"The Causeway Whistle"- has anyone tried these?

Whistle
1

Just came across these whistles on Etsy, apparently part of the Dannan brand (the sell roll and individual sleeves). They have a hexagonal head, so it looks unlikely to roll off the table. Voicing looks a little on the larger side, so could be relatively loud maybe.
Not sure if it’s just the quality of the photos, but the finger holes look a bit uneven in terms of their finish, here and there.

Has anyone had any experience with these yet?

Link: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1314554830/the-dannan-causeway-brass-tin-whistle-in?ref=share_v4_lx

2

This is very interesting. I wonder how the mouthpiece is made. A while ago I was super in to whistle making, and my journey stopped because I want to make an injection molded mouthpiece but don’t have good enough tooling to do it. But in the process I looked heavily into if 3d printing whistle heads is viable. So whenever I see something liek this, I wonder if its a 3d printed head of some sort or if its properly molded. Because due to assorted reasons, I don’t view a 3d printed mouthpiece as safe. But some people don’t realize that and just design the whistle. So I’d love to know how this is made.

3

They have a hexagonal head,

They didn’t pluck the name from thin air.. :stuck_out_tongue:

4

Yep and they’ve got a giant sitting on that very causeway depicted on the box itself. Also, there’s three little hexagons on the back of the whistle head as well.

I get it’s a statement of the obvious to point out the head shape when the box and context says it all, but the fact that it is a heaxagonal head to begin with is certainly atypical and interesting

Hmm It looks like there might a big ol gap under the windway exit, like with generations, and I can’t see any chamfers to the windway exit itself either. Someone will just have to buy one and let the rest of us know how it plays :stuck_out_tongue:

5

Has anyone tried one of these yet? I came across them on Etsy recently, as well. A Google search didn’t seem to turn up any info about what they are like, and the YouTube videos about them do not have any sound (perhaps a bad sign?).

I’m almost tempted to buy one just for the sake of curiosity. Surely someone has played one, though.

6

I’ve just ordered one, and it’s estimated to arrive on December 31st.

My expectations for it are not high, but curiosity got the best of me. I will report back to this thread after I’ve given it a thorough tootin’.

7

I got the Causeway whistle today.

The tone of the whistle is nice, but there are a couple of issues that would prevent me from ever choosing to play this.

As for the tone, the lower octave sounds like that of a combination of a Generation and a Dixon trad. The upper octave has a rather pure sound that is surrounded by a good bit of breathiness that pairs well with the tone within it. The whistle is also rather responsive. These are all good things in my book. I’d prefer a bit more chirp in the high end, but the pure tone encased in a shroud of pleasant haziness is nice in its own way. The low octave is round in tone and nothing unusual or unique, but I think it is nice.

However, the bad things about it are dealbreakers for me. First of all, I wasn’t sure if this was meant to be tunable or not, so I gave the head a tug. The head was indeed glued on, but it seems they used Elmer’s school glue or something. The glue broke free easily. Nice, now it is tunable…… oh, never mind. The whistle is only reasonably in tune with the head shoved all the way in, where it was set with glue, which means the tunability is only useful in very limited situations.

As for the tuning of the whistle…. Yikes. It is all over the place. After a brief time of playing it, I could play it better in tune, but it is trickier than most whistles in this regard. Maybe after more time with it I will modify this opinion a bit, but I can’t imagine how this whistle wants to be played to come naturally to me at any point.

Also, the low and high D note are weird on this whistle. Overall the whistle is quite powerful (louder than a Sindt, Bluebird, Oak, Generation, etc. but not as loud as Burke, Copeland, or Chieftain). However, you really have to back off on the low D, as it takes way less pressure than the other notes, and will break if you don’t drastically lower pressure for the low D. Yes, many whistles require you to back off a little bit there, but it’s pretty extreme on this whistle. The note isn’t quiet, but it is very quiet in proportion to the other notes. As for the vented high D, you have to push more than most whistles to get it to sound. This is a bit unusual, as normally that is a note that speaks easily and you just have to push it to get it into tune. On this one, it won’t sound at allunless you push it more than you’d expect for that note. Actually the whole second octave requires a good push, but the whistle isn’t too air hungry. You need to push considerably harder than a standard plastic-topped mass-manufactured whistle, but I didn’t find myself having to take more breaths than usual.

The big dealbreaker on this is the high B note. The second octave B is very close to Bb (according to a Peterson strobe tuner) than it does to B natural, unless you push the note by such a ridiculous amount that it is absurdly louder than the other notes. If you push it by the amount you’d expect, or even a good bit harder than you’d expect, it will be very flat. And you better be precise, because the littlest change in pressure sends the tuning wildly all over the place. You’d have to spend more time getting used to the quirks of this whistle than you would with most any other I have tried. To play it in tune is just extremely extremely loud, both in comparison to the other notes and also in regards to volume in general.

The weak and fickle low D combined with the either extremely out of tune or ear-shattering high B makes this whistle too inconsistent for me to recommend to anyone. It’s a real shame, too. If they could bring up the strength of the low D a bit and fix the high B tuning to make the whole thing a bit more consistent, it would be a very good sounding whistle. Tone wise, it sounds great, though I would prefer it to have a bit lower overall volume closer to that of a more traditional plastic-topped whistle. Then again, I care more about volume balance between the octaves than I do about overall volume, as I think most whistles penetrate significantly more in a session than the player realizes. OXXOOO c-natty is acceptable on this, by the way.

I’ve played many different whistles, and I just find this one to be too wacky with the breath gymnastics requirements. One could spend time getting used to it to play it acceptably in tune more reliably, but you’d still be left with a gigantic volume differential between the lowest and highest note, and I feel like the music doesn’t flow as well when I’m focusing that much effort towards keeping it in tune. Yes, every whistle requires some amount of attention to this, but this requires too much of it, and in a way that I am not accustomed to.

Maybe these vary and I got a bad one. I just don’t foresee myself ever choosing to play this one. If they could fix the major problems and keep the sound it has, I would play it.

But, we all blow differently and have different prefrences, and like any whistle of this sort, I’m sure they vary a lot too, so don’t make the decision of whether to buy it on the basis of my review. However, I’d go into it without super high expectations if you do buy one.

Personally, if I wanted to spend $30 on a whistle, I’d recommended buying three Acorns. The best out of the three will likely be a lot better than this one.

8

Hmmm, doesn’t sound encouraging, Sirchronique. Thanks for your honesty.

On the tunability front, if the socket is reasonably deep, you could cut a few mm off the top end of the tube to give yourself some scope. But yeah, in this day and age, you shouldn’t have to unglue heads and cut bits off. Especially with a whistle from Ireland. They should know what we need. That was life back in the 1970s with Generation.

Hmmm, and a top B nearer to Bb. This takes me back to tweaking my old Soodlums(?). See the navy blue “untweaked” curve on the chart below - top B coming in 80 cents flat, ie only 20 cents flat of Bb. Again, this is not what we expect in the 21st century, especially from an Irish whistle company. Especially when I could tweak it up to within 14 cents (green trace). If I could, they should have.

(full story at: http://www.mcgee-flutes.com/Tin-whistle-retuning.htm)

Could I press you for an entry to our Comparison of Whistle Bores page? Just so we can continue to explore where the various makers have chosen to set their bores.

9

The bore size of this whistle is identical to a Generation body (albeit with different hole size/placement).

And yes, the b tuning bothered me a lot, as my main D whistle (Timothy Potter) has sort of an opposite quirk, where that note tends towards being slightly sharp with where I have the head and how I blow. With that whistle I typically just push the high B by the minimum necessary.

As for making the whistle more tunable, I likely won’t bother, as I don’t like it enough to do so. That being said, I might try out the head on a Feadog tube to see how much of the tuning that can rectify. I might also try out a putty tweak to see if this whistle benefits from that or not (it has a cavity under the windway).