Benefits of HEAVY/heavy wall whistles?

[Moof]

Isn't whether they both can be got into tune, preferably by the usual means of moving the head, more important than whether they are now? Or maybe I've misunderstood?

I supposer we don't know whether further compensatory mechanisms are added to whistles with built-up holes. If they are, that might complicate things because it means we can't compare like with like.

(When I say 'we' I mean everyone but me, obvs. My talent in the whistle modding department stops at sculpting thumb rests out of Blu-Tack.)

[Tunborough]

So, I had this really good idea. (Oh how I wish I had a dollar for every time I've said that!) Let's find out what happens when we thicken the wall of a whistle. Yeah, I know, Tunborough can probably model that with one stroke of the keyboard. How could I do it easily? That's where the alleged "good idea" kicks in.

I still have that pair of Walton's D whistles that cost $5.00 each at the local op-shop. I figured one could be the Control and the other the Test Piece. The Control is left as is, the Test Piece I would artificially fatten up by slipping some irrigation tubing over its tube. The irrigation tubing was a pretty tight fit, so I made the job easier by cutting it in two pieces, Left Hand and Right Hand. And warmed it with a hot air gun to make it softer and more pliable. Wasn't too hard to get them into place.

So now my Test Piece could only play Low D, as the irrigation tube covered all the holes. Using the Control whistle as a guide, I jabbed a needle into where I thought each hole should be, successfully. Then followed up with the No 11 Scalpel Blade, cutting a diameter, then a cross, then a square, and finally running around each of the holes using the underlying brass as my guide. Doesn't look great, but it plays again. And to put some numbers on it, both whistles have a bore of 12.07mm. Control has an OD of 12.85mm, Test Piece an OD of 15.33mm. Control wall thickness therefore 0.39mm, Test Piece 1.63mm. Just over 4 times thicker walls.

It is a great idea. But I wouldn't worry about tuning in your comparison ... We know it's going to mess with the tuning, but we can always fix that by enlarging the holes or moving them up the tube. (I do recall that modelling a thicker body tends to exacerbate the flat second octave, but not drastically.) I'd like to know how it sounds - more mellow, perhaps? smoother? muddier? And how it feel to play: easier or harder to hit the holes, get a nice "pop" from the cuts and taps? From my very limited experience, I favour thick-walled whistles: I like the sound better than metal-tube whistles, and I feel like I hit the holes more cleanly. Perhaps just my imagination. Perhaps the different in heads explains the difference in sound.

What does your Test Piece tell you in this regard.

[David Cooper]

I've noticed when making wooden quenas that the quality of the lowest note deteriorates substantially as you drill the tone holes. The difference is huge with lightweight wood if you drill them before lining the bore with epoxy, but you still get a disappointing decline with the epoxy in first. To minimise the damage, you don't want to see parts of your fingers bulging into the tube when you look through it, but you also want the covered holes to be filled reasonably well to minimise disruption to the airflow in the pipe, so the wall thickness ideally needs to be tuned to the size of the holes, although using a thicker tube allows you to reduce the thickness to the sides of a hole if you need to so that your finger can get deeper into the hole to fill it, but without having to do the same for the larger holes where you need to keep the finger further out. On the quenas I've made out of craft resin this isn't so crucial as the sound quality's much better and doesn't appear to decline significantly as you drill out the holes. Small whistles have such small holes that thin walls won't lead to any finger bulge-through into the pipe, but thick walls should cause more disruption to the airflow, which likely impacts a little on the quality of the notes produced, though not necessarily in a bad way. With deep whistles where the holes are bigger, bulge-through and disruption to airflow from unfilled side-chambers are more likely to have a negative impact on performance, so where whistles have a constant wall thickness you'd be looking for the best compromise between the two issues.

Making quena tubes out of craft resin takes many days of pouring layers of epoxy up on a rotating silicone bore mould, but I've just finished making the second one by that method having spent months tweaking the first one to try to get the best sound out of it. This new one developed a bit of sag in the tube supporting the mould after I added the first couple of layers of epoxy as I forgot to store it vertically in between adding layers, so the result was that it accumulated more epoxy on the underside of that sag from then on, resulting in a tube with one side (used for the underside) much thicker than the other. It makes no difference to the sound of the resulting quena. I thought it might for a while as it sounded horrible at first, but I was also using a different angle between the two surfaces of the wedge: the previous quena ended up with a 30° angle while the new one is 45°. The 30° one needs to have a very sharp edge to get the best sound out of it, but using a sharp edge on the 45° one was causing the horrible sound of the tube. Slightly rounding the edge cured that and now both instruments sound great. The 30° one is louder and has more bite to its sound, while the 45° one is more mellow, and the quality of sound it's producing is just like the one I had a go on in Edinburgh thirty years ago, so I'm close to achieving my objective. The 45° one requires less precision to get most of the notes of the second octave, improving playability for most pieces, but it makes it harder to get the highest note of the second octave and the all-holes-open bottom note of the third octave. I don't know if I should leave it as it is or try to reshape the wedge closer to 40° to see if that leads to improved playability, but any angle between 30 and 45° should be viable. Probably best not to change it for now. I'll have to make two more quenas to test 35 and 40°. A thicker tube at the blowing end makes it easier to support the wider angles, but it also makes it more comfortable to play as it presses against your chin/lip with the force more spread out, so I'll always engineer that end of the tube to be good-and-thick in future.

[Terry McGee]

It is a great idea. But I wouldn't worry about tuning in your comparison ... We know it's going to mess with the tuning, but we can always fix that by enlarging the holes or moving them up the tube. (I do recall that modelling a thicker body tends to exacerbate the flat second octave, but not drastically.) I'd like to know how it sounds - more mellow, perhaps? smoother? muddier? And how it feel to play: easier or harder to hit the holes, get a nice "pop" from the cuts and taps? From my very limited experience, I favour thick-walled whistles: I like the sound better than metal-tube whistles, and I feel like I hit the holes more cleanly. Perhaps just my imagination. Perhaps the different in heads explains the difference in sound.

What does your Test Piece tell you in this regard.

I think it offers the promise of better, smoother, fuller tone, although there are still a few glitchy notes in the second octave. But they seem to also be a feature of the Control tube as well. Perhaps that amount of thickening isn't enough to move us into significantly warmer territory.

I did find the pitch difference a bit off putting. We humans tend to be attracted to bright shiny trinkets, and so the flatter Test Piece seemed a bit dull. But I got around that by flattening the Control tube to the same degree. I'm now playing both around A435Hz. Posh people would call it Diapason Normal. I calls it Flat.

I also found the sharp D notes quite off putting. Especially on the Test Piece, as it now plays even sharper. Think about it. I fattened up the tube around the finger holes, thus flattening all the other notes a bit. But left the far end of the tube bare, so not flattening the D notes. So by comparison, they now sound even sharper! Got around that by pressing another bit of irrigation tubing over the end of the tube to lengthen it. About 8.5mm overhang needed to get it more or less in tune with the A.

But of course that makes an unfair comparison with the Control, as the manufacturer (a Mr Walton, according to the labels) had left it too sharp. So I did the right thing and gave it some tube too. About 5mm overhang seemed to work here.

So interesting to remind ourselves about these two whistles picked up as new from our local Op-shop, still in their original boxes with the usual pamphlets inside. Both heads needed revoicing by lowering the ramp floor to clean up the tone. Both whistles needed elongating to bring the D notes down. And both whistles are still rather flat on the top notes of the second octave. And I had similar experiences with my Waltons (or was it Soodlums?) Mellow D until I tweaked it, head and tube. It's a bit of a dismal story.

[busterbill]

Comparing high D's my favorite whistle is a brass Copeland which is an exquisitely heavy whistle. On other days it is my Sindt, which is much lighter. But if I were forced to choose to have only one whistle it would be the Copeland. I also enjoy my original Glenn Schultz Water Weasel which is light as a feather, and have the original even lighter Composite Burke when they were all composite, not metal at all. That one is sweeter and lighter than the Copeland Brass Session Bore I picked up for my kid and have now regained custody of. They are all different. It is hard to say if the thickness of the walls and weights make the Copeland and Brass Burke sound hefty or better somehow or the craftsmanship. I've heard a lot of aluminum Burkes and have played a couple, but preferred the brass myself. The Aluminum sounds great though different, perhaps more birdlike? That one is hard to explain and likely a personal observation which would vary from listener to listener. Wooden whistles often have thicker walls with less weight than brass. It is all magic and alchemy plus engineering and skill I suppose.

[DeTerminator]

Busterbill, I have the brass Burke high D, as well as the aluminum version of the same model. I tend to reach for the brass model more often, although as you had stated, there's nothing wrong with the aluminum one at all. The brass one has a slightly mellower voice than the aluminum one, although the volume is the same to my ear. I guess I like the heft of the brass one too, now that I think about it.