At a session I used to go to, there was a guy who picked up one of my whistles one day to try it out. It's just a standard blue top Generation that I bought at a shop. Actually the second whistle I ever owned (after the first one was lost in a busking/street fight incident). He loved the tone. Told me to never let that one go. And a few times afterwards, he would ask me if he could play it again, and I'd oblige.MichaelRS wrote:And as a beginner one does not have the chops to "muscle through" something that is less than it should be.
And, for example, if the Generation D is still just fine, then there shouldn't be any post about how wonderful the pre-1980s generation was without some major qualifications about how the current one is okay itself.
Along those lines one goes back to Jerry Freeman having stopped tweaking Gen Ds because, as I understand it, the current defects in productions were just too numerous and/or varied to overcome and I halfway cost-efficient way.
So when people without money to burn hear stuff like that, they're like, "okay, I stand a better chance with a current Walton's or a Feadog if I want to get a cheap D or C".
He's a decent enough whistle player. He mainly plays other instruments, so I don't think I'd be offending him if I said that he's no Mary Bergin, or even all that strong a player. But he can carry a tune with a bit of lift, essentially your bog-standard session musician.
What I didn't have the heart to tell him was that my magical Generation was actually a couple of them. Every so often I find myself in a situation where I want a whistle and don't have one, and it's cheap enough to go to the shop to pick one up. I rarely spend that much time testing it out. So I have three more or less randomly picked Generations.
They're fine. You might get a dud here or there, but almost every Generation I've had, barring a problematic Eb I once got, sound and play fine. There's variation, and some definitely sound better than others, but I don't think there's anything that would pose a problem to a beginner. You're going to sound like you're strangling a cat on a Gen, a Killarney, a Milligan, an Abell, or anything you start out with.