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.