Hybrid Instruments

[kokopelli]

One of my roommates plays the bassoon and today as he was playing it I was struck by an idea. What would happen if I attached a whistle head to the bassoon body? Would it be an instant ultra-bass whistle? Would it even play? It seems like it should work since it's just another method of vibrating the air. A standard whistle head is pretty small though. I don't know if it's capable of getting such a large wavelength or moving enough air. Has anybody tried this before? Either way, I might end up doing some experimentation.

[R Small]

Single reed mouthpieces have been made for the bassoon and supposedly work fairly well. So maybe a whistle type mouthpiece would work. Could be worth a try.

[cboody]

Double reed slide music stand anyone??

[trill]

kokpelli,

Have you tried it yet ?

One of the most enlightening experiences I've had was a few hours spent swapping heads + tubes from various whistles. Very informative !

As to your question: I think you'll get sound, but the scale might change. Also, you may have to try blowing really softly or really hard... not sure which.

My memory is a little fuzzy, but I thought I read somewhere that there's a fundamental difference between: a) having a reed generate sound (e.g. clarinet, oboe, bassoon), and b) having sound generated by a vortex-shedding (e.g. flute, whistle, organ pipe).

I think it's got something to do with "boundary conditions" for the pressure waves in the tubes. In flutes, the BC are free-free. In reeds, they're fixed-free. Are there any physicists around ?

So, if you do attach your whistle head to the bassoon, it would be interesting to see if the notes played would be in the same scale for a given fingering. Do you have one of those electronic tuners ? If not, here's tuner you can run on a laptop:

http://www1.ocn.ne.jp/~tuner/tuner_e.html

On the page, use the link for "s8tuner.exe". It gives both Hz and note-names.

Sounds like a job for duct-tape !

I hope you give it a go !

trill

[Tunborough]

The length of the window in a whistle head, between the windway exit and the lip, is critical to the balance between high and low notes. Too short, and the low notes flip too easily into the next register. Too long, and the high second register takes too much breath pressure.

My guess ... With a conventional whistle head, it won't play at all in the lowest register, and what sound you get will be very quiet.

[kokopelli]

I would expect it to be very quiet if I get any sound at all. I've got finals coming up this week so any experiments will have to wait until at least next week. Maybe January. I'll be sure to keep everybody updated on the results when I try it.

[Narsoron]

If you could find a whistle head large enough to sound notes appropriate for a bassoon's register, probably. I know that attaching a low whistle head to a regular flute it plays like a normal flute but with a more airy sound...and a whistle head.

[kokopelli]

It's time for an update here. I made my first attempt and failed. I tried to put a rubber stopper in the end of a Generation whistle head to seal off the end around the bocal (I don't know if that's proper spelling) of the bassoon. I didn't get a complete seal and nothing that might leave a residue was allowed near any part of the bassoon. In addition to the poor seal, the bocal begins at a very small (~1/16") outer diameter and grows to a much larger (~3/8") diameter. The small diameter at the end that was going in my whistle head didn't seem like it would work well anyway. My next step is to look for a rubber tube with an outer diameter of about 1/2" and see if I can make that fit both my whistle head and the bassoon.

More updates as they happen.

[Airgead]

The length of the window in a whistle head, between the windway exit and the lip, is critical to the balance between high and low notes. Too short, and the low notes flip too easily into the next register. Too long, and the high second register takes too much breath pressure.

My guess ... With a conventional whistle head, it won't play at all in the lowest register, and what sound you get will be very quiet.

Out of curiosity, I once stuck one of my unfinished low whistle heads on a long length of 16mm I.D. aluminum tube that I had not yet cut down into proper lengths for alto whistles. The low head would have been for an F, E-flat, or low D and is 20mm I.D...... so it slipped right over the smaller tube fairly snug. Just as Tunborough points out, it was all but impossible to get the bell note out. Needless to say it was barely a whisper...... but LOWWWWW!!!! I don't recall the exact length of the tube. Would have been somewhere around 3 feet plus though as I had to hold it much like a didgeridoo and I remember it not being terribly close to touching the ground.

[Feadoggie]

What an idea! Cheers to you.

I'm with Tunborough on this one. You'll not get a working instrument with the approach you are using. But have fun trying.

I would think you need to get the voicing window (A) sized to the pitch and range of the bassoon and (B) located at the top of the air column and not at the mouth end of the bocal. You could still fashion a bocal to deliver the air to it. I use flexible vinyl tubing for such experiments.

I love bassoons though. I've been looking for a cheap-ish one for the last ten years with no success yet. I did get a bass clarinet but that's just not doing it for me.

Carry on.

Feadoggie

[nineflutes]

If you put a flute/whistle head to a reed instrument, I think it will not work because reed instruments have very small bores compared to their length, it's like making a low D whistle with a 10mm bore...
The lowest note will be 1 octave higher than with the reed, because of acoustic properties of tubes which are open at both ends (flutes) or closed at one end (reeds)

[pancelticpiper]

Yep what Nineflutes said... double reeds tend to have extremely high backpressure (if an oboe is a 10, all whistles would vary from 1.0 to 1.1 or something) in part caused by the narrow bore.

I don't think any whistle or flute head could power a note through that bore. You'd probably only get a higher overtone anyhow.

I've played Boehm bass flutes and contrabass flutes, and to get that low you need a HUGE bore. I'm sure it's fairly common knowledge what the ratio of bore ID to length is for a flute, and you'd have to more or less match that with a whistle head.

BTW this sort of hybrid head-switching is supposedly how the saxophone was invented: before the invention of valves there were keyed brass instruments (which fingered more or less like woodwinds but had brass-instrument bores and mouthpieces) and Adolphe Sax supposedly stuck a bass clarinet mouthpiece on a bass-sized keyed brass instrument (an Ophicleide) and voila, it worked! It's why the original saxophones were bass-sized.

Here's an Ophicleide being played; you can see that it fingers like a woodwind. When valves were perfected these keyed brass instruments became obsolete.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W535OQhEjM8

I've done a similar thing with whistles: I have a clarinet head stuck onto a Low F whistle which actually plays quite well. I had to drill a thumbhole not for the minor 7th but rather for the octave of the bellnote.