Hi all. I’m sorry for this (undoubtedly) boring request. I’m not a trained or skilled musician. I play by ear, for fun and sometimes for short film projects of mine. I’m a VERY casual player.
I would LOVE to make up some pvc whistles to play around with some Middle Eastern style melodies. I’m skilled maker and have made a few decent pvc whistles.
What evades me is a solid plan for such a build. I’m not a music theory technician..I know nothing..at all. Does anyone have ANY plans/measurements to make a decent, cliche’d pvc Arabian style whistle? Most any key would be great, any size from soprano on down? Any help for an appreciative simpleton? Thanks so much!
If you’ve already made PVC flutes with “Western” tuning, equal temperament or just intonation, presumably all you need is a pattern for hole sizes and positions for the tuning you want. Can you describe the specific scale you’re looking for? Wikipedia suggests the double harmonic scale or major locrian scale, among others.
Have you used any flute design tools to compute hole layouts? You could use WIDesigner; it supports user-defined tunings. There may be other tools that would be easier to use.
I think I’m looking for the Double Harmonic Scale. I think I have seen that some Middle Eastern styles of music tend to favour keys? Bb? D? Of course I may have taken hold of the wrong end of the stick.
I have looked at a couple of calculators but they seem to need such exacting and specific information based upon musical knowledge I simply don’t possess. The pvc I have isn’t always the exact size specified or catered to in the calculations. I guess I need a recording saying “THIS is a “such & such” scale as heard in THIS tune”.
I love the note progressions and dynamics of “Middle Eastern” music, there is such drama in it inherently. I don’t know if it’s Egyptian or Persian or any other commonly quoted “sound”
Basically, as you say, I would ideally have a series of measurements to assemble.
I gather this is only one of dozens of Arabic maqam scales.
Is there a particular tonic you would like to start on? D4, like a conventional flute? From D4, the notes of Hijazkar would be D, Eb, F#, G, A, Bb, C#, D. If you are using a calculator that uses frequency in Hertz, a two-octave scale will have the following notes:
D 293.66
Eb 311.13
F# 369.99
G 392.00
A 440.00
Bb 466.16
C# 554.37
D 587.33
Eb 622.25
F# 739.99
G 783.99
A 880.00
Bb 932.33
C# 1108.73
D 1174.66
(but can NOT for the life of me work out how to apply a 7 note scale to these calculators. 6 notes? Sure. But I always end up “running out of” holes or with too many holes, or places to place the notes. (See..I told you I was musically ignorant!!) Something always seems to go weird when I face these calculators with 7 notes or frequencies! The other thing I also sometimes get is a distance between holes that I would need 12” long fingers for!! I guess I should have 6 finger holes (?) or would 5 and a thumb hole work? Or 6 finger holes and a thumb hole!?! lol
I looked at the more technical calculator and WOW…I was BEYOND lost!! Eg. WIDesigner…YIKES….!!!
How do makers without an advanced degree in musical theory use these or get anything but a standard “western scale” whistle made!? It’s like some arcane secret!
In terms of the tone (?) or “key” (I guess?) for the whistle..? I suppose a D (4?) & G would give me a couple of usable “voices”?
Since the previous post I have tried the Bracken calculator and WOW! It did NOT like anything but pretty standard values being put in! I don’t know enough about music theory to even attempt to adjust the parameters to get anything usable. I usually get results with all of the finger holes AND the whistle itself in the same spot. Could someone else please run those frequencies through the calculator (20mm od tube, 1.6mm wall thickness) for a 6 hole whistle?
Nope! I have tried and tried and tried and tried. The whistle calculators bug out, there are NO written plans/patterns or even formulas to get Double harmonic (Hijaz) scale whistles in PVC…none whatsoever! Thats it…they can NOT be done! Its official.
I have brand new (sooooo much less now) pvc tube. 20mm od, 1.7 mm wall. I can make the whistle part but to get the double harmonic scale in A, Bb, D (and I have tried them all) is simply and utterly impossible.
I have been looking and trying for over a month. Apparently there is not ONE single maker out there who has EVER made a nice, clean, “classic, corny, dramatic ARABIC” sounding double harmonic scale whistle in ANY key and in PVC and wrote the process down.
This has broken me. I have made full-size, free standing animatronic T Rex models run by computers, I have made numerous guitars, amps, guitar pedals, masks, body suits, set pieces, masks, catapult rifles, directed and edited films, done digital visual effects, built Japanese Katana swords, driven a snowmobile across a glacier, climbed Ben Nevis in a blizzard, driven into the Norwegian arctic in mid winter in a 7.5 meter camper etc etc etc but a classic, Arabic sounding whistle finally broke me. APPARENTLY IT CAN NOT BE DONE. If it can be done, no human has ever shared the arcane knowledge.. perhaps the secret is the same as the secret to how the pyramids were built? I mean I am lost and totally disheartened…
Then pull yourself together and regain hope. You don’t need a hole calculator - just drill the holes one at a time in what you hope are the right places and then learn from the mistakes to put them in better places on the next instrument. How expensive is PVC pipe? I got into flute making this way but with wood, and each one started as a 25mm dowel which I had to drill out with a 40cm x 16mm Speedbor bit which I had to steer down the middle of the rod by measuring the wall thickness with magnets and a ball bearing in the tube. You can just saw off a new section of PVC pipe each time instead. Make your whistle head in such a way that you can move it from pipe to pipe and then just do the experiments. My first few flute attempts had holes that grew too big to cover, and others that were too small to produce decent quality notes, but I learned from that and got them closer to the ideal positions on the next one. The fourth one I made is still one of my best flutes, and it was all done with trial and error.
Hi! I’m sorry that no one has been able to help so far.
I’m not a professional whistle maker, but I have done quite a lot of amateur flute making out of PVC, and I’ve come to be pretty familiar with those PVC flute hole calculators.
I believe I’ve sketched up the kind of design you’re looking for. I think the reason you’ve had so much trouble is that, because the scale is so different, the combination of hole sizes has to be quite different as well. As it is, I think you’ll have to close the bottom hole with your pinky, and use your ring finger to grip the instrument, because the gap between the bottom hole and the next one up is so much larger–this is the minor third interval, after all.
The top hole is optional: you could drill it as a thumb hole and have an octave note. This would also make the 1st-octave major 7th note possible via half-holing or cross-fingering. (Without that 7th hole, the remaining top hole would give a minor seventh, with no practical way to sharpen it another semitone.)
Let me know if this is indeed what you’re trying to find, and if not, I can maybe help you adjust it. Have fun building!
P.S. That’s a pretty impressive CV of extracurricular achievements there, sir.
And P.P.S. don’t let the intimidatingly long URL scare you–this calculator saves all the parameters in the URL, so that sharing a finished design is easy. Here you go:
Is that 20 mm inside diameter, which would make it 23.4 mm outside diameter?
If so, you could try starting with a tube of 523.3 mm from the splitting edge and these hole positions for a D4 low Hijazkar whistle (dimensions in mm):
Name Position (Spacing) Diameter
T1 236.0 9.1
T2 276.0 40.0 4.2
T3 316.0 40.0 9.1
B1 366.0 50.0 9.1
B2 395.2 29.1 9.1
B3 435.2 40.0 4.0
Fingering is straightforward, from XXXXXX for D4, through OOOOOO for C#5, OXXXXX for D5, through OOOOOO for C#6, but OXXOOO for D6.
As usual, start with the tube a bit long and the holes undersized, and shorten the tube and enlarge the holes (from bottom to top) to improve the tuning. As David suggests, make a single whistle head that you can move from tube to tube.
On the other hand, if that’s 20 mm outside diameter, 16.6 mm inside diameter, you could make a nice whistle in A from it. The shorter A whistle would give you more flexibility with hole spacing. Let me know.
Hi folks! Thanks so much for the feedback! I used the Flutomat figures and have a whistle that plays an Hijaz scale!!!
Having said that, the layout is weird and awkward-ish and not exactly intuitive.
I’ll post pictures and info later and maybe someone can offer some feedback and suggestions. 5mm and 5.5 mm finger holes are ok but I can barely feel them etc etc…
lol