Length Dimensions of current WhistleSmith Whistles and Flutes

1. Mountain Made Hi-D=12”
2. Ultra Hi-D=12”
3.Good & Plenty Hi-C=12.5”
4. Good & Plenty Bb=14.25”
5. Low A=15”
6. Low G=16”
7. Low F=19”
8. Ultra Low D=22”
9. Ultra Low C=25”
10. Low G Auto Flute=18.5”
11. Symphony Slide Flute=14”
12. Pennywhistle Slide Flute=14”
13. Thumb Rings,Cleaning Rod
     and Beeswax

 

 

 

Marcia Contador playing the WhistleSmith Mountain Made Hi-D

On November 22, 2010 - we shipped a Hi-D Mountain Made whistle to Brazil. Marcia Contador who ordered the whistle inquired in a couple of weeks on the progress of the shipment. The post office tracking said the package was "clearing customs and not to worry about delivery" and that some packages take "quite a bit of time". Marcia was most patient and the whistle finally arrived after clearing Brazilian customs on January 2, 2011. This is the longest shipping time we have ever had with an order to any place in the world and must be some kind of a record!

The very next day, I received a note in my e-mail from Marcia to let us know that she was playing her new Mountain Made Hi-D and recording a You tube selection. In the past weeks she has recorded four selections and posted them for everyone to enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y9Q8Tmj0UM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRnEgjGEhZQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KngTgK4snCM&feature=email

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpuWmD9-Icc&feature=email

I am sure everyone will enjoy her playing and wonderful presentation. The technique and the enthusiasm she has for playing the whistle is evident throughout the piece.

The Mountain Made Hi-D being played is typical of the sound and tone of a WhistleSmith whistle just as you receive it. No filters and special effects were used at all.

Everything is not Barter... Some things are "Being Neighborly"

Being Neighborly with a tune at the Scarecrow Festival at Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia. Just as this photo was being taken, a tour bus pulled up and I played some tunes to the passengers who thought I was part of the festival welcoming committee.

Barter is doing business without using man made money. Folks display their goods and you display what you will give them in return for those goods. This is the oldest kind of trade, swap or doing business that exists and a common method of exchange between neighbors and friends in rural Maine.

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Slide Flute finds New Friends and Places to Play!

I have been busy making inventory this winter and one instrument that has been consistently in demand is the slide flute. The Pennywhistle and Symphony Slide Flutes have both been found to be very satisfactory instruments for children and adults with Down Syndrome.
These folks love music and the interaction that it gives them with others. Playing the slide flute is a good therapy for improved breathing and an inexpensive way to provide an instrument that is easy to play and fits into family activities.

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Tips about Antique Reviews•Second Hand Instruments •Chat•RIP Archives

I get a lot of calls and emails from folks inquiring about other whistle makers and instruments that they may have acquired second hand. Here is what I say.

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The Whistler of Blackstone Bluff

Last ride of the season on November the sixth. Temperature was 55 degrees in the afternoon for about two hours and I had to dress warm to be comfortable. By evening, we had snow on the ground again.

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Tips for Weatherizing your Wicked Good Whistle!

When you receive your whistle or flute it will be easier to play if you warm the instrument up first. Winter shipping makes for some pretty cold temperatures inside the box and a good warmup will prevent the instrument from holding onto all the moisture you are blowing inside the bore. If you do not warm up the instrument, it will respond by bogging down and not having the volume or tone that it should have. The only remedy is to clean the whistle and dry it out even though it is brand new. I have noticed several makers have started specifying a warm up for their whistles before playing.

 

If you are playing in a room or outdoors and it is colder than 65 degrees, use some method to keep your whistle warm between sets.

Putting your whistle in your sleeve is one method that works well. When playing outdoors in cold weather, I have a dress coat with a long pocket sewed into the sleeve that will hold up to a Low D size whistle. My neighbor made the alteration to the coat for me and it works just great. I think a pocket that used velcro and could be removed would be a great idea.

If you blow the whistle backward from the bottom, the barrel will warm up and the moisture if any will be in the very bottom of the instrument where gravity will make it go away naturally.

I have recommended turning the mouthpiece upside down when playing in windy or cold conditions in several tips articles. Finally, several e-mails have been received telling me what a help this technique is! The amazing thing about inverting the mouthpiece is that the whistle does not know the mouthpiece is upside down and may even sound better! The mouthpiece does not feel funny when turned over and several people have said that it feels more comfortable than the regular position. An added benefit in inverting the mouthpiece is moisture gets pushed by your breath and pulled by gravity out the sound hole and your whistle plays much drier.

Wicked Important DiVinci Code Whistle Info

Things have been busy this winter at The WhistleSmith with lots of changes and revisions. You have perhaps noticed the Website has been newly refurbished with whistle pictures and descriptions. The type in the blog is now posting up with larger size type for better reading.

Continue reading "Wicked Important DiVinci Code Whistle Info"

Whistle Up a Texas Fried Turkey!

When company comes unannounced and there is a large crowd to feed quickly, it is a big help to have a way to take care of the situation.

I like to run down to my favorite grocer and get a nice fresh turkey. The one in the picture is about thirteen pounds and is just right to Texas Fry in my cooker. All you have to do is wash the turkey inside and out and dry it well to remove as much moisture from the bird as possible. Remember to take that funny little packet out of the bird before washing.

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Wicked Good Black Squirrels in Arlington Heights

This year Nadiene and I spent Christmas with my younger son Jay and his wife Maya. Our newest grandson Ewan Thomas has just turned two months and granddaughter Anya is now heading for three and learning something new every day.

Because it is a full days drive from Presque Isle to Boston even if the weather is good, we try to swap Christmas destinations every year to even out the travel distances. Rodney Lee, his wife Patty, grand daughter Marilyn, and my grandson Darren (2.5 years and growing) headed out from Mineral, Virginia to visit Uncle Jay in Boston and when everyone arrived the house was full.

We had a great holiday with lots to eat and plenty of homemade cooking. Jay had just finished up the entire basement into a large apartment sized entertainment room with sleeping area and bath, so everyone could move around and have plenty of room to visit. The amount of presents around the tree was pretty incredible and I am certain everyone got what they wanted when Santa arrived.

Of course the weather was the really incredible thing for Christmas. Green grass, 50 degree temperatures and although the sun was missing most of the time it was a good chance to walk around and see the neighborhood. We were actually in Arlington Heights just outside of Boston and the house is on top of the mountain which is capped by the Arlington Standpipe. This is a landmark for folks headed into Boston and is mirrored on the other side of 2A East by the Mormon Temple with its gold weather vane of Gabriel blowing his horn. It is pretty hard to miss the Arlington Heights turnoff with two giant landmarks like these.

My grand daughter Marilyn and I decided to take our new Christmas whistles and take a walk up to the Standpipe and check out the acoustics of a huge round tower full of water. The Standpipe had a lot of folks going to visit their neighbors and people out for a jog, so we attracted a small group of folks stopping to listen to us play.

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Wicked Good Inside Scoop on Whistles!

In making urns, I have used both red cedar which has the smell of a lead pencil when cut and Port Orford cedar from the west coast which has a delightful perfume smell like flowers. Port Orford is hard to obtain in large size and in extra clear grades. Ten years ago I purchased a large lot of this cedar as a high grade lot to make urns from. This cedar was stored inside an insulated tractor trailer and eventually lost most of its moisture and is very dry and straight grained. Port Orford is so waterproof that you can build a boat from it, never paint it and the boat will survive salt water and last for a hundred years!

This is a Port Orford Cedar creation I call The Floating Amphora that you may find interesting. The vessel still retains its wonderful aroma after many years

Wooden whistles are always interesting. I have been involved in wood turning and making urns and artistic pieces on the lathe for over forty years. Because I know a bit about wood and its inherent problems, I have rethought the manufacture of whistles from this material. Some of the opinions I had originally on using wood can be balanced by using new techniques in preparing the wood and replacing the water content even in seasoned and aged wood.

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Whistling in the Wind at St Froid Lake

This fall, I had the privilege to be invited to Cry of the Lost Hunter Campground for Sunday dinner with Frances Cushman and her daughter Ann. Located on St. Froid Lake at Quimby, Maine ,the campground was home to my boys and Nadiene and I in the summer for many years.

Here I am playing away in an extremely cold and stiff wind. Whistle worked great!

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Sound Recorder Can Improve Your Playing!

I'm not a big fan of using sound files to make judgements on how a whistle plays for a prospective customer. I find many sound files have been corrected with filters in the recording process and are no longer true to how the whistle really sounds if you picked it up and played it. Correcting sound for a commercial album is accepted policy, but a sound file made for a buyer should be as factual to the instrument as possible. No reverb, no filters, just the way it comes out of the whistle.

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Check out the New Whistlesmith Mailing List

If you haven't figured it out by now, we want to provide you the best Whistlesmith news in any shape or form possible. Because of that, we've been adding tools to make your Whistlesmith.com reading experience more enjoyable and even easier.

One of our newest tools is a great weekly update from FeedBlitz. This email has the Whistlesmith Weekly Roundup and shows up in your mailbox before you wake up each Monday morning. That way, you can keep up with everything you might have missed during your busy week.

We promise not to bombard you with email or sell your name to the blackmarket. We just want another way to communicate with you - our reader. We even promise some "subscriber-only" news and exclusives down the road. So hop over to the right sidebar or below and enter your email to join our mailing list or simply click here to join the mailing list.

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There is no Magic Whistle, Mary Jane

Reviews and chat room discussions posted on the internet are prevalent and easy to find. The reviewers uses one or two whistles from a maker and try to make the playing attributes and physical appearance of those instruments clear to the reader. Using close up photography, material lists, and tuning descriptions obtained from electronic devices, the prospective buyer should have enough information to purchase a whistle that is perfect for their use. Because most whistles are made to last a lifetime, the buyer need only buy the Magic Whistle once and be set for life. Right, Mary Jane?

Written music notation covers everything you need to know to play a piece of music as long as you can read the symbols and do the math. When you describe the sound of the Magic Whistle to another person, you use the same words describing the sound that you use to convey the complexities of food and drink. Rich, smooth, sharp, kind of flat, complex, dark, subtle undertones (i.e. flavors). and so on. When we run out of descriptive terms for food we add in air based terms like breathy, airy, breezy, and the infamous (but not universally known) term of CHIFFY! Why all this descriptive chaos to describe the whistle and the sounds it makes? Here are some quotes I thought you might want to remember that came to me via e-mail.

Continue reading "There is no Magic Whistle, Mary Jane"

Sliders are for Everyone!

If you have read the article on Kevin's Whistle you will remember I have been working on a slide whistle for my nephew Kevin for a three year period of time. This is not only an excellent instrument for folks with missing and broken fingers and limbs, arthiritis, and disabilities, but an instrument that is enjoyable for a variety of musical applications. Most people relagate the slide whistle to a novelty sound effects instrument, but the "Slider" has a long history of musical applications and many compositions have been written for slide whistle.

After playing the prototype whistle for an extended period it became apparent that a flute version would be more appropriate for most applications. The flute is a bit more mellow, has more horizontal length for the attachment of clips and attachment devices, and is easier to hear over other instruments. A snap on clip is available for the whistle that allows you to rivit the clip to a velcro watch band. This allows you to place the whistle on you wrist if necessary to play the instrument. The clip can be modified to attach to a variety of appliances and head braces (harmonica brace works well) for playing using one hand.

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COLLECTING WHISTLES

Last week, I had some folks drop into the shop to purchase two whistles for their collection. They pointed out some things I would not have thought about if I were purchasing a whistle to be a collectible. Here are some of the items I wrote down in my daily notes that seem like good ideas.

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Kevin's Whistle

My nephew, Kevin playing the original slide whistle.

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Screenprinting Whistlesmith Tees

I have been doing commercial artwork and screen printing since I was in high school, so naturally I put off doing the company tee shirts until last. Sign painters never have a decent sign, plumbers have a house full of leaking pipes and carpenters never fix their own front steps. Well, that goes for for screen printers who can't decide what design should go on the shirt they want to print.

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Tuning Up for the Dance of the Frenzied Turkeys

Being a whistlesmith and making whistles all day can be a heavy burden. While you are working on whistles all day, your friends are out whistling away their time and having fun. The more they play, the better they get, until they actually begin to sound like real musicians. Soooooo, I decide to learn at least one new tune every week for an entire year.

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Some easy techniques on playing Low D whistles that really work

Playing the Low D whistle is a little different than any of the other whistles. I have received many responses to the following article from folks around the world. Taking the time to read the steps about playing the Low D apply to all whistles and will give you a step up on being a good whistler.

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Try a Seed Sock for your Visitors

 

The Seed Sock can be refilled over and over with oil rich seeds. Nothing attracts winter birds

like one of these socks in addition to a regular feeder. 

Help Your Winter Visitors

For many years we had very few birds in the winter. About ten years ago my wife and I decided to make the feeding area a little more private and protected from the wind and it has paid off wonderfully. The birds in the photos are mostly Red Poles from the Arctic that visit Maine in the winter and return north in the spring to nest. In addition to Red Poles, we have a flock of about two dozen Mourning Doves that winter in our woods, six Blue jays that harass everything, a flock of Chickadees and several Nuthatches that drop by. The Downy woodpeckers hammer at the bird feeders and stumps on a regular basis picking flies out of the bark and digging for grubs. The sock with all the birds is filled with Nyjer seeds, the barrel feeder has sunflower seeds and the trough gets a full ration of mixed bird seed. Occasionally we add suet squares for the Blue jays and woodpeckers as an extra treat in extremely cold weather. This year we fed the birds about 100 pounds of seed per month to keep them happy. When spring comes, the Goldfinches and Hummingbirds will arrive with Robins and our resident family of crows that patrol all the back fields looking for pests. They never bother the garden or the other birds, so no one bothers them in return.

Moose Return for a Little Nap in the Snow

The moose returned in the afternoon for a sunbath in the snow that lasted about four hours. After a good rest they feasted on some frozen crabapples and wandered off for a night on the town.