WIDesigner instrument design program now supports reeds

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Tunborough
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WIDesigner instrument design program now supports reeds

Post by Tunborough »

I'm pleased to announce the release of WIDesigner v2.0.0, now including support for single-reed and double-reed instruments like bagpipe chanters, in addition to the existing support for whistles and flutes. It can also support a few (valveless) lip-reed instruments like serpents and didgeridoos.

WIDesigner is a Java application to assist woodwind instrument designers, an open-source program hosted on GitHub, available for free under the GNU Public License. As a stand-alone Java application, it should run under Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, and more, with a suitable JRE installed.

Although WIDesigner brings more complexity to instrument design than other tuning calculators, it offers a number of advantages:
  • It models notes over the full range of an instrument, including arbitrary cross-fingerings, and notes in higher registers.
  • It supports tapered bores, including multiple tapered sections.
  • It uses multivariate optimization, varying multiple instrument dimensions to get accurate tuning across the full range of notes.
  • It is the only tuning calculator and optimizer I know of that supports reed instruments.
For an introduction to WIDesigner and how to use it, read Using WIDesigner, or watch the video tutorial WIDesigner Introduction. You can download the WIDesigner zip file from https://github.com/edwardkort/WWIDesign ... ses/latest, and watch WIDesigner Installation for an explanation of how to install it.

If you try WIDesigner, please let me know how it works out.
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