Chiff and Fipple Forums

@ Peter, you can agree to disagree. It's just something I learned from observation. oxxooo works on EVERY thick-walled whistle I have while it doesn't work on some with thinner walls. Of course you could also vary the hole size of the top hole but only to a certain extent. Making holes smaller or bigger means they need to move up or down on the whistle and all the other holes will also be moved. Hole-placement on whistles is always a compromise between intionation and playability. Whistles with thicker walls can almost be played like a recorder where (approximately) leaving one hole open and then using 2 fingers to close the two holes below will make a half-tone difference. Like xxxoxx for F# -- will not work 100% but for quicker tunes it will work fine. xxoxxx for G# works fine on a thick walled whistle and I don't think you can design any thin-walled whistle so that this fingering will work (at least I never saw one on which it worked). So material is an important factor.

afl2277 wrote:Yes the half hole is the way Im going

My last point was neither pro nor against half-holing as a technique, but to stress the interrelationship of fingerings and hole sizes as much as fingerings and wall thickness.

Sedi wrote:oxxooo works on EVERY thick-walled whistle I have while it doesn't work on some with thinner walls.

I don't doubt that, but still believe it to be as much a design choice as anything else.

Oops, was too slow with my editing of my post . Added some thoughts above. One thing I do notice when comparing the Dixon DX204 with other whistles is that the top hole is bigger and the three top-holes are therefore closer together.
So I think when making the top hole smaller on thin-walled whistles so that the oxxooo works (in case it doesn't) would make the top hole probably too small. At a certain size a hole won't work properly anymore.

Sedi wrote:Cross-fingerings work better on whistles with a thicker tubing. Like plastic or wood (or the Dixon heavy brass model). On a whistle with thick walls the oxxooo works just fine.

I did a quick modelling exercise, comparing thin and thick walled high D whistles, both optimized for tuning over two octaves, including cross-fingered C-nat and C#. The thick-walled whistle called for somewhat larger holes in some cases, but the tuning of C and C# came out almost exactly the same on the two whistles (with C somewhat sharp and C# somewhat flat). If OXXOOO isn't working on a particular thin-walled whistle, I'd suggest the designer has made a different design compromise.

Edit: for the record, XXOXXX was sharp of G# on both thick- and thin-walled design. F# is XXXXOO, G-nat is XXXOOO, and there's no chromatic note between the two, so I'm not sure what you're using XXXOXX for.