The Carbony Bass A carbon fibre whistle...my full review

Welcome back to my blog!

I have had a lot of comments recently from people asking me about a new whistle which has featured in some of my latest music videos - the amazing Carbony bass A whistle. I wanted to tell you a little more about this wonderful instrument...

This whistle is designed by Rob Gándara and is from the company Carbony Celtic Winds, who make an incredible array of wind instruments out of carbon fibre.

I took the Carbony bass A whistle out into the woods and played 'Highland Cathedral' ...

Design -

This whistle is an amazing piece of construction, it is super sleek with the grey-black shimmer of the carbon fibre body and if you didn't know it was a whistle you could be forgiven for thinking it was a part off of a race car - it certainly looks very space-age!

I love the design and shape of the mouthpiece, it is very chunky and solid and it is tuneable which is a huge bonus.

The body of the whistle is of thick walled carbon fibre and the whole instrument feels super strong, yet incredibly lightweight for its size and length. In fact this whistle is so long that the body is built in two halves which you put together in the middle. It is a high quality instrument crafted with great attention to detail.

Sound and playability -

This bass whistle has a very distinctive sound with a lot of depth and resonance. It is very enchanting to hear the deep, booming notes of the lower octave - but amazingly, this whistle is also able to glide up into the second octave and produce flowing and bright melodies across the full scale - it is very responsive. The tone of this whistle is very clear and allows you to be very expressive with breath control and vibrato. You can really tell that this is a high quality instrument, and the intonation is also very accurate.

I think what surprised me the most about this whistle is the playability of it - being so long I expected it to require a huge amount of breath to play, but this is not the case! It takes a surprisingly gentle amount of air to play this whistle, and you don't have to have lungs of steel to reach the high notes.

Another surprising element is the finger spacing - being the lowest key of whistle I have played, I was expecting to have to really stretch to reach the notes but actually they have manufactured it in such a way that the gaps between the notes are not too much different to that of my low D whistles - this is down to internal chimney extenders which give finger spacing equivalent to a much smaller instrument. So if you're already used to playing with the piper's grip you can adapt quickly to this instrument.

One thing to note when playing this whistle is that it is so long - you will notice that you have to get used to playing with your hands further away from your body than you are used to!

This is also an excellent whistle for recording - it provides an interesting low, bass end to the spectrum of sound within a track and was perfect for playing the spooky lead in my Harry Potter 'Hedwig's Theme' music video (clip above).

It also featured in my latest music video 'The Riders of Rohan', where it steps in to emulate the low brass section of the orchestra! Watch the full videos on my YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@leynarobinson-stone/videos

You can also find whistle tabs for playing along with my music videos when you sign up to be a Woodland Whistler on my Patreon channel, where you'll also be helping to support my music! - https://www.patreon.com/c/leyna_robinson_stone/membership

The Carbony bass A whistle is a fantastically engineered instrument, and I highly recommend it. You can find this whistle as well as many other beautiful carbon fibre wind instrument designs on the official Carbony website here - https://carbony.com/product/low-whistle-in-a-with-close-spacing-via-chimney-extenders/

Thanks for reading, stay tuned for more whistle reviews and behind the scenes of my video and recording productions!