About 2 years ago I walked into a music shop and bought a cheap Feadóg penny whistle. I quickly lost motivation and tossed it in a drawer.
I took it back out again last November and then things got out of hand! I developed a love for traditional wind instruments of all sorts. My collection has expanded at an alarming pace:
I wont pretend I’m brilliant on any of my instruments, but I do enjoy playing them all.
My favourites are my Dixon Low D (with the whistle head on), the Clarke High D and the large Oriental Flute from Erik the Flutemaker.
The Shaw Bb is my latest addition.
I’m hoping to pick up a few pointers here from like minded addicts…
The thing that troubles me is that I “reverence” my instruments for some weird reason, holding onto things I do not play.
The Clarke Meg in C is badly out of tune (it happens occasionally with factory produced instruments) but I can’t bring myself to chuck it even though I don’t play it.
Perhaps I should prise the head off and see if I can tune it before considering that.
That’s exactly what you should do. In fact it is standard operating procedure for most whitles with plastic heads on a metal body. The Meg and Sweetone are tunable once you loosen the head from the body. You need to brew a cup of whistle tea. Have some oven mits (or similar) handy. Heat some water short of boiling. Place the head end of the whistle into the water. Let it steep for a minute. The warm water just softens the glue. Remove the whistle while protecting you hands with the mits (or similar) and pull the head off. Clean any excess glue from the inside of the head and from around the tube. And now you have a tunable Meg (well as tunable as it gets).
Well that’s a good start on a problem, isn’t it Ron? I’m recalling the innocent post once made on the flute board where a member asked, “What do you keep your flute in?”. Now the expected response was probably “in a flute case” or “in a flute roll” but one member casually answered “I keep mine in a humidified steamer trunk.”. Now that may be indicative of a problem but I am no expert.
Feadoggie, that was good advice about the tuning. I gave it a bash and I have now tuned my Feadog and two Megs.
They’re still not perfect and the Megs seem to tend to being sharp in the second octave, but they are now playable so thank you.
I did find removing the glue somewhat compromised the air seal between fipple and body so I applied a little Vaseline to the join and rubbed the excess off. That seemed to do the trick.
The Feadog is probably the most in tune out of all my whistles now.
When you are tuning your Megs, you might to tune to a note like the A in the first octave as opposed to the bell note. It kind of evens the tuning of the extremes out a little. Then you can adjust your breath as you play to hit the higher notes on pitch and hopefully still be able to get the low notes on pitch too.
The Vaseline is a good idea too and cheaper than cork grease or the like. Some prefer to use beeswax. And still others mix the two.
I’ve got more than $3600 invested in whistles and the whistle isn’t even my 1st, 2nd, or 3rd instrument.
And I just ordered an Oz C, so that number is going to go up significantly at some point down the road.
Many use Teflon tape (often used in plumbing) to act as a seal between head and tube. Far less messy than Vaseline. It works so well than several higher end whistles are sealed with it.
Those cane flutes are interesting. One seems to be built on the same sort of scale that Irish whistles and flutes are, but two of the flutes appear to be built on a minor scale, and one on a pentatonic scale.
Here’s what I take to gigs (every key, chromatic, from Low D to High Eb:
I got them from >here< as a set. I don’t think they are quite concert pitch, but quite enjoyable to play when I can get my embouchure to behave itself.
The set goes to support a good charity and it gave me a chance to try out flutes so I went for it.
