Chiff and Fipple Forums

Well, just one for the moment, but I'm sure others will follow.

What is meant by the phrase "a whistle sounds like a recorder"? Just wondering, because to me recorders all sound different from each other (and whistles as well)...

To me it would suggest a tighter, possibly reedier, sound of considerable focus and clarity. But agreed recorders differ as widely as whistles or anything else, so these comparisons may be of less value to those trying to understand them than those making them. Just like 'flutey' or 'flutelike' can mean different things to different people... ranging from soft/breathy/woolly to hard/dense/edgy!

Kade1301 wrote:Well, just one for the moment, but I'm sure others will follow.

What is meant by the phrase "a whistle sounds like a recorder"? Just wondering, because to me recorders all sound different from each other (and whistles as well)...

The comparison is generally used as a criticism or derogatory remark,such as-

"I don't like -insert whistle brand name or construction material here-because they sound like a recorder."

At least that seems to be what I've always seen here over the years.

The Lurking Fear wrote:The comparison is generally used as a criticism or derogatory remark

For sure, but why? I think my answer gives the 'why' when the attributes I list are not necessarily what you want in a whistle. And I say that as a recorder, whistle and flute player who loves all three for what they are and not what they might have been.

Peter Duggan wrote:...these comparisons may be of less value to those trying to understand them than those making them.

Yep. I never quite know what is meant when someone calls a particular low whistle's tone "flute-like", even when I hear it for myself; to me, they're to dissimilar for such a comparison to make sense, much less pin down what was actually meant by it.

Peter Duggan wrote:To me it would suggest a tighter, possibly reedier, sound of considerable focus and clarity. ...

You mean, less "breathy"? Less "chiff" (is that what chiff means)?

I suppose that means my Takeyama alto and my Mollenhauer plastic dream recorder sound "like whstles"

Kade1301 wrote:
What is meant by the phrase "a whistle sounds like a recorder"?

It means

1) the person who said it doesn't have a very good ear for timbre, or

2) the person is trying to make a disparaging remark.

Whistles have a range of timbres, and recorders have a range of timbres, but I've never heard a whistle which could be mistaken for a recorder.

I'm sure there are outliers, people who have made whistle bodies for recorder heads and visa versa.

An example of this is Sustato, who makes "Renaissance recorders" and "Irish whistles" using the same heads.

Kade1301 wrote:You mean, less "breathy"? Less "chiff" (is that what chiff means)?

Chiff is properly more about attack than sustained timbre. You can have chiff without breathiness.

Kade1301 wrote: Less "chiff" (is that what chiff means)?

I've been playing whistles over 40 years and I never heard the term "chiff" until I joined this site.

I, too, have no idea what it means.

Yeah, what means "chiff" would be my next question.

But I've done a search on the site and it seems there is no definite answer. In any case it's nothing that's limited to whistles because I've just seen that Tim Cranmore writes that his medieaval recorders have "pronounced chiff" (http://www.fippleflute.co.uk/3_instr/3_ ... t_medi.htm)

I can only speak for myself and as an almost complete novice with the whistle, but i think it all has to do with a sense of tradition and culture. I tried a couple of the recorders my daughter has lying around and they all sound different, in the same way all my whistles sound different. I would bet large amounts of money that most people would have a very hard time telling a recorder from a whistle in a recording.

But for me at least a good deal of the charm of the whistle comes from the irish context and particularly its toylike simplicity and limitations, which musicians in Ireland managed to spectacularly overcome. They found ways to make this very simple thing do all sorts of cool and moving stuff. I imagine a farmer with the whistle in his pocket. So while a recorder CAN sound like a whistle, it represents a different tradition, and its larger capacities run counter to that tradition. It's not that it sounds radically different, it's that it feels wrong. I gig regularly on the upright bass. A bass guitar could sound just the same, to most people (see Sonny Rollins with Bob Cranshaw on electric bass), but it would look and feel wrong, and for me, part of the joy of playing swing based music is exactly the specific feel of the upright bass

Music never exists in a vacuum--our appreciation of a given style of music is always loaded down with the cultural and political context in which it comes to us. And why not? music itself is a product of people living in specific cultural and political contexts.

At the same time, too much rigidity and orthodoxy just stuffs and mounts tradition, so if a guy can make a recorder work more power to him.

pancelticpiper wrote:I've been playing whistles over 40 years and I never heard the term "chiff" until I joined this site.

I, too, have no idea what it means.

It is an onomatopoeic word from the pipe organ world, dating back at least 40 years and possibly 400 for all I know. It identifies broadband transient noise when a pipe first starts to sound.

So what's "broadband transient noise"?

Sounds not part of the pure note would be my guess.

Kade1301 wrote:So what's "broadband transient noise"?

Noise: not musical.

Transient: Short-lived; in this case, appears at the start of the note and is gone in a fraction of a second. "Ch" is transient, "shhhhhhhhhhhhh" not so much.

Broadband: No specific pitch or pitches, like the sound we make when we say "ch" or "ff", rather than "iiiii". "White noise" is the ultimate broadband noise.