Chiff and Fipple Forums

Okay, Richard. That's what I thought you meant. No, Colin has never made whistles with a tapered windway to my knowledge. I don't know that any whistles with their origins in the Overton design i.e. Overton, Goldie and Chieftains have used a tapered windway but I may be wrong.

What Chris Moran did was basically the opposite of Davy Spillane who used the existing block but replaced it with the tapering in the opposite direction so that it was narrower at the entrance to the windway than at the exit.

I would go back and delete some of my earlier posts in this thread if I could.

Because for Christmas I got something I needed- a quality high-tech metric caliper. I re-measured my Goldie headjoints and found my earlier measurments (or the math I did converting inches to mm) were wrong. My old calipers weren't fine enough to get inside the windway, so I held the caliper at the end of the windway and eye-balled it.

Now I have something fine enough to put inside the windway.

So, I found the windway heights do correspond to normal Goldie specs as would be expected.

The D head is .8mm which is his hard blower.

The C head is 1mm which is his very soft/very easy blower.

So my two Goldie heads represent the extremes of the Goldie range. I've always wondered what all of the "hard blower" "soft blower" talk was about, now I know.

My impression, switching back and forth, is that it's not so much about them blowing harder or softer, but having different playing characteristics in other ways, ease and nimbleness of the 2nd octave, Bottom D power, timbre, etc.

Yes, you do have the extremes of the range. I think both are windway heights that Colin only makes to order.
We're a bit off-track now with this thread but I would be interested to hear you summarise how you see the playing differences between the two "strengths."

Richard, glad to see you're making good use of the Goldie C I recently traded you. How does the D body compare with the C body?

Mike, yes it's the one you sold me a year ago, nice whistle. Goldies are just not for me I think.

Thanks for the all the advice. I ended up getting an MK for my son, who as a newbie needed the ease of playing. The new ones have a series of horizontal grooves for the thumb, which makes holding it easier. I also got a couple of size 12 silicone wedding rings from Amazon. They slide on the tube nicely and give him a place to grip. He is an excellent fiddle player who got some whistle lessons when he was a little guy, and prefers the lower octave. Since his goal was speed and ease of care the MK seemed to make the most sense. I agree there are so may whistles out there with so many characteristics. From the eerie echoy haunted sound to the flutelike. The whistle and a plastic poster tube for a case and he's good to go. If he gets into this I am sure he'll end up with a handful.

So interesting to see Calum Stewart's thinking on Low Whistle design, and the whistle he chooses to play:

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