I wanted to share a whistle geometry editor I’m developing. Right now, it’s a really useful tool if you want to create a fipple for 3D printing.
In the editor you can move and resize the hole positions and bore sections in the table and the 3D view by dragging a tone hole.
It doesn’t have an acoustic solver yet. Right now the initial hole positions are just interpolated from reference designs so they won’t be very in-tune, but are hopefully a useful starting point for further analysis.
I’d love to hear any feedback and feature requests you might have!
Here’s is a print of this whistle. The roughness definitely does come through in the timbre, and I notice more losses due to the texture compared to an injection molded fipple.
This one was printed it in one piece, foot to head. So the bore end is overhung, and leads to a rough surface at the cap of the bore.
I’ve now added an export option to split it at the bore face and I’ll have a bunch more soon… I’m currently printing this matrix of window dimensions. Each one is split at the bore face.
I’ve found the a curved labium plays with a much cleaner tone in general. I’ll eventually add one to the editor, here’s an example of one I printed. I think it sounds really nice for a 3d print. Let me know how it goes for you, and if you’d want to try this type of window too.
The only reason I’m starting with a flat labium is because I wanted to be able to model and compare it with the other whistles I own.
Been super busy and I just started having an issue with my printer, but i intend to print something with this in the next few days. Just wanted to mention, I haven’t forgotten
All right, I finally got around to testing this. And I switched to MM because that’s what my slicer and tinkercad prefer. To do my first test, I tried a head to fit on a 15mm bore diameter for an old Generation C body. It printed way too small. The outside diameter of the head was like 13 mm. So something isn’t working. I love the idea of this but it looks like it needs some work.
I put one of the too-small heads in tinkercad and upscaled it, and when I put it on my C whistle body, no sound came out. I’m not sure if the labium wasn’t lined up correctly or what, but there you go. I really do hope you revisit this project and get it working because I do indeed love the idea.
Hey, thanks for trying it and letting me know! Can you send me a link to the model you printed? What printer and slicer are you using? I’d like try to replicate it and see why it’s not working
Yes I think that’s a good way to do it. When you’re gluing the sections together you can get the alignment exactly right.
That’s the Generation whistle tweak where you saw the head in two through the window, file away some material, then glue it back together.
Now the end of the windway is closer to the edge of the blade, raising the 2nd octave.
And there’s a brief period when the glue had hardened just enough to hold the two pieces of the head together, yet can still be moved, so you can experiment with the alignment until it’s perfect, giving the best tone and voicing.
I have to say this is a game changer! I have been interested in widow width and length, to see how this changes tone. With this app I can make a few changes and in an hour have a new mouth piece to play around with. My first attempt at a Low D (4) was great. I copied the sizes of a whistle I had and was able to reproduce the original sound very closely. I can’t thank you enough for the work you have put into this!
I have been printing in one with tree supports. These work really well and obviously avoid any alignment issues. Here is my first attempt.
At the moment just the heads. There are coming out spot on. My bodies are PVC, however I have aluminium on order. What are you printing in? There are different shrink amounts.
I’m just printing on standard Bambu PLA with my H2S. I set the bore diameter to 14.5 and the wall thickness to 0.5mm, and it printed an interior diameter on the head of 16mm. Who knows why, though. I was wondering if it was working for you and I guess it is. Actually, are you using the UI with imperial units or metric?
Wow awesome, thanks for sharing! Your post was very encouraging to me and your print looks great. This has been a passion project of mine for a while, and I’m so glad you’re using it.
I shared with @gruevy in a DM that the “Bore Diameter” parameter in the mouthpiece table is a no-opt right now (I’ll remove it). Instead, Bore Diameter and Wall Thickness is read from the first bore station.
The fipple inner diameter is then calculated from (Bore Diameter + 2 * Wall Thickness + Fipple Fit Tolerance). Here’s an illustration of the fipple fit tolerance:
If you play with the params (cross-section view option is really helpful), you’ll likely also find the Window Height parameter isn’t very useful right now. I’m mostly using “Fipple Min Thickness” to control the labium height. This area still needs work.
I made a few more illustrations for some of the parameters. I could use some suggestions for better terminology:
I have used both, at first it defaulted to imperial, but I found metric, which I am more used to.
I have not bothered with the body as this gives constant finger hole sizes, which for a low D whistle is never going to work. I suspect the finger spread will be all over the place. I have a Kerry Chieftain V1, so I am going to copy and fine tune that to start. I use a pipers grip so am used to variable sizes. I have finalised a mouthpiece design, so next week I am going to experiment with the body. Initially with PVC pipe (OD 25mm), then move on to Aluminium.
A little tip I use from other instruments is to lap the joint with PTFE tape. This gives you a good seal as you can use as much as you need. it also keeps the joint mobile for tuning.
Brilliant that is really useful! I have a mouthpiece design that I am pretty happy with, so the next step is the body. My plan was always to use a different material, initially PVC pipe for experimentation and then finally Aluminium for the finished instrument. I have experimented with a few mouthpiece designs, but your app has, as I mentioned been a game changer! I have been learning Freecad, which has aged me over the past few weeks!
I finally have a functional head for my close-hole low D whistle! I had Grok design this from scratch and it did a passable job with the body, but it couldn’t get the head geometry right to save its life, so I’ve been trying to do it myself in Tinkercad and it has not been going well. Until now. This app makes a perfect head every time. I have to work it a bit in Tinkercad to made it attach, but that’s easy.
I have a little more fine-tuning on the upper 3 holes (seen here in on the right) to see if I can get them a bit closer together, then some experimenting on the head, and it’ll finally be ready. I love this app, man. Thanks a ton.
Once I have it where I want it, I’ll post a video or some audio.
My background is in finite element analysis, and analyzing whistles is something I’ve been interested in a for a while. This discussion inspired me to dust off my personal finite element library to try out some simplified whistle simulations.
Here’s a short recording from simulating an air jet flowing through a whistle’s mouthpiece and how the edge cuts the stream of air and creates an instability that drives the oscillation:
If anyone’s interested in trying it out, the simulation above actually runs in a browser and has the ability to dial in some whistle design parameters (bore size, tube length, windway dimensions, etc). The “play” button at the bottom of the UI panel on the left starts the simulation.
Note: this web page is doing some heavy computation for the CFD, so it works best when run on a fast computer.
I think it would be fun to also simulate how the tone hole positions affects intonation, and to what extent other design parameters affect the sound (e.g. Freeman "tweak"ing).
I’ve seen simulations of the oscillating air stream before, which drives the standing wave in the bore, but what I find most interesting with this one is that it shows the way the air circulates in a kind of whirlpool motion under the window, and in a series of swirling eddies above the window. I think this helps to illustrate why modifications to the head bore under the window have an effect, and why playing techniques, such as window shading using the lips, also have an effect.
Specifically, by constraining the space in which these swirls of air move, you change the timing of the repeating pressure build up at the labium, which will affect the frequency.
I’ll have to play around with this and see what I can get out of it.
