NorCalMusician wrote:brewerpaul wrote:Look at what Mary Bergin and others have done with the humble Gen D.quote]
I agree that a great player (pro entertainer) can do great things, even with relatively inferior instruments. I have to wonder though....
Do they REALY use off the shelf whistles?
I use NASCAR racing as my example. They drive a lot of cars that have names that are the same as showroom vehicles that are available, Thunderbird or whatever. I dare you to find one of those high performance cars in the showroom though.
I am sure that the companies that provide their instruments to these high profile advertisers make sure that the instrument provided is better than the rest and that those people do not spend their time sorting through cases of them to find just the right one!
Cue the Black Helicopters....I know, it's all about Cheney and Haliburton...
Generation has been making whistles for generations--out of the same molds. They've been cranking these out essentially as cheap toys from day one and Generation doesn't care a rat's rectum If James Galway plays one or not, because they've *never* marketed them as any sort of musical instrument, just an entertaining novelty that kids, tourists, and dabbling housewives buy by the tens of thousands every year while half-drunk and wearing a "Kiss me I'm Irish" button.
Just go to any music shop and they'll have a cardboard rack of Generations. Pick up a couple and blow them a bit and if you think one is better than the other buy that one. The truth is, most of the characteristics being pissed and moaned about here relative to Generation in particular are exactly those that make it responsive to good Irish Traditional technique. While flogging it and beating it with cuts and rolls and bends and literally driving it through a tune, hammering and molding the output tone as you like it, you produce the true whistle sound. It's based on technique applied to an instrument that responds to the technique.
Frankly, the much-touted "fluid" and "effortless" and "smooth" qualities of the "super whistles" retards technique, it does not add anything to it at all. Those qualities being criticized in a Generation et al whistle are the sorts of qualities somebody who neither plays nor understands Irish technique would find difficult or objectionable. The superwhistle's qualities are preferred only relative to the inadequate mastery of technique, thus, has this tonal and performance model been designed to make up for player's inadequate technical execution in "sweetness" while the novice is nakedly meandering through mostly recognizable melodies unmolested by proper embellishment.
The most manoeverable fighter aircraft are inherently unstable, and the more stable they are the less manoeverable they are and the more useless they are in a dogfight. Same goes for whistles.
All the chiff and squeaking and brightness and windiness in the "traditional" whistle, or at least "traditional sounding" whistle, are all components to be exploited in expressing a tune with proper embellishment. You want a cut to snap and chirp. You want all those little spikey transient sounds. And the last thing you really want in a performance whistle is one that *effortlessly* breaks the octave. You want that to be a little more defined a break, a break that comes only when you demand it, not when you're just casually thinking about it and then by that time you're already there.
Most of what I've heard on the mp3 files sound like people coming from recorder or academic flute training trying to tongue their way through Irish melodies on recorders very thinly disquised as tin whistles. What you should be asking yourself is not, "Is this whistle playable, " but "Why can't I fathom the merits of a standard Generation?" Because the bare truth is, there has never been a Generation that was so unplayable that it would ever impede the learning of Irish Traditional music on it in the entire history of the instrument. Let's take that back a few decades and simply say that there were several generations of whistlers who hissed away with complete success on poorly thrown together old Clarks make out of rolled up old tin sheets with a splintery piece of salvaged packing crate lumber jammed in the end.
Nobody on this list should ever presume to suggest that their playing or learning of this music is impaired to any extent or in any manner by some imagined "unplayability" of Generation, the old Clark, or any other whistle. I learned off both whistles like whistlers have been doing for decades and decades and decades. I can go down to the toy store and buy a $1 plastic whistle from Taiwan (and I have) and teach you any thing you need to know about playing Irish music on it, and on top of that if you put it back-to-back with the playing *technique* (or lack thereof) I hear on these sound files, what you're really going to be comparing is the sound of a slightly funky-sounding $1 whistle being used to play real, fully outfitted Traditional Irish music, to a lot of $300 designer whistles sounding like recorders, being played by recorder and classical flute players as if they were recorders or classical flutes, and almost incidentally picking out Irish melodies (inbetween Greensleeves and the theme from Titanic) featuring only occasional cuts and an obligatory roll once or twice in a tune, while essentially just tonguing out the notes as if the player really had no clue what the music was all about and never would.
The exact metaphor would be some self-proclaimed uilleann piper taking up the instrument, then claiming the traditional uilleann pipes were all "unplayable," and then adapting oboe reeds and bores to uilleann fingering, and then playing Irish pipe tunes with baroque ornaments with a tone like an oboe.
(And the real story on that is, uilleann pipes really are all unplayable, but pipers learn to make them play anyway, and that's one of the biggest parts of the craft.)
For the metaphorically challenged and the literally impared: It's not the whistle and it never is, was, or will be. Don't get a better whistle, work and get better fingers. Don't find your fullfillment in spending money on a better whistle than Sean Potts or Paddy Molloney plays, find your fullfillment in playing any whistle you have, as well as, in the same manner as, in the same tradition as, with all the notes and embellishments as, Sean Potts and Paddy Molloney. (Or fill in the idol of the day.)
Spend your 300 bucks a year on lessons from real whistlers, not on more and better vanity whistles.
Royce
