DIY and hole placement

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phryas
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Tell us something.: Beginner flute/whistle player looking for advice starting out. I have some musical background, but now with irish music.

DIY and hole placement

Post by phryas »

What follows is a set of very stupid questions. Thanks for your patience.

My backyard has a bunch of bamboo, and I had some culms cut for various projects. I tried my hand at making a 6 hole transverse flute. I want to the iotic flutomat for guidance on hole placement. http://iotic.com/flutomat.

I'm assuming the generator is based on a cylindrical bore, but if anyone wants to correct me please do!

Based on the length of the bamboo I tried entering D4 flute . Based on the inner diameter and the wall thickness, the flutomat tells me the spacing from 5th to 6th hole is 81mm, which seems insanely big to me. Is this because the values are based in cylindrical bore, and commonly irish flutes have conical bore and can compress the spacing?

However, look at Doug Tipple's page, he compares finger placement for various conical and cylindrical bore low D flutes (I assume low D is D4 in the flutomat, again, please correct if wrong).Typical spacing from 5th to 6th finger is around 37mm, even for large bore flutes, which is WAY, WAY smaller than the flutomat spacing for my bamboo project.

I must be missing something, why are the spacing values so much higher for my flutomat project? Based on Tipple's page this doesn't seem correct.

Thanks for any help,

James
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Terry McGee
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Re: DIY and hole placement

Post by Terry McGee »

I'm not functionally familiar with the flutomat, so treat this as speculative. 82mm is of course unuseable, whereas 37 is in the right ballpark. Is it perhaps because you didn't nominate a small diameter hole for R3? I can imagine if you specified say 10mm diameter for every hole, the finger spacing would become unbearable!

And yes, the bottom D on the typical Irish flute is D4 in the international system.
phryas
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Re: DIY and hole placement

Post by phryas »

Thanks Terry, I think your suggestion is part of the solution. I didn't go into the theory behind the flutomat, which means I was using it as a black box. I still am, but here are too things I've spotted.

1. Yes, reducing the size of the R3 hole does indeed reduce that spacing.

2. I also now understand the "cents" setting, after reading the info tab about a hundred times. For each hole, you specify how many hundredths of a semitone above/below the key of the flute you want it to be. The default settings on the flutomat site for a 6 hole flute is to have the open 4th hole be the actual key specified, and all 6 holes covered would be 5 semitones below, thus the D4 note would be played with just 3 holes down, and so all 6 holes covered would actually be a G3 flute! The info tab does say that the flutomat convention is to define the flutes "key" by the note with the top 3 holes covered.

So, now, using the correct settings of having all holes covered being D4, not the top three holes covered being D4, as is the default, and using your suggestion of a smaller R3 hole, the spacing is much more reasonable!

Follow up question, is there a preference/standard for hole sizes? I can look at Tipple's page for examples, but it's an open question for me.

I guess when I have time I can look into the mathematics of how this all works!

Cheers!
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Terry McGee
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Re: DIY and hole placement

Post by Terry McGee »

Biggest holes (2 and 5) set by what we can cover - 11mm max but 10mm better if it can be achieved.
Smallest hole (6) set by what doesn't sound too muffled. 6mm
Other holes as needed, eg (1) 8mm, (3) 7.5, (4) 9mm

Undercutting can be used to make the holes seem bigger and/or seem further apart.

And yes, I'd start from Doug's examples, but keep in mind every piece of bamboo is unique, so be prepared to tweak!

When you come to ponder the maths, Google WWIDesigner
phryas
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Re: DIY and hole placement

Post by phryas »

Will do, thanks.
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