JI Low Whistle

Whistle
1

Hello, new to the forum and of course it’s great to be here.

I’m in the market for a low whistle, I’m thinking a low F, only for solo playing. I also like the idea of having a whistle tuned to Just Intonation. I’ve read a few long debates here about just what JI means and how it compares to ET, and all that stuff is way over my head because my knowledge of music theory is nonexistent. I do have one question though. I understand that ET allows one instrument to be in tune in any key, and JI does not. I know that each key of whistle is associated with certain keys of music in which it can play, but I know that it doesn’t really matter if you’re playing solo because it just transposes. Does that hold true for justly intoned whistles as well? Can I still play any tune on the whistle and it’ll sound right, provided I’m unaccompanied?

Sorry if this is a silly question but I’m hopeless at music theory.

2

As far as “sounding right” when playing solo, well, that’s in the ear of the beholder, is it not? People hear different things and like hearing different things. A whistle that’s horrendously out of tune to one listener might “sound right” to another.

There are a couple basic things about Just Intonation

  1. the differences between Just Intonation and Equal Temperament are fairly subtle; if this were not so, our ears wouldn’t be able to tolerate the ‘out of tune’ ET scale we hear all the time.

These differences are mostly within typical blowing variances on whistles, so that a person could fairly easily blow a JI whistle so as to play in tune to ET, and visa versa.

The main differences are the Major 3rd and Major 6th, both of which, in JI, are around 15 cents flat of their ET positions.

So, if you have a Low D whistle tuned precisely to ET (which most are) you can quickly and easily convert your whistle to play a JI D Major scale by putting some tape across the top edge (the edge closest to the fipple) on Hole 2 and Hole 5, the holes from which B and F# emit, so that these notes are around 15 cents flat according to an Equal Temperament electronic tuner.

  1. Just Intonation is only “in tune” for one scale, and one scale alone. JI is necessary when each note of the scale is heard over a fixed drone, which is why Irish, Scottish, Spanish, Hungarian, etc etc bagpipes are tuned JI.

If a scale is not heard over a fixed drone JI is only necessary when playing along with other instruments tuned JI.

If playing solo and unaccompanied it doesn’t matter which way you’re tuned; it will sound pretty much the same to anybody that doesn’t have Perfect Pitch.

ET is necessary when playing along with other instruments tuned to ET.

The limitation to JI is that it’s only exactly ‘in tune’ to one scale. Say you’ve tuned a D whistle to the JI scale of D Major. But! Now you’re going to play a tune in E minor. Are you ‘in tune’ now? No, because your B is somewhat flat and the 5th E to B is now NOT a Perfect 5th but in fact rather narrow. Plus your Major 2nd (F#) is now too flat too! To fix both of these you’ll have to take the tape off the B and F# holes you put on to create the JI D Major scale.

In other words, for precise JI you would have to rearrange the tape on various holes for each key you played in.

It’s this sort of thing that made people adopt ET in the first place.

3

Just so you have it, here’s ET compared to JI and the differences

Scale Degree/ET/JI/difference

Tonic 0 0 0
Major 2nd 200 204 +4
Major 3rd 400 386 -14
4th 500 498 -2
5th 700 702 +2
Major 6th 900 884 -16
minor 7th 1000 1018 +18 (bagpipes use 969 -31)
Major 7th 1100 1088 -12
Octave 1200 1200 0

Most of these differences are well within ordinary blowing range.

4

Hi Larry, welcome to the Chiffboard.

Nice table, Richard! I’d like to add one more minor 7th:

Minor 7th 1000 996 -4

I like that one because it’s the inverse of the major 2nd, and because it’s the one that also harmonizes with the perfect 4th.

Makers I know of that make a JI low F: Bracker, Reyburn, Goldie (if you specify). MK, Burke, Susato, and Reviol are more ET. Though, on most whistles I’ve tried, the ET whistles are not 100% ET and the JI whistles are not 100% JI. They’ve mostly been somewhere in the middle, with the ET whistles much closer to ET than JI, and vice versa.

Enjoy your whistle hunt!

5

Whew! way over my head… keep it simple and just have fun. Welcome to the whistle forum LL.

6

It’s interesting the number of minor 7ths that people use… on pipes anyhow it’s the most ‘unsettled’ note, or was until fairly recently.

The Just Intonation one (5-limit Just) at 1018 (+18) sounds too sharp to us pipers.

Highland pipers nowadays have settled on 969 (-31) which is the minor 7th of the Harmonic Series, probably because it’s a unison with the same note present in the drone harmonics. It has a wonderful bluesy blend with the drones, literally ‘bluesy’ because that’s the minor 7th of the traditional blues scale.

The one you posted is from the Darbari Kanada North Indian Raga tuning. It’s probably about where I have the minor 7th on my Scottish smallpipes, because the 969 one doesn’t ‘play well with others’. It’s a nice compromise between ET and blending with the drones.

Every Low Whistle I’ve had, from around a dozen different makers, has been tuned more or less precisely to ET, save for Hole 1, which of course is a compromise hole, as Theo Boehm so well explained over 100 years ago. Having Hole 2 (B) tuned 16 cents flat, as it would be for JI in D Major, would of course be disastrous for all the tunes in E minor, B minor, A Mixolydian, and A dorian, though fine for tunes in G Major.

Unless over a fixed drone! JI really shines on the Highland pipes, if the chanter is precisely tuned, and the drones are giving a full spectrum of harmonics.

Here’s a tune which fully demonstrates how lovely that JI Major 6th at -16 sounds over the drones

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnYL7OlJLcc

And here’s an excellent example of the standard Harmonic minor 7th at -31

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzdUDPK8XO8

7

Hmm, interesting. I learned of it as the Pythagorean, or 3-limit, minor 7th. “Compromise” probably sums up why I prefer it.

I enjoyed the pipe clips, thanks for sharing! That reminds me of a question that I’ll ask in a separate thread.

8

That’s the cool thing about all this, Pythagoras and the musicians of ancient India and you and I can all hear the same thing… it’s the laws of acoustics after all.

Have you seen this site? It’s amazing. There’s your Pythagorian minor 7th and the ‘septimal’ minor 7th (harmonic minor 7th) that’s become standard on the Highland pipes.

http://www.kylegann.com/Octave.html

You can well see how lower ratios are heard by anyone with decent ears as being ‘in tune’. Long before we knew about any of this stuff, and indeed before Highland pipes were tuned as strictly “just” as they are today, a piper friend and I sat down with two early electronic tuners and established the pitch of each note of the pipe scale that sounded “in tune” to us over a fixed drone. What we arrived at is precisely how the vast majority of Highland pipers have their pipes tuned today. It’s dictated by the harmonics of the drones.

The odd inexplicable note in the old Highland scale (practically extinct now) is the old sharp D. One would think that pipers would always have had D tuned a Perfect Fourth over the A drones, as everyone does today. But it wasn’t so! When I started piping, in the mid 1970s, all the good pipers had their D’s tuned sharp. In 1954 Seumas MacNeill and a team of acousticians did an electronic study of a number of Highland pipes deemed to be correctly tuned and their 4th was at 27/20 519.5 and their minor 7th at 9/5 1017.6 both of which would be considered too sharp today.

9

Not a silly question at all! Some interesting answers have been posted, but let me try to add my viewpoint:
To my perception an equal tempered instrument is equally out of tune in all keys, and it is perceptible to anyone with sensitive hearing, regardless what kind of instrument. But sadly people are more and more conditioned to accept the harshness of the equal tempered compromise tuning as de facto standard. A just intoned instrument sounds sweeter. If there is a drone, or if played in harmony with other instruments, the sweet “just tuned” intervals can become very apparent and lovely to listen to. But even playing solo whistle the tuning of intervals matter and are perceptible, not just to the player. This is partly because we keep some memory of the previous note in the mind, and partly because notes are played in a space which produces reverberation (some spaces more than others), and the new note is played against a previous note reverberating. We pick these up. A player picks this up even more so than a listener, and adjust the intonation of the note instantly. This is less important when playing fast passages, and more important playing slow ones or long notes.

Traditionally whistles are tuned sweet, i.e. in some fashion of just intonation. As has been pointed out, this is most apparent for the F# and B note on a D whistle (the major third and sixth). The ET tuning of these notes is very sharp indeed. I should add here that I prefer a “B” flat of ET, a natural major third above G, as G is such an important key, and prefer to blow it sharp when necessary, for instance when it should be a perfect fifth above E. I find it easier to adjust notes blowing them sharper than blowing them flatter. So you see the “B” provides a challenge for playing sweetly in the various keys and modes accessible on a single whistle.

The other note worth looking at is the seventh, or C# on a D whistle. If this note is tuned to ET, it is sharper than it should be for a sweet C#, and it makes playing a sweet C natural very difficult, using normal cross fingering like OXXOOO. For a good C natural, important for the scale of G and its related modes, the C# needs to be tuned fairly flat, even flatter than what just intonation tells. Doing so one can blow it sharp as needed, rather than struggle with a C natural which is too sharp. But some players with ET tuned whistles and a sharp cross-fingered C natural adapt by half-holing the top hole to play C natural. I find this difficult and never learned it. - I just wanted to point out that even for ET tuned whistles there are notes which need special attention, above the difficulties of adjusting ET notes to sound sweet.

As for the transposing character of whistles: it holds true for ET and for just intoned whistles. A just intoned whistle of a different key plays in that key just as sweetly, as an equal tempered whistle plays equally harshly (if not compensated by the player).

10

Sorry Hans but I’m going to play Devil’s Advocate here and ask exactly what is meant by that statement.

With whistles there’s not all that much in the way of “tradition”, is there?

When I started playing, in the mid-70s, there were (as far as I knew at the time) only two types of whistle available, Generations and Clarkes (Clarkes only in C).

The Generations of that time that I had were not as a rule tuned “just” but rather tuned fairly accurately to ET. (I’m talking the keys of Bb, C, and D.)

The caveat is that they got flatter as you went up the scale. Thing is, on these old Generations I had the 2nd octave was flat, and perhaps to bridge that pitch gap more smoothly the scale in each octave got progressively flatter as you went up; the upper notes of the 1st octave were the flattest notes in that octave, and the lower notes of the 2nd octave were the sharpest notes in that octave, so that when you ‘went over the break’ there was little pitch differential between the octaves. That meant that to play in tune you blew a bit stronger for each note, in a fairly even progression, from Bottom D through the ‘break’ right up to High B. It was when you alternated notes in octaves, say, Low G to High G, that the flat 2nd octave became very apparent.

Another feature of these old Generations was that the 4th tended to be sharper than everything else. My cherished old Generation C had to have tape on that one hole, the rest of the scale being precisely in tune to ET. The same was true of the D Generations I had then.

Around 10 years ago I had a whistle student who picked up a couple excellent new Generation D’s at a local shop, and he gave me one. It was a great player! But it had it’s F# quite flat, and I had to carve out that hole. That was the first time I had encountered a “just” 3rd on a Generation.

11

Hmmm, the few old Generation whistles (Eb, D, C and Bb) I still got from the early 70’ all seem to have a just Major Third, same with two old Clarke whistles, same with some Soodlum MelloD whistles from the 80’. And I imagine, but have no examples, that really old tin whistles would have been tuned just to some degree, as the makers would have tuned by ear and not chromatic equal tempered tuners. Maybe others can shed more light on this. But you are right, I should not make statements about what constitutes a “traditional” whistle, or how it was tuned. And it is not relevant to the OP’s question, nor to tuning of low whistles, which are a fairly modern invention it seems, and where different makers pursue different preferred ways of tuning.

12

the few old Generation whistles (Eb, D, C and Bb) I still got from the early 70’ all seem to have a just Major Third,

They do indeed and so do the earlier examples of them, the ones before the plastic head was introduced. In fact I don’t think the tube diameters and hole patterns have been changed at all.

While there may have been only two makes of whistle around in the seventies and eighties (in fact thee were a few more of them but not very common), there is indeed a ‘tradition’ of sorts many makes of whistles in a range of keys commercially available since the late 19th century, not only in the English speaking world but,especially around the turn of the 19/20th centuries, in France, Belgium, Germany and other European countries. And they mostly follow the same pattern of not being tuned to ET.