C-natural hole for 2nd ocatve?

Whistle
1

Hi. I’ve never played a whistle with a thumb-hole for c-natural, but I’m wondering if it can be used (uncovered slightly) to make the 2nd octave easier to hit and sweeter sounding (like on a recorder).

-Brett

2

Despite my assurances that fingering C as OXXOOO or as a half holed C# really IS easy, I had one customer who insisted on a C nat thumbhole. It worked OK, but it didn’t seem to function like a recorder thumbhole (I’m a pretty avid recorder player too).

3

I have a whistle (a Hoover) with a C-natural thumbhole.

It works as advertised (produces a perfectly-in-tune C-natural in both octaves), but I’ve not found much other use for it.

It will not act as an octave vent like a recorder’s thumb hole. I believe this to be because of its altered location on whistle vs recorder, and because of the bore differences between the two.

There is one other use for the C-natural whistle thumbhole: like the long C key on a flute, you can vent it to bring a sustained C-sharp up to pitch. On whistle this isn’t as big a deal as it is on flute, because on some flutes the second octave C-sharp is quite flat.

–James

4

on my whistles,

OXOXXX works great for 2nd octave C nat.

5

The Whistle and the Recorder are “apples & oranges”. The Whistle has a cylindrical bore and the Recorder has a tapered conical bore.

The Whistle achieves register changes by overblowing and the Recorder by cancellation of the fundamental register using the thumbhole pinching technique.

Because the Whistle has a cylindrical bore, it becomes progressively flat with each register change (phase-shift) but it has a greater range. The Recorder uses the tapered conical bore to compensate for flatness in the upper registers but is limited to 2.5 octaves.

6

I have been playing whistles for over 40 years and I have never played a whistle whose range exceeds 2.5 octaves, mostly only up to third octave’s mediant.

C thumbholes are good for D tubes except that you can not piper grip with your left hand properly. If that is not an issue for you I would recommend the thumbhole without qualification. I have one on my Irish flute and tape over it when I need to play music with full pipers’ grip.