Have to start this long story about a short whistle with the confession that, while I still make my living as a musician of sorts (school teaching), I’ve spent too long (as in many years) playing little but the things I need for work (piano, guitar, bass etc.) while neglecting the things I used to be good at (recorders, flutes and whistles). But sometimes it simply takes the smallest nudge to set off a whole chain reaction, and so it was this summer with a request for me to play at Anne and Donald’s wedding leading to the serendipitous discovery that, despite needing some real practice to get myself back to a standard worthy of the occasion, it was Anne and Donald doing me a favour rather than vice versa when I’d been missing my wind playing more than I knew and was basically gagging for some serious, regular blowing again. So I enjoyed working up a really nice low whistle set for them, following Phil Cunningham’s The Wedding (self-explanatory choice) with An Cluinn Thu Mi Mo Nighean Donn (a favourite Gaelic love song), The Bonnie Lass o’ Bon-Accord (Anne being a north-east girl) and Calum’s Road (just a tune I like to play) but, failing to find the combination of tone colour and pitch I sought for that in my old Overtons (A, G, Low D, and still great whistles!), then had to go looking for suitable new instruments. And perhaps I was only really in the market for three or four but, with Phil Hardy’s Chieftain V3 in F looking the business for the wedding set and a set of seven Chieftains (V3 low D, F, G + NR A, Bb, C, high D) bought together costing little more than the few I wanted most, found myself splashing out for the whole lot…
Now, while I found them all beautifully made and some (starting with the F and A) so gorgeous to play that I just couldn’t stop, my reservations about others led to further dialogue with Phil, who (after encouraging me to persevere before getting back to him) replaced the G (probably unnecessarily in retrospect), C and high D and made some unspecified tweak to the Bb. At which point, despite some continued but dwindling reservations about the G, Bb and C (small quirks ultimately outweighed by strengths), the high D became my main source of continued exasperation as an apparent curate’s egg, near useless to me as delivered with its undoubted strengths (brilliant tone and crisply quacking ornaments low down) completely negated by intolerable weaknesses (sticky/absent high notes and pitch problems) and only its effective non-returnability when it would cost more than the set price to purchase even the four lowest whistles separately persuading me to persevere with it at all.
So what was wrong with it, was it just me and what (if anything) could be done about it? Well, before even attempting to answer these questions, we have to look at the Chieftain high D concept and consider whether there was any misunderstanding involved. It’s a large-bore whistle (massively wide for a high D), which conventionally (according to the laws of physics) means loud, requiring plenty of puff and with potentially more difficult top notes. It’s not supposed to behave like a traditional tin whistle and I wouldn’t want it to, but the top C# just wasn’t there (tongued or slurred) all fingers off despite blowing hard enough to push the nominal D scale to almost perfect Eb with the tuning slide right in. But it’s not supposed to be an Eb whistle either, so that tuning slide needs to come out a long way (even after dropping the pressure a bit) to bring it down to D, and that degree of adjustment’s starting to play havoc (to my ears) with the overall intonation.
So… just me or not? Phil Hardy says he gets those top C#s instinctively with a wee push from the diaphragm and will make a video to demonstrate, but I’m afraid (with all respect to Phil as the maker) that’s just not working for me, I can’t see why it would when I’m not getting the note at any pressure and others have clearly found the same… as documented at http://www.thesession.org/discussions/display/25434 where, amongst a mixture of useful comment, erroneous statement and gratuitous Chieftain bashing, you’ll also find reference to the near-Eb pitching with tuning slide in. And you can hear folk playing the whistle way sharp too, with Hobgoblin’s video Noel plays the Chieftain High D Tuneable Whistle being a prime example.
So I’m suggesting (while acknowledging Phil’s credentials as a whistle maker and the Chieftain high D’s as a big seller) that this instrument has significant flaws, but has it stayed completely irredeemable (a true curate’s egg) in my eyes? Ask me that a few days ago and (after several weeks of exasperated experimentation) I’d probably have said yes. But, with the high D being such a ‘core’ whistle and so much effort already thrown at it, I’ve gone on trying and finally got the thing behaving more or less as I think it should. Starting with the pitch and the tuning slide out about 7mm, which (contrary to what’s suggested in that ‘session’ discussion) still leaves the top notes (second octave A and up) way sharp at the pressure now required to blow them. So I didn’t like the O-ring solution suggested there (sort of works, but kills the vibrant lower register as well as being downright ugly), tried taping the bottom edges* of the second and third holes to keep the high B and A down, didn’t like that either, and finally hit on a piece of rolled-up plastic film overlapping the cavity left by the pulled-out slide and marginally constricting the bore at that point (NB size, position and thickness all matter, with the chosen piece c.28mm x 67mm of unmeasured thickness and various rejects shown in the first photo) to keep these notes down and easier to blow. But that seemed to leave the low A relatively sharp, so I’ve also taped the upper edge of the third hole to compensate. Top C# now seems to be sounding fairly reliably when slurred and/or visited fleetingly enough (as does the OXOOOO ‘note’ produced by cutting the high A), crucially restoring safe ornamentation to high As and Bs, with the fingering workarounds sometimes necessary to get it as a longer melody note nothing like as awkward as they’d have been for the cuts and rolls. Standard top C cross-fingering might just have been compromised by the tweak, but again seems less of an issue than potentially terminal (!) ornamentation, with the result being a large-bore high whistle that’s now playing pretty reliably and tunefully across its range and far closer to my initial expectations than it was.
* Tip learned years ago from The Recorder Book by Kenneth Wollitz: ‘Filling in on the lower side of a hole flattens the upper register, filling in on the upper side flattens the lower register.’
Planning to review my full set of Chieftains with some video clips sometime now I’m really getting to know them, but hoping that’s also going to be easier now my love/hate relationship with this wee beastie has taken such a positive turn. Because — make no mistake — Phil Hardy makes some great whistles and there’s much to love about these even if my experiences with the stock high D are hard to reconcile with either his undoubted skills or its status as a top seller.
