Cyberknight wrote: ↑Tue Feb 13, 2024 1:01 amI can't remember where I read this, but I was pretty sure wall thickness was a factor.
If that is a significant factor, it could enable corrections to be made by adjusting the thickness around the holes. I once had a go on a phenomenal quena belonging to a member of the group Yuraj Marka which had huge holes, all heavily chamfered, and I've followed that style in my own instruments to try to recreate that sound and feel. That cutting away of material around the holes leads to them behaving as if the instrument has thinner walls, but you could vary how deep you dig to resolve specific tuning issues as you evolve your design to keep improving on the previous instruments. I've started making thinner walled ones too though with more conventional small holes, and I'm not running into tuning issues with those either. One problem though is that I hardly own any instruments made by other people to compare with mine: just a full set of Generation whistles, a Dolmetsch recorder, and inadequate quenas bought from afar, which is what pushed me into making my own ones. I don't know how good or bad my own instruments actually are, other than that with the prototype whistle heads added to them I'm getting significantly better sound from them than the Generation whistles, so at least I know they're adequate.
Perhaps there's a difference in opinion regarding what counts as "consistent" pitch? To me, if there's a 10-20 cent difference in tuning between octaves, that's a very large inaccuracy. And if eliminating that 10-20 cent difference requires blowing so hard in the second octave that it ends up being 3x or 4x as loud as the first octave, that's also not going to cut it for me. I expect whistles to have consistent tuning and to have second octaves that aren't garishly loud (obviously, they'll always be louder than the first octave - but they shouldn't be THAT much louder). The only thick-walled cylindrical whistle I have that accomplishes this is my Goldie, which seems to have a slight reverse taper in the head.
I suppose it comes down to price as to how far out the tuning should be allowed to go, but when some inexpensive brands can keep it close to 10 cents, it would be disappointing to do worse. It is tricky getting the whistle head right though, and to make them consistently the same. Incidentally, the way I shape the wedge results in my instruments effectively having a slight reverse taper in that part of the tube too because the inner surface of the wedge slopes instead of being parallel to the longitudinal centre line of the tube. Whistles and recorders normally do the opposite as they have it parallel, and because it's flat while the tube is rounded, it actually narrows the effective bore local to it. Perhaps the Goldie is shaped to cancel out that change.
At any rate, if you manage to make large bore, thick-walled soprano whistles that have truly consistent pitch across both octaves without horribly inconsistent volume, I'll buy your whistles any day of the week. Seriously, tell me how to order one.
I need a new tunable C whistle anyway.
I'll have to see what standard I can get them up to, but at the moment I'm not making them tunable, though I do have ideas about making them out of multiple sections held together with magnets (to make them pocketable) and there will then be an option to put spacers in between sections to tune them. Significant changes in tuning lead to the higher notes going horribly out of tune (e.g. making the recorder play C a semitone flat makes high C play one and a half tones flat), but if you have more than one place along the tube where you can change the spacing, you can keep all the notes closer to being in tune while changing the pitch of the instrument over a wider range. I'm hoping I might be able to give them a usable range of a tone such that an instrument could be optimised for Eb and play with acceptable tuning in the keys of D and E. With a low D whistle there's actually enough room for joins like that between all the holes to allow perfect tuning right across that range, which is something you could never do with tuning slides. With small whistles though, it's easy enough just to have a range of them for each key with slightly different tunings and you select the one to suit the conditions and the tuning of the people you're playing with.
My experience with low whistles could be 100% because I am inexperienced with them. Unlike high whistle, which I've played for quite a long time, I'm a total noob when it comes to low whistles. I'm probably just blowing them wrong. But I've tried a Susato, a Dixon, and a Chieftain, and I find the second octave extremely sharp; depending on the note I'm playing, my Susato low D might be 20-25 cents sharper in the second octave than in the first.
At any rate, no low D I've ever tried has a FLAT second octave, which is a pervasive problem with the majority of thick-walled high D whistles I've tried. So there must be something different about the bore-to-window ratio and/or the hole spacing on lower whistles that eliminates some of the "flat second octave" problem so common in thick-walled high D whistles.
Low whistles are bound to have thinner walls relative to the rest of the geometry to keep weight and material cost down, so maybe localised thickening of the walls where the holes are would help fix that. With any luck it will turn out that wall thickness at the holes is a significant factor, because varying that should enable perfect tuning without needing to fiddle around undercutting holes.
Oh, and one little question for you about the prototype chromatic high D: is there a specific colour that you'd like yours to be? It'll be metallic due to the silver layer, while the colour will be in the layer of resin on top of that. I'll be using dye for this rather than using alcoholic ink, so I'll just do the whole thing in a single colour.