The Whistle and its Modal Scales

[hans]

I've written and put on my web site an essay outlining a number of the various musical scale modes, and how they can be played on a standard whistle, using techniques of half-covering holes to play flattened or raised notes. It is in three parts, from basics to more advanced, in a sort of progression of introducing more notes, from flattened 7th, flattened 3rd, flattened 6th, raised 4th, to raised 1st/ flattened 2nd.

I hope it may be useful for some players, who are, like me, exploring options to play more difficult scales like Harmonic Minor, Double Harmonic Major, Melodic Major, to name just a few. It might be useful for those wishing to develop their whistle playing into Jazz, by providing some theory with the whistle at its centre.

See https://music.bracker.uk/Music/The-Whis ... les-1.html

Happy to hear comments and suggestions for improvement etc.!

[Narzog]

Keep up the good work Hans. I love your calculator, I use it to calculate all my tube hole placements. I'm not sure how hard this would be. but if you could make a button to switch it to use imperial measurements, that would be awesome. When I started making whistles I just used metric. and most of my cad files are in metric. Makes life easier when things like this calculator are also metric. My issue starts when all my tools are not metric haha. So I'm trying to convert to the complicated crap we use here in America. Its challenging when all my designs are metric then I need to math everything to convert it all.

Could either just be decimals, or fractioned numbers to like 1/8th or 1/16ths. This would start getting complicated and annoying to make probobly. Or if you wanted to go really complex, have a setting to change it to use up to 16ths, 32, or 64ths. I have so many weird drill bits. I hate the system we use here lol.

[hans]

Keep up the good work Hans. I love your calculator, I use it to calculate all my tube hole placements. I'm not sure how hard this would be. but if you could make a button to switch it to use imperial measurements, that would be awesome. ...

Thank you! Unfortunately it is not a simple matter to bolt on a mm to inches and vice versa conversion unit to that calculator. Dividing or multiplying by 25.4 is simple enough. Cannot promise if I will be able to solve the javascript coding for that, but I will give it a try.

Enjoy your whistle making! Hope to get back into making a few more myself one day! Getting older has thrown some physical challenges, and I am waiting for cataract op, till then the eyes are not up to the fine work required, which is frustrating. But I play more whistle, so that is good!

[TxWhistler]

Thank you for the link to all the useful information. I will bookmark it for future reference. I appreciate the time and effort it took you to produce this resource.

Thank you again!

[Narzog]

Thank you! Unfortunately it is not a simple matter to bolt on a mm to inches and vice versa conversion unit to that calculator. Dividing or multiplying by 25.4 is simple enough. Cannot promise if I will be able to solve the javascript coding for that, but I will give it a try.

Enjoy your whistle making! Hope to get back into making a few more myself one day! Getting older has thrown some physical challenges, and I am waiting for cataract op, till then the eyes are not up to the fine work required, which is frustrating. But I play more whistle, so that is good!

A simple conversion to in would work well enough. Then someone can just type in the hole size they want (like their drill bit size) and it finds the perfect position for it. So it doesnt need weird intervals or anything, becuase those would be much harder to make.

I was learning web development a while back to try and pursue it as a career. So I get the pain of trying to mod it to have inches conversion. Some things can be easy changes but coding some things is just pain, the more advanced it is. I can spaghetti code simple things but the second it becomes an advanced algorithm my brain just melts haha.

hopefully your eye surgery goes well! Luckily my eyes are pretty good. My issue is my craftsmanship haha. And lack of tools. But that ones slowly getting better.

I'm in the same boat that my break from whistle making has significantly improved my practicing time. I can't manage to do both lol.

[hans]

Thank you! Brain did not melt quite doing coding on the calculator, which is good!

So now I've got whistle calculator enabled for working in inches and mm, and some things hopefully improved.

See https://music.bracker.uk/Music/Whistle-Calculator.html

You may need to enforce a browser refresh to see the differences.

[Narzog]

Awesome, thanks for updating it. Will save a lot of time!

[hans]

Awesome, thanks for updating it. Will save a lot of time!

you're welcome!
Just done more improvements: one can enter now also fractions, like 3/4, or enter integer and fraction, like 1-1/8 (with minus between integer and fraction part).
Input of fraction is converted to decimal number. But no display of fractions!!!

I hope I got some sensible rounding built into the machine. Let me know if things are not right please!

Graphics are also improved, but need to do some further checking and twiddling probably.

[Narzog]

Awesome change, seems to work well. This way if someone is using drill bits for holes and stuff, or for tubing size, can just type the fraction and it automatically enters the right number. Which is much better than having to whip out a calculator to figure out what 35/64 is then typing in or pasting the decimal haha. Thanks again!

[hans]

Awesome change, seems to work well. This way if someone is using drill bits for holes and stuff, or for tubing size, can just type the fraction and it automatically enters the right number. Which is much better than having to whip out a calculator to figure out what 35/64 is then typing in or pasting the decimal haha. Thanks again!

That was precisely my thinking! What's the point of using a calculator, if you need to use a calculator to use it?! Luckily I found on some coding forum someone did write a neat function in javascript to convert fractions and whole number-fractions into decimal numbers.

What I did not do is to find an imperial (in inches and fractions) solution for the initial choice of tubing, wall, hole diameters. That could be done, but the result will then be noticeably different from what I use in my more metric ways. Anyway, after selecting a key for the whistle or flute, the initial tube and hole sizes are pretty subjective to what I was doing, what stock I used (mostly metric alu tubes with 1mm wall thickness), my set of drill bits, which go by half a millimetre.

I am mostly worried if I over or underdone the rounding of numbers entered. Now the hole sizes increase or decrease by 0.1mm, or by 0.01", when using the + and - buttons. It used to be 0.5mm, reflecting my drill bit set... For tube, wall and window dimensions I set a rounding of 0.001", which is rather fine, but I thought it needed to be better than 0.01". Any thoughts or suggestions on this would be welcome! And I have not been bothered to introduce the use of a cookie to save personal preferences, or results... I usually do a printout, and keep the paper on file, including my hand-scribbled notes on any changes I finally did.

[Narzog]

That was precisely my thinking! What's the point of using a calculator, if you need to use a calculator to use it?! Luckily I found on some coding forum someone did write a neat function in javascript to convert fractions and whole number-fractions into decimal numbers.

What I did not do is to find an imperial (in inches and fractions) solution for the initial choice of tubing, wall, hole diameters. That could be done, but the result will then be noticeably different from what I use in my more metric ways. Anyway, after selecting a key for the whistle or flute, the initial tube and hole sizes are pretty subjective to what I was doing, what stock I used (mostly metric alu tubes with 1mm wall thickness), my set of drill bits, which go by half a millimetre.

I am mostly worried if I over or underdone the rounding of numbers entered. Now the hole sizes increase or decrease by 0.1mm, or by 0.01", when using the + and - buttons. It used to be 0.5mm, reflecting my drill bit set... For tube, wall and window dimensions I set a rounding of 0.001", which is rather fine, but I thought it needed to be better than 0.01". Any thoughts or suggestions on this would be welcome! And I have not been bothered to introduce the use of a cookie to save personal preferences, or results... I usually do a printout, and keep the paper on file, including my hand-scribbled notes on any changes I finally did.

I wouldn't worry about changing the recommended tubing and hole sizes to match tubes we can buy. I've found so many different dimensions tubes. Because you can find one OD, but several different wall thicknesses, which changes the ID. And this is the case for pretty much every tube size you can find online. My local store just has a few tube sizes so I mostly use those. But each is a different wall thickness, ranging from 1.4mm to 2mm ish. So many people using the calculator should just be changing the numbers to match their tube. Which is what I always did, and is one of the things that makes the calculator so useful. It works with any tube size.

If you can making the + and - buttons still be 0.5mm would probobly be ideal. but I'm not sure if that effects how it does the conversions of fractions and stuff. Because for those we want it to be as accurate as possible. for the buttons, bigger jumps is nice. 0.5mm obviously wont quite match peoples drill bits in inches, so for those they will need to enter their own numbers anyway. But having the 0.5mm increments is nice to give it a few clicks to make a hole smaller or larger to try and perfect hole placement.

Saving probobly isn't necessary, but would be a good feature. But in my case I always make cad files of my whistles. So when I need to re calculate, I just re enter the numbers I need which are in my cad file sketches. Because once you try to add saving, theres the issue of people like me who make many different whistle keys and sizes. And then does it save all of them with cache? What if they clear their cache and lose it all? Etc. Then you would want to make a log in system and have it save their settings. But then you need more hosting power, and have to save peoples data. Would get a lot harder really fast haha.

[David Cooper]

Saving probobly isn't necessary, but would be a good feature. ... And then does it save all of them with cache? What if they clear their cache and lose it all? Etc. Then you would want to make a log in system and have it save their settings. But then you need more hosting power, and have to save peoples data. Would get a lot harder really fast haha.

You can use local storage, but also provide a button to let them save all the stats to a text file created in their downloads folder as a backup, plus a button to allow the text file content to be pasted back in - that way you don't need more hosting power. I can give you JavaScript code to do both those things if you ever decide to add that functionality. The text could also be exported to the clipboard for pasting into forum posts for other people to copy from there and paste into your program.