The Fipple and the Holes

By Bobby Neal Winters

I still have not succeeded in making a working recorder.  We will get that out of the way.

As usual, the things that I was concerned about at the beginning have not been my main barriers.  To put that differently, and perhaps more precisely, it was easier to overcome these things than I had imagined.

For example, I didn’t know how to bore a hole through the entire length of a 17-inch piece of wood with the equipment that I have.  As it turns out, I’ve found a way that works.  The first of these was the discovery that longer recorders are made in three pieces.  Each of the pieces is short enough to fit on my lathe.  I can then bore from each end to meet in the middle.

I won’t say that is easy, but I will say I am getting better at it, and it’s now just one of those things that takes time.

It has also helped that I’ve switched from using forstner bits to using augur bits.  (I see ways that I can use these in my other woodwork, so my long-suffering wife may eventually be up to her eyeballs in bud vases, but that will be another problem for another day.)

That out of the way, my focus shifted to the head of the recorder, which is also known as “the fipple.” (Let me pause here to say that as a lover of language and trivia, I take an unreasonable delight in the existence of this word in our language.)

When you look at flutes and/or whistles of this type, the end that you blow into has a particular structure.  There is a narrow duct that you blow into which runs over a block that narrows the interior tube of the flute for a short length before it allows it to expand back out. On that same end, there is a hole at the top of the flute that allows some of the air to escape. It is called “the window.”

The narrow duct is aimed at the bottom edge of the window which is sharpened to split that stream of air.  This edge is called “the labium.” 

Part of the stream of air escapes through the window, and the rest continues down the flute.

The way the narrow duct is constructed to aim the labium is key to making this work.

To do this, I had to shift from my “big work” of turning wooden tubes on a lathe to “close work” of carving on those wooden tubes.

This was a very rewarding thing.  I am a better woodworker for learning how to do this.  I am a better human being than I was before I forced myself to slow down and do this. (I will be a much better human being after I clean up the clutter I made in the process, but I digress.)

After I figured this part out, I went back to some of my earlier efforts which made no or poor sound, and I was able to fix some of them.

I now have four long whistles--two from eastern red cedar, one from maple, and one from purpleheart--which could be made into recorders.  I just need to put the holes in them so they can make more than one note.

This is my current barrier.  The amount of work that I have tied up in even one of these pre-recorders is substantial.  I’m having a hard time overcoming the emotional barrier of making holes in them.

I’ve watched videos on how to do it.  It is one of those things that is part science, part engineering, but very much art.

I am approaching that art with respect.

The barrier is in my mind.

In the past the way I’ve overcome mental barriers is through ritual.  For this sort of thing, I’ve got a ritual of putting my space in order.  If you’ve ever watched a minister or--perhaps a better example--a priest preparing communion, there is a way that the setting is ordered.

I need to put my space in order for this process.  I need to remove the clutter from the bench.  Turn off the TV that keeps me company; turn off the noisy shop heater that keeps me warm.  Get out my most complete set of drill bits and my most accurate measuring devices and start the process: One hole at a time; one note at a time.

And I must be willing to risk my creations.

Risk is an important part of the process.  Sacrifice is sometimes necessary.  The blood that I sometimes accidently stain my creations with might not be enough.  I may have to sacrifice one or two of them.

I hope that it doesn’t go that far.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

All I can say for sure

 All I can say for sure

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been writing a lot about woodworking and making recorders lately, so I thought I would take a short break and write about something else.

My Bible study is going through the Acts of the Apostles as a follow up to the Gospel of Luke.  So far, the take away from it is simple: Be Bold.

The Apostles, buoyed by the Holy Spirit, were bold.

Being bold is effective.  Being bold puts opponents, puts bullies on their heels.  Authorities, as a rule, and bullies, in particular, are used to having their way.  While they might be used to resistance, they are not used to bold resistance.

People, in general, see someone who is speaking boldly, they interpret that as confidence.  If you are confident in yourself, it is easier for them to be confident in you.

Our President--whatever you may think of him, and I do mean whatever--has internalized this.  He speaks boldly.  He will make a bold statement, and, when confronted, will become even bolder. Love him, hate him, have hope in him, be fearful of him. He has made this work for him.

That’s him.

What can those of us who don’t have his money, his background, his office, his backing do?

One thing I would suggest--and it’s something I need to be careful about myself--is not to speak unless it is something that I am sure about.  That is to say, I need to listen more than I speak.  I need to do research about whatever I am going to talk about.  I need to not say something if I don’t know that it is true.

Implicit in that is knowing the difference between knowing something and thinking it. Here I am getting into territory where I need to take my own advice and not say something I don’t know.  But to speak boldly, I will say there is a continuum between thinking something and knowing it.

Often we say that we know something, and it’s just what we think.  We heard someone who is on “our side” say it, it seems to reinforce “our side” so we repeat it.  We think it’s true, but we’ve given it very little consideration.  We just pass it on.  

We are being used by whoever said it like a piece of paper. (And, for those of you who get the reference, sometimes we are used like a page ripped from a Sears catalog.)

Knowing is more than this.

Knowing requires considering an idea; testing it.  As scripture says, “Test all things and hold on to what is true.”

How does this translate to action?

The most important action is to keep silent when we don’t know; to speak kindly but boldly when we do know.

This is why I’m writing about woodworking and making recorders so much these days and not about politics.

I don’t trust much of the day-to-day information that comes through the various national media outlets, social or traditional.  Each of the two major political parties says the other is full of liars and thieves.  

Ironically, that is just about the only thing they say that I believe.

I feel better about leadership the closer it gets to Pittsburg, Kansas. While we are not all perfect, we are simple enough folk that our flaws are apparent.  I can trust that.

Having said all this, I do have some recorders in various stages of completion. Maybe, just maybe, I will have one that works by the next time I write.

That’s all I can say for sure.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 A Whistle with holes in it

By Bobby Neal Winters

While I am still doing many other things with my life, I am still “going down the rabbit hole” on my project of making a recorder, i.e. a simple, whistle-like flute.

It keeps me out of people’s hair.

I don’t play the recorder. In grade school we were introduced to the “Tonette,” which in hindsight I see was a cheap soprano recorder made of red plastic.  This would’ve been in the seventies. (I see on Amazon you can still get them for less than $15. They have other colors.) Since that ancient time the closest I’ve been to woodwinds was when two of my daughters--separated by years--played the clarinet in the high school marching band. Unbeknownst to me, I was--through the generosity of my daughters--providing replacement reeds to the entire band at that time, but I digress.

That previous paragraph was simply to explain that--when I started--I didn’t know anything about a recorder. Nothing. Nada.  I thought it was just a long whistle with holes down the front. (Yes, and one in the back. I know that now.)  But there is more.  A lot more.

I’ve made quite a few whistles.  Some have turned out to be duds, but most of them work.  Some of them work almost too well: They are high pitched, loud, and very, very annoying.

I take pride in the last bit.

The truth is that you can make a whistle almost by accident.

We’ve all been in buildings on windy days and have heard the wind whistling through the attic, through the ventilation, through randomly placed pipes. You get all sorts of whistles that way.

It is harder to get a particular type of whistle, the type of whistle you want to hear coming out of a musical instrument. 

Learning how to do this is where I am spending a lot of time and effort lately. Let me take some time to expand on what I mean by this.

To begin with, (and I am sure I am over-simplifying here, but let’s just brazen through until someone tells me differently) a whistle is made when a stream of constrained air is split by a sharp edge. The Wikipedia articles on flutes say this, but my Grampa Sam knew it too at some level because he could make a whistle with a blade of grass.  There are some amazing individuals who can do it through their teeth.

I am having trouble with it.  It is hard.

It is hard, but I am stubborn.  

I’ve decided to approach the problem by breaking it into smaller pieces.  In this case, that metaphor can be taken quite literally: Recorders are made in pieces.  These pieces are the head joint, the middle joint, and the foot joint.  The head joint is where the sound is made and the other two joints help to modulate it.

I’ve decided to work on making the head joint.  

The head joint is essentially a whistle with an open bottom.  It’s got to have an open bottom because it’s going to be attached to the middle joint.  To make it, I make a tube of wood on the lathe with a stepped opening--a mortise--on the end where it’s going to connect to the middle joint.  I then take that tube and I start carving the whistle into it.

That last sentence is wherein the challenge lay. I’ve made several head joints that serve as whistles.  But then I connect them to the middle joint and get that song referred to by Simon and Garfunkel: The Sound of Silence.  

Silence eventually sounds like an old asthmatic man.

To date, I’ve made exactly one head joint that will connect to a middle joint. I’ve made a video of myself blowing through it, and my recorder expert has told me it was “roughly” a C note.  I appreciate the kindness in the word “roughly.”

I am now in the process of trying to replicate that.  If I can replicate it, I can improve upon it.  If I can improve upon it, I can remove the “roughly.”  

When I’ve gotten this part right, I can move on to the middle joint and start making holes in it so that the thing can be played instead of just blown.

So I guess that maybe a recorder is a whistle with holes in it, but where do you put those holes?  How big are they?  How do you make them?

As I find out, I’ll let you know as much as I can without being too boring.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Tuning Your Instrument to a Standard Scale

By Bobby Neal Winters

It’s all about fitting in.

I’m still working on learning how to make flutes.  I’ve made some Native American style flutes.  Several now.  Note the word “style” there between “American” and “flute.” Whenever I make one, it has to be there because I don’t share the heritage of any of the indigenous peoples of this continent.  I am just copying them. 

I don’t mind having to throw the word “style” in because it’s a small price to get along.

My ultimate plan is to make recorders, and I’ve made progress, but I chose to work on Native American style flutes first because you don’t have to tune them to a formal scale.  It is a choice.  Some people don’t tune them to the major scale that is used in the music tradition of the West, but some of them do.

Those who do choose to tune to fit in with the music of the West then have an opportunity to make music with anyone else who has. As I understand it, and it’s far from certain that I do, if you aren’t tuned to the same scale and try to play together, then it sounds like...well...crap.

I am pretty sure that if I am wrong in this assertion that I will be corrected and corrected swiftly.

So by choosing to give up the freedom of not being tuned to the standard scale, you can gain the freedom of being able to play with anyone else who is tuned to the standard scale. You gain access to the music that is written for that standard scale. And any music that you might create in your instrument can then be played by others long, long after you are dead.

By making changes to fit a larger system much can be gained.

That last sentence is hard for me to write.

I personally like “unique” individuals, people who do not necessarily color within the lines. People others might call odd. (The more self-aware of my friends might pause after having read that sentence and wonder, was he talking about me? You, no, never.) I find that I can learn a lot from these people.

You can learn a lot, but not always in a good way.

Forgive me if I’ve told you this story before, but I think it's germain. In the academic year 1988-1989, my wife, my eldest daughter, and I lived in Austin, Texas where my thesis advisor was taking a year of sabbatical. We lived in the northern part of the city, and I took the bus down to the campus everyday.

Austin being a liberal city and in a warm part of the world, drew its share of the homeless.  Riding the bus only cost a quarter and it was warm on the bus, so quite a few of the homeless availed themselves of this form of transportation so they could be warm. 

There were quite a few of these folks, but I remember one because he was as articulate as any of my professors were at the time. He would find someone to talk with and share his life’s philosophy. The uniting theme of his lectures was that he’d always done things his own way.

I would imagine he’s dead now and that he has been for quite a while. I’ve got to wonder if he’s been buried or has a marker on his grave.  If so, a fitting epitaph: “I did it my way.”

Indeed, he did it his way, but he had to get on a bus to stay warm, and the bus was a product of the system.

I do believe in bending a bit to help the odd, the outsiders, but there has to be some bending back.  It can't all be just one way.

God has painted a picture of Himself in each of our faces. Each of us is a precious individual.

But we are not meant to be alone.

We can make our own beautiful music, but unless we tune ourselves to fit in, we will never be able to join it to the music of others.  Our songs will die with us.

And that would be a pity.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

Learning from Old Hippies

 Learning from Old Hippies

By Bobby Neal Winters

Teaching is an art and a science.

But it’s mainly an art.

I am trying to learn how to make flutes. That is to say, I am trying to teach myself how to make flutes with copious aid from YouTube.

Eventually I would like to make recorders. “Eventually” is a long word in terms of letters and of time. This may take a while because there is a lot to it.

A lot.

At this point, I’ve put recorders on hold for a while because I want to get them right.  This is a precise instrument being made for the European tradition where there are a lot of picky people with very high standards.  

Very picky; very high.

For the time being, I’ve shifted to the Native American flute. This instrument makes a beautiful sound that will make anyone of primarily English descent like myself feel sad and guilty in nanoseconds. (Irish music will do the same, but we are also good at pushing through the guilt and sadness.)  It has the advantage of being taught by some very mellow people who are in touch with themselves spiritually. You get the feeling that they don’t deal out criticism or backhanded compliments.  They praise what you do, and then gently direct you in ways to be better.

I find that I can learn from these gentle teachers for the small price of ignoring the nose rings.

And here's the thing. I don’t know if any of the Youtubers who are teaching how to make Native American flutes are actually Native Americans.  I do know that they are all--for lack of a better word--hippies. Hippies, who in their deepest souls, want to be Native Americans.

From my experience, those are the very best kind of hippie.

Anyway, among them are some very good teachers.

Okay, in making a flute--recorder, Native American, picolo, whatever--the big picture goes like this: You take (or make) a long tube and then make the right sort of modifications in it to make music. That is the view from 30,000 feet.

Right now, because of my equipment, I’ve got a limitation on how long of a tube I can make out of wood.  Using a drill, I can go 5 inches one way.  I can then turn that around and do a five inch hold on the other end.  So--and the math is not hard--I can only make a 10-inch long flute from wood.

The rule is this: The shorter the flute, the higher the pitch. The sound can be somewhat...annoying. 

Longer instruments make a lower, more mellow sound.

There are ways to bore longer holes and I am working on that, but in the meantime, my hippie teacher has a lesson that has allowed me to put aside the hole-boring for a while and to learn about doing the modifications needed to make music.

His teaching technique: The PVC pipe Native American flute.

Right, you can see it right away. You’ve got the pipe of basically any length you need.  You can then just concentrate on modifying it to make music.

PVC music, but music none the less.

Part of the art of teaching is that there has to be a bit of success along the way in order to encourage learning.

I spent a morning yesterday doing the work needed to make the PVC pipe make music.  I cut holes in it; I put a wood plug in at the correct place.  I carved the edge on the sound hole; I put “The Bird” over “The Nest.”

Then I blew into it.

Sadness. Pure, beautiful, righteous sadness.

This is from someone who literally cannot put two notes together.

In the hands of an Indigenous musician, this can produce great beauty.  The hippie on Youtube can do a pretty good job himself.

For my part, I have to use the powers I get from my ancestors to push through the guilt and learn as much as I can.

There is something to learn, about so many things, and in so many ways.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Jelly-bean woodworking, prevenient grace, and blood sacrifice

By Bobby Neal Winters

With the end of the Fall semester, finals, Christmas, and my 40th Wedding Anniversary, I’d taken a longish break from woodturning.  I’d done some woodworking, but I hadn’t spent much time at the lathe.

When you work at the lathe, the question is what are you going to make.  You know to some degree what. You know that it’s going to be round.

Round is what lathes do. Lathes make round objects and sawdust.

Lots and lots of sawdust.

The various “jelly-bean” wood working stores market ideas.  Wooden pens for one thing.  They sell kits to make pens from.  There is a system set up.  Wooden pens are pretty cool, but if you don’t know better, you would think they were pretty expensive.  It turns out that, while they can be, they can also be relatively cheap.

The net effect of this is that if you want to put your pen-making on as something that will help to defray the costs of your hobby, then you have to develop a system to turn out pens in bulk.

That doesn’t sound like a hobby to me: It sounds like Work.

There I go, using those four-letter words again. 

But John Wesley taught us about “prevenient grace;” God’s grace as a means of preparing us for something else. Put a bookmark here, I will get back to it before long.

I’ve found a nice woodturning channel on Youtube called “Tomislav Tomasic Woodturning.”  Tomislav is a fellow from Croatia.  I like his channel for several reasons.  He has the right mixture of talk and video.  

Some of these woodturning guys are so non-verbal they just show videos of the work being done without any explanation at all.  The only sound is the gouge against the rotating wood.

On the other end of the spectrum (take that word any way you want to), there are folks who talk so much you think that maybe their woodturning has made them really, really lonely.

Tomislav has the mixture of talk to work right.  He also is a good teacher.  Add to that the fact that he doesn’t have a lot of money to spend on equipment, and you’ve got a guy I can learn from.

Anyway, one of the projects that he uses to teach from is that of making a whistle.

Making a whistle is not hard to do if you have the right equipment, and--here is where we hook back up to “prevenient grace”--if you’ve been making pens, you’ve got the equipment.  That is to say, if you’ve been making pens, you likely have a drill chuck to mount in place of your “free-center.” 

You drill out a cylindrical chamber in the middle of your blank, cut a hole near one end so you can whistle, and then make it as pretty as you like.

These are not difficult to make.  One of my neighbors has five kids, and I made them each a whistle.  This was back when the weather was warm and I had my shop door open.  I had a happy afternoon of listening to them whistle across the street. (They were quite loud.) I suspect they all “disappeared” that night after the kids went to bed, but it was a glorious afternoon of whistling.

The question arose in my mind--and it could be that a friend of mine asked it. Sometimes my friends ask such good questions, I think I’ve thought of it on my own.  Anyway, the question arose, could you make a flute?

What does one do to answer such a question?  Well you google it, of course. Well, this simple Okie had absolutely no idea there were so many ways you could blow air through a tube to get a sound. There are scores of types of flutes: recorders, Native American flutes, picolos, Japanese flutes, etc.  And in each of these types there are various subtypes.

One could quite understandably suffer from paralysis by analysis, but I have a super-power: I ask, which is the easiest?

To me, unless I find out otherwise, the recorder looks the easiest. I might find out otherwise, but at my current level of study, it looks like a long whistle with holes in.  No doubt those holes have to be placed correctly to get the right notes, but that is something to study.

That having been said, making a flute in the “Native American” style is attractive as well.  Native American flutes appear to be a little more complicated than a recorder, but they have features that appeal to me.  The first of these is that I am drawn to the Native American aspect of it. While I am not coming out of that tradition myself, this would be a way of paying tribute.  Another attraction is that there is no pressure to tune it to a standard scale.  

Indigenous peoples in the Americas were making music long before the Europeans arrived. Their flutes can just make cool sounds. As I understand it, you can tune them to a standard scale, but it isn’t necessary.

Anyway, I’ve started my journey.  I am working on techniques, and I’ve made a blood sacrifice.  God gives us his prevenient grace, but the tablesaw god extracts blood from his adherents from time to time. He particularly likes the flesh of my left thumb.

I’ll let you know if I make progress.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

The Space between the Stars

 The Space between the Stars

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’m a science fiction fan.  I’ve been one for as long as I can remember. When I was in junior high (not middle school, because there wasn’t such a thing in those days), I tried writing a science fiction short story. It was truly horrible, but at least I tried.

I’ve dabbled in trying a bit here and a bit there along the way, but not all that seriously and not for a long time now.

But it has always been there in the back of my mind, and I come back to visit it from time to time.

One thing that inspires me along these lines is a series of books called “The Expanse” written by James S.A. Corey (which is actually a pseudonym for a pair of authors). “The Expanse” differs from, say, Star Trek, by not writing the future as a utopia.  They also stick pretty close to physics as it currently exists.  That is to say, they do this for the most part until humanity comes into contact with certain alien artifacts, but I digress.

What I like about “The Expanse” is sticking as much as possible within the constraints of our physical universe and exploring humanity’s development within that reality.

People are going to be people regardless of whether it is in Baltimore or on the Moon or on Ceres or on Ganymede.

In sticking to current physics, the humans in “The Expanse” are bound by the speed of light until they come upon the aforementioned alien artifacts.  This means that, until then, they are stuck in the solar system.

I am interested in exploring this worldview further.  That is to say, what does interstellar exploration and colonization look like with a light speed limit and without the deus ex machina of alien artifacts.

One of the currents I follow on YouTube is science/science fiction speculation like I’ve just described.  Those of you who keep up with developments in astronomy and so forth may have read about interstellar asteroids and comets that have been tracked recently.

Our astronomers keep an eye on the various asteroids that are floating around the solar system. There are literally tens of thousands (and probably way more) asteroids that are circling the sun.  A lot of those are in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, but there are a lot that are just salted and peppered everywhere.  Like I said, our astronomers keep an eye on them, because it was such an asteroid that took out the dinosaurs.

Recently, they’ve spotted a few that come from outside of our solar system. They know they are from the outside because they are going too fast to be in an orbit around the sun.

Having sighted a few of those, a picture comes to us: The space between the stars is not empty; it is only relatively empty.  There are asteroids like these we’ve seen.  In addition to this, there are so-called “rogue planets”--planets that do not circle a star--going around through interstellar space. We know this because, every once in a while, one of them comes between a star and the lens of a telescope, causing the star to dim.

Then there are objects known as brown dwarves.  These are objects that are too small to generate the fusion that is required to become a star, but too big to just be a planet.

My vision is of the human race using these interstellar objects like the polynesians used the islands of the Pacific: They just hopped from one island to another.  Some folks think they made it all the way down to the Pacific Coast of South America. 

So at this point, I’ve got an idea.  I need to do a couple of more things before I proceed.  One of these is called “World-Building.” That is to say, what does life look like to a bunch of humans who are out in interstellar space.  On one hand, I plan to stick to the premise that, on an individual basis, human beings are still the sick/weak/fallen creatures that we all know from our everyday lives.  On the other hand, there is the question of how this manifests itself in the darkness of interstellar space.  What does your day look like if you get up in the morning in a space-station halfway between the Sol System and Alpha Centauri?

The other thing I need is a story.  “The Expanse” does this with the ancient alien artifact.  “The Expanse” had enough “story” for nine long (and I do mean loooooong) books. Story is very important.  I think that it’s been shown that if you’ve got a good story to tell, then the audience doesn’t worry too much about world-building.

The world-building is for me.  Telling a story is my excuse to inflict my world on whoever might want to read the story.

James S. A. Corey has recently started a new series called “The Captive’s War.” It is not clear at this point whether it is set in the same universe as “The Expanse,” but after reading the first novel, I will say that option has been left open.  I mention it because in terms of a story, this series has stolen the story of the Book of Daniel from the Bible in a loose sense.  That is to say, they have our heroes living as exiles being used by their captors.  That is to say, they have--following a tradition as old as literature itself--taken their story from someone else.

I might wind up doing that myself.  The more I think about it, the better I like it.  The question is, what story do I steal?

Something for me to think about.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.