Thanks Peter. I’m relatively new to Generation-style whistles compared to some others and when I first tried them I did find some of them unplayable but not others. I’m inclined to want to try some more completely untweaked because I think the tweaked ones lose a bit of brightness and sweetness. It’s more out of curiosity than anything else since I have Sindts in several keys and they are all easy to control and have a very sweet sound. I never really assumed the magic on Banish Misfortune was provided by anything other that Brid. OTOH, I did assume that she would have rejected some whistles as less suitable than the one she chose, even though I imagine she could sound better than good on any whistle in tune with itself.
I sort of see what you mean here. I agree entirely that it’s got a lot to do with what you are used to. It also has to do with how well you can play on your best and worst whistles.
My (disappearing) idea that some Gens are unplayable might well have come from my unusual route to them. The cheapies I started on were Clarkes and, although I like some better than others, I’ve never met a Clarke that’s unplayable and I’ve happily used Clarkes for recording. I went from them to Overtons, without ever stopping playing the Clarkes. Then bought a couple of Gens and only the Eb gave me a lot of trouble. I now think that I was just instinctively overblowing it. Obviously, if you started with Gens, you might have problems moving to other kinds of whistle, especially those with a lot of backpressure. Obviously, they wouldn’t be quite the same problem, but you wouldn’t feel they were behaving the way you want them to.
One reason this whislte sounds good may be that, from the image, it appears to be an older style Generation head, like my old Bb. These are very good whistles. The newer ones don’t seem to be as good.
Tres
I also should say that sometimes, one just lucks out and gets an exceptional whistle “straight off the shelf.” L.E. McCollough, I believe, bought his famous blue topped Generation D off the shelf first time and never tweaked it to my knowledge.
Tres
There’s no noticable difference in quality between the old and new C as far as I can see (one of the Cs I have is a newer model and it certainly is, untweaked, no worse player than the one used in the recording)
I don’t think it is really a quality issue per se. I do think the change in fipple design did make a difference. It may not be a huge difference, and every now and then, one may get a good new one that competes favorably with a so so older one. However, I think one is much more likely to find the legendary “Good Generation” with the older fipple design.
Tres
I think the story is more complicated than Peter makes out - there are differences in the different keys.
The older B-flats were almost invariably perfect whistles - I defy you to find me a good one straight of the box today. All the ones I’ve tried in the past few years have had a fuzzy and raspy upper octave.
The old Cs were great and most of the new Cs are very good. Except you can’t usually unglue their heads without breaking them.
Old Ds were great too. Today’s Ds need to be tried. Complete duds are rare, most are OK, esp. with minimal tweaking. For example they all sound better immediately once you reposition the head so that they are no longer sharp. Very good ones can be found too. Funnily enough some heads that sound so-so on a D body sound fabulous on an Eb body.
That said there is a lot in what Peter says about how you blow them. I had a student complaining bitterly about her Generation whistle and indeed it did sound horrible when she was playing it. So I tried it and found it to be a really nice one, told her she was lucky to have found it.
And this is what truly amazes me. It would seem that it’s a pretty simple matter to blow into a whistle and make it play, just like if I press the C key on a piano and a virtuoso pressed the C key on a piano, it should sound exactly the same. But it’s not. We’ve seen it. And it never ceases to make me shake my head in disbelief.
And I think this is what my teacher was referring to when he told me during one of my first lessons, that I had an ‘old’ sound. I said I’d spent a lot of time just listening to myself play to try to make it sound good.
I didn’t mean more than I said really, the difference between the old and new C seems minimal and doesn’t influence the playing characteristics much, if at all. Now, D’s that’s another story but we were talking about the C specifically.
I acctually had a very nice new design Gen Bb (one of my first 10 whistles) that was extremely good right of the shelf. It had an almost flutelike sound, good balance and an easy player all together. I ruined it by tweaking (I had a period when I had to tweak everything because I’d had some success with other whistles), it never became half as good as it first was. Granted, I’ve never found another one like it, but if there’s one there should be more of them.
The Bb Generations are extremely variable. Just amazingly so. There are several variations I run into with them, and it takes different tweaking tactics with each variation. Each of the other whistles I do, there are specific adjustments I make, and they’re the same adjustments for all the whistles of that type.
Best wishes,
Jerry
I don’t know whether you got a good one or a “finicky” one to work before you sent me mine, but the one you sent me tweaked - sings very well indeed.
It was well worth the little extra expense and in my mind very comparable to another expensive Bb I have. The expensive one is sweet but soft, and does not have the power of my Generation. The one thing I continue to appreciate with the Generation is that they increase the bore width as well as the length with the lower keys. This applies as well to the Generation Tweaked C whistle I have.
This makes a much more expressive whistle in my mind!
Ok…as I mentioned I have a few generation whistles. I’m not happy with any of them as compared to other cheap whistles I own…so…I’m looking to tweak the Generations I own. I went to the C&F Tweaking Inexpensive Whistle Page and saw only how to tweak whistles which “‘flip up’ way too easily.” Well my generations do not “flip up” easily enough. It’s very annoying as it takes a significant amount more breath to play upper octives. So…how do I tweak in this case?
Pete. The tweaking instructions for Gen style whistles on the mainsite makes the whistles better overall if you’re successful. I’ve tried it on Gen style whistles and eventually added a few own tweaks as well with great effect. None of my whistles became harder to play in the second octave.