First, I’ll give y’all a moment to recover from the shock of OutOfBreath starting an on-topic thread…
Okay, everybody got their breath back?
We have a small new music shop that’s opened here in my little town. Not sure when they opened but my son-in-law just told me about it today so I went down to check it out. To my surprise they had a Feadóg - a whistle I’ve always wanted to try. I picked one and then halfway out the door I noticed they had a whole box of Clark Megs, so I picked one of those up too.
Now for the questions. The Feadóg was quite sharp but I was very surprised to find that I didn’t have to soak the head in water to loosen it, it was not glued on. I was able to pull the head out far enough to bring the whistle in tune, but in the last 3/8" or so of travel it gets very loose on the shaft. Unfortunately, to bring it in tune means bringing it right to the edge of this looseness. Has anyone else encountered this and how did you tighten it up (I’m thinking maybe a wrap or two of tape around the end of the barrel?). Once tuned the whistle is very pleasingly in tune with itself through about A in the second octave – better than any of my other cheap whistles and as good or better than some of my high end ones.
Finally, does the blu-tac tweak work well on Feadóg whistles?
Now, for the Meg. What’s the deal on this whistle? The one I bought is in C but, allowing for differences in size, it seems indistinguishable from my Sweetone. It also seems to play about the same, though it may be a bit more sensitive to breath pressure than my D sweetone. Are the Meg and Sweetone the same whistle, or is there supposed to be some mysterious difference?
Oh, and so as not to worry anyone, I promise not to start any more on topic threads for a while
The Meg and the Sweetone share the same design, but they are manufactured differently. The Sweetones, as far as I know, are made in the UK (still) and the Megs are made in China. I was also told by Clarkes’ technical consultant Norman Danett, that the metal is slightly thinner.
By the way, there are reams of posts on this very subject going back a year or so, when the Meg first came on the market.
I can’t speak to what’s happened in the past year, but the early Megs were very uneven in quality.
I AM SPEAKING AS A BULK PURCHASER, NOT A MAKER HERE. I do NOT compete with Clarke.
I bought 2 dozen of the Megs in D last year for an informal whistle class I gave at a performing arts school. Half were out of tune, half of the rest wouldn’t play at all, and the rest were okay. We got the out of tune ones in, for the most part, by moving the heads. I got a refund on the six that wouldn’t play. The rest were fine. The class was fun, and if I get called on to do another class, I’ll probably buy another couple dozen.
To help clean up and stabilize the voicing of a plastic headed whistle, you can fill the cavity under the windway with poster putty (“blu tac”), which is available at WalMart next to the crayons, or Home Depot, hardware stores, etc. Make a ball of poster putty about the size of a large pea. Drop it into the cavity under the windway (with the whistlehead removed from the tube) and tamp it down with something that has a flat end. I use the flat end of the handle of my exacto knife. You want the poster putty to fill the cavity even with the end of the windway and make a nice flat, smooth surface, so add or remove a little poster putty until you have that result.
To revove the whistlehead from Generation whistles, make some piping hot (not boiling) water, dip the whistlehead in the water, and then pull the hot whistlehead off the tube. Sometimes it takes more than one try, but they usually come off on the first try. For some reason, Generation C whistleheads are almost impossible to get off, but the other keys come off just fine.
Thanks all, I’ll do the Blu Tac thing I guess. I guess I got lucky on the Meg as it seems to play fairly decent though it’s quite sharp across the scale, I haven’t tried moving the head on it yet.
I’ve tested the sticky tac tweak on a fairly large number of whistles. I’ve actually done it on about 400, but I’ve compared before and after performance on maybe 40. The other 360 or so, I’ve only checked the end result without having tried the whistle first.
I agree, not every whistle is improved by the sticky tack tweak. However, in many cases, there is a noticeable difference, sometimes even quite a big difference. It’s definitely worth a try.
I feel obligated to share my super special MEG fix technique:
Take your dude and locate the blade on the mouthpiece, take a flat screwdriver that will fit well along the blade and press the blade down with the screwdriver a bit and experiment till you get the sound you should, mainly its just a matter of stretching the plastic down a little.
Well, I knocked all the sharp edges off the Feadog mouthpiece and did the poster putty thing. It made a huge difference. The whistle didn’t sound bad before but the bell note was a tiny bit touchy and it started getty a little raspy in the second octave. Now the bell note is stronger and it’s clean right through three octaves, though the third octave is a bit off pitch and extremely loud.
I used a couple of turns of teflon plumber’s tape on the end of the barrel to snug the mouthpiece up.
It’s really a very nice little whistle now. It’s intonated about as well as my early model Burke NBB. It’s not quite as pure, but actually sounds more like a traditional whistle than the Burke does.
