Hi, I’m a newbie to the whistle. I’ve been reading some various whistle sights that talk about tweaking whistles. Can anyone recommend or advise against doing this to my Feadog D? Sometimes it seems that the D note wants to skip up to the next octave too easily. It could just be me.
Thanks,
Fishie
Ah, you’ve come to the right place. Welcome.
You can easily fix your Feadog problem, in two steps:
First, remove any burrs or little bits of plastic that look like they shouldn’t be there from the winday (you blow through the windway), the window, and the blade (the slanted thing).
Second, take some very fine sandpaper or a thin piece of emory board and carefully, gently dull the blade a bit. Do not take off too much, just make it every so slightly blunt.
In a third, optional step, you can take some blu tac or light weight spackling and fill the little cavity inside the whistle’s head under the windway. Whether this helps or not is controversial.
Thanks for the info! I will probably do that then. I think I had better get another whistle first, in case something goes terribly wrong.
To tweak a Feadog…
place on road, drive over with truck!
Only joking , see above.
That’s always a good idea! But if you do as Bloomfield recommends, you’ll have a very nice sounding whistle. I’ve ruined a few in the process, but it’s fun to do it yourself and end up with a beautiful sound. One of my all time fave whistles is the Feadog I started out with.
I like mine well enough. Mostly because it has a cool name. Eventually, I’ll even make it sound good.
And, if it doesn’t work, or if you destroy the mouthpiece in the process, you can get a Hoover Whitecap mouthpiece, which is what I did. It’s pretty quiet now, which is good for my situation, but the sound is excellent and it’s very easy to play. My original Feadog mouthpiece sounded more like a duck call than a whistle, and tweaking helped, but I still wasn’t crazy about it, so I got the Whitecap.
I’m about to tweak a couple of them tonight. Both of them are fairly playable, but they arn’t particularly nice. Also got a couple of Waltons and a Clare. I had the urge to buy a bunch of cheap whistles for some reason last week. The best one right out of the box was the Walton in C.
I have a tweaked Feadog, but the cavity is not filled. It plays really good and has a tone of which even the most rabid ITM fanatic would approve. When you tweak it, try not to shave too much off the blade, as the position of the blade relative to the windway is extremely critical. Maybe Tweakmaster Jerry will chime in to explain. If you mess up and have to use a different mouthpiece, then it is no longer a Feadog, and it will sound entirely different. It is a great tube, however, as it probably has the best intonation of any mass produced cylindrical tube, so it would be worth salvaging.
From what I recall of advice Jerry gave me about Feadogs he recommends caution where messing with the blade is concerned. Jerry suggested to me that I tackle an unstable bell note (the low d note) by filling the void beneath the windway with putty or blu-tac. I tried it and it worked well - although it did seem to slightly DE-stablise the higher register. Basically you drop a pea-sized piece of putty down the tube end of the mouthpiece and then pack it into the void with the flat end of a pencil or similar.
Now I’ve practiced more I find that I can get a good bell note from my feadogs without tweaking, so I no longer do it (other than the clean up of loose plastic as mentioned by Bloomfield, although Feadogs are neater than Generations in this respect and usually don’t need it). I’ve also moved to the nickel Feadogs more than the brass (although I love both) which I find play a fraction better - although I can’t imagine why…
The two I did last night turned out very well. One required just a little blue tac. I’ll leave it at that for now. The other I ammended the blade a bit. I’ts turned out to be about the best cheapie I’ve got. It take so little air now, it’s about like a hoover.
Both were III’s that I just got.
I just bought a Feadog (Mark III, I think) at a Renn faire.
I love the lower octave, but the upper is pure, unadulterated crap: screechy and hard to hold.
I’m going to try some of the tweaks mentioned here tonight…
if I can get the octaves to sound the same, it’ll be a heck of an instrument!