Tunes!

Here are some videos of me playing some Irish tunes on my low D whistle. The first is a minor jig called 'The Musical Priest', while the second is an air named 'Inishere'. There are some mistakes in both tunes, and some tuning problems, but these are as a result of the player, not the whistle. As a hack whistle player, I've only really played soprano whistles before this, and I have been lazy with my fingerings, especially with second octave D, which really requires the top finger to be off the hole. This whistle really needs that to happen so that the note speaks properly, and so I'm having to relearn that fingering properly. Damn!

Oh, and these were recorded by my 12 year old son, hence the shakiness in places :)

Finishing touches

The last little bits included chamfering the tone holes and adjusting the fipple block and mouthpiece cap to perfect the sound.

I used a bit of fine sandpaper wrapped around an extra bit of piping to chamfer out the tone holes. This is for a nice feel on the fingers, and apparently also improves the tone slightly.

I used electrical tape to fix in the fipple block and mouthpiece cap in place. I have decided not to glue in the fipple block and cap as I will probably replace the fipple with a properly shaped piece of dowel.

Tone holes - aargh!

I used a small drill bit on an extremely low speed to drill the initial positions of the tone holes at the suggested spots on the whistle. I was a bit concerned about the large spacing between the last and second-last holes, but I thought it best just to follow the basic instructions for my first attempt (the pdf does include many suggestions for customisations, including how to change hole spacing by compensating with different hole sizes).

I then drilled each hole out to 4mm, then 8mm, the diameter of the smallest holes, and then enlarged each larger hole after that. A slow speed was very necessary, as the drill bit would grab and then dive towards the other side of the tubing as soon as it bit into the plastic.

The last tone hole, which produces the note E, needed to be enlarged by about another mm, as the sound of the second octave E was very weak and breathy. I didn't have that sized drill bit, so I used sharp little scissors to scrape around the inside of the hole until I got it right.

Tuning

As you can see from the above photo, it took a few tries to get the tuning for the overall length correct. At this stage I also tinkered with the position of the fipple block and mouthpiece cap to get the right sound. I had to sand away the top of the fipple block on an angle so that as the air passed through the mouthpiece, the top of the fipple block rose towards the mouthpiece cap. This increases the pressure of the air flow so as to strengthen the whistle's response and cut down on air requirements. This is known as the Bernouli effect.

Mouthpiece

So I measured up the end of my whistle to cut out the windway, et voila...

Not too bad for a Stanley knife job...

So then I was ready to assemble the mouthpiece, and begin tuning the overall length.

First Steps

Having gotten hold of some electrical conduits of various internal diameter, I began to follow the directions in the plans that I had downloaded. One of my pipe sizes fit the bill perfectly for making a low D whistle, so I decided that was my project.

Firstly I had to find a cylindrical piece of wood that would function as the fipple block. The fipple is the part in the whistle mouthpiece that forces the air to flow against the lip of the windway, thus producing the sound (the wooden bit in the photo above).

The photo above, by the way, is taken from the plans I was using, and the fipple block above is made of beechwood, lathed and sanded down to the correct size so as to fit almost perfectly into the pipe. My fipple block, on the other hand, was a piece of rake handle...