Chiff and Fipple Forums

I had to look up what Gumby was referencing (my memory isn't the best)

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My first Practice Set, late 1970s, was a Hughes & McLeod. I was a complete beginner with no-one around to teach me. When I took it to the nearest Tionol the experienced reed people didn't have much luck with it. The wood was turned down thin almost like a Highland chanter. Ironically there's a H...

Cuts on the mid E (top space of the staff) using your left ring finger won't work on the Galeon Firth Pond flute. Yes I've learned to use my right index finger for cutting middle E, also on some Low Whistles. The other thing is the little double-cut ornament, which I've learnt to do using my right ...

The sweetest easiest-to-blow High D whistle I've ever played is my trusty old Feadog Mk1. When people try it they always wildly overblow it. Then when they find the right blowing they say "that whistle almost plays itself". The closest new whistle I've played is one of the earlier Killarne...

Good advice there from Nathaniel. I have the cool situation of having both "medium" and "soft" Goldie Low D heads and I've spent quite a bit of time going back and forth. They're both top-class, both unmistakably Goldie, but there are subtle differences. With the "soft"...

I've not tried any Goldie "high whistles" but the Goldie Low D, Low C, and Mezzo F I have are just about as perfect as whistles can be. The troublesome bit with most whistles is "going over the break" with good intonation. On my Goldies I can go up the scale from low-octave B to ...

I got to play quite a dozen or so wood headjoints (of four or five different woods) on the same silver Boehm body and my experience was that most of the tone and performance came from the headjoint, not the body. I would keep the Boehm body I'm already used to, and try various wood headjoints on it....

paddler wrote: ↑Sun Dec 17, 2023 7:40 pm I would have liked it even more if it had a slightly narrower bore...I feel that way about all the low D whistles I've tried.

Yes it's a tricky compromise with Low D's.

What I want to try is a Colin Goldie narrow bore Low D. It might be the perfect Low D for narrow-bore fans like us.

I don't think you'll find such a thing as a "Generation style" Low D whistle. You can't just make a Generation twice as big...well you couldn't but it wouldn't be playable. Yes the Howard and the Kerry Optima both have metal tube bodies and plastic tops, but IMHO neither could be called a ...

While all of my whistles are tunable, and I wouldn't buy a whistle that wasn't, I do acknowledge that I generally keep them tuned at the same spot. Here in California we're not faced with extreme weather. But, though it's rare for me to move a tuning slide, the tuning slides of all my whistles are p...

Having regularly played an original Rudall & Rose c1830 flute for over 20 years I feel the need to point out that the pewter plug footjoint keys (which I regularly used) always worked flawlessly, sealed perfectly, and needed no maintenance whatsoever. (And Low C and Low C# were in tune, despite ...

Ginsberg full set collection in person only. Seller says needs reeding. That looks identical to the set I owned back in the early 1980s. It was a well-made boxwood set, but didn't have the original chanter. The chanter was a roughly-made basic chanter of some sort of cheap blonde wood. (The name of...

I wonder if it has to do with temperature. I tend to keep my room very warm, and I have to pull the slide all the way out to get it in tune. Is your house on the cooler side? Temperature can make a large difference to how you tune your whistle and, consequently, how in-tune your whistle is with its...

Tyghress wrote: ↑Fri Nov 17, 2023 5:29 pm Finally found an Original Syn and was satisfied...

I see what you did there.

In other words, trying a large number of Low D whistles didn't suggest that a flat 2nd octave was in any way endemic or characteristic of the breed.

Quite the contrary, it showed that makers could tune the octave relationship however they wanted, from extremely flat to extremely sharp.