Experience with German TWZ whistle?

[MichaelRS]

A poster by the name of Sedi has recently talked up the German made TWZ Al Jo whistle over the Killarney, or maybe I should say DER Killarney Anyway, anyone else have experience with the TWZ Al Jo and thoughts about it?

[MichaelLoos]

A couple of years ago, I bought one of their all-aluminium whistles (a model which they don't offer anymore), that was pretty much the worst whistle I ever tried - unbalanced octaves, raspy sound, air leakage around the block, bad tuning, high octave difficult to control, any attempt playing a vibrato in the high octave would lead to breaking tone and so on.
I wrote to the company a list of all my points of criticism and received the answer "thank you for your proposals - we might take them into consideration when developing further instruments"...
Last year I was doing a tin whistle class, one of the students had a TWZ MacNic which obviously consisted of a Clarke Sweetone or Meg mouthpiece on a wide cylindrical brass tube, however, it wasn't nearly as loud as I had expected by the width of the barrel. Tuning and sound were so bad that I gave her one of my own whistles, she was very surprised how easy a whistle could play.
The folk model looks like a Walton's mouthpiece on a fancy tube.

[Sedi]

Interesting. I have all the models they make themselves and they are all great. I stayed away from the cheaper models they offer however. The "Al Jo" I have is simply awesome. And it is definitely a notch up in comparison to my Killarney. (Would be "Die Killarney" as whistle is female in Germany ). If interested, I could maybe record a comparison vid. I think they made a couple of changes over the years. My "Al Jo" definitely looks and sounds different than the models I saw in Youtube-reviews like this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wia8BKN7bmY
BTW -- just to be clear, I don't know the people making them, I don't get paid and I'm not talking them up because they are German as I am. I simply think they make great instruments.

[Sedi]

Just uploaded a little comparison between the Killarny, Chuck Tilbury, Tony Dixon DX204 (another great one) and the TWZ "Al Jo". Mind you -- I'm not much more than a beginner.
https://youtu.be/fUjlTJFoGso

[bruce.b]

Hard to be sure from the video, but I thought the Killarney sounded the best.

[Kade1301]

For me only the Dixon stands out - negatively, I'm sorry to say.

But considering there's microphone, compression and loudspeakers involved here there's no way to say how the whistles sound "in real life". Not to mention that for me as a listener it's much more important who is playing and what they are playing than which instrument they are playing. As a player I want an instrument that I find easy to play and that sounds nice to me, and that's completely subjective and can only be determined through trying out a few different ones.

[Wanderer]

A couple of years ago, I bought one of their all-aluminium whistles (a model which they don't offer anymore), that was pretty much the worst whistle I ever tried - unbalanced octaves, raspy sound, air leakage around the block, bad tuning, high octave difficult to control, any attempt playing a vibrato in the high octave would lead to breaking tone and so on.

I had a TWZ probably a decade ago or more, and this matches my experience with them then.

[Sedi]

@ Wanderer
Well, it looks like they made some improvements over the years.


Kade1301:

As a player I want an instrument that I find easy to play and that sounds nice to me, and that's completely subjective and can only be determined through trying out a few different ones.

Agree 100%. The Dixon is really good, just my playing was sh*t .