Hi, Italian Rover.
Here’s my tip.
I am in agreement with Tommy (that’s usually the case). I am not sure how long you have been playing the Merlin but I would not hack into the whistle head until I got a second opinion from another experienced player or talked to the whistle’s maker.
One thing to remember with whistles is that “it is all relative”. How much air a whistle requires is relative to our experience. If you come from a flute background then a whistle will likely use more air. If you come from a tuba background you may view the whistle’s air requirements relative to that experience. If you have played high D whistles and this is the first low D you have played then your experience may be relative to the high D. Your Merlin low D may be doing just what it is designed to do. Some makers like an airy sound, other do not. Some like free blowing whistles and other makers do not. It is all relative.
So I would suggest that you work with what you have got to play with for a little bit until you can get an opinion relative to another player’s experience.
And on that minor note … I encourage people to make their own whistles. It is a fun activity and you can learn a great deal about the instrument by making them yourself. But I usually add a provisos, a caution or things to consider before jumping into that. So here are my opinions. Take them for what they are worth.
First of all, every whistle made can play a minor scale. A low D whistle is tuned to the D major scale. It can also play the G major scale easily with one cross fingered or half holed note, C natural. The D major scale contains the same notes as the B minor scale. So we say that B minor is the “relative minor” to the D major scale. See, “it is all relative” once again. The E minor scale is the relative minor scale to the G major scale as it happens. So you can play two minor scales easily on your low D whistle - B minor and E minor.
I am not sure which Vivaldi minor you want to play. I am no Vivaldi expert. It seems the famous violin piece is played in A minor. You could transpose the A minor notes into the B minor key and play it on your low D whistle. No drilling or hack-sawing required. Of course you would have to examine the range of the notes in the Vivaldi piece to see how they sit on the low D whistle.
Alternatively, a low C whistle would play in A minor since A minor is the relative minor scale to the C major scale - same notes. You could make a low C tube for your low D whistle to accomplish that. It would need to be longer than your low D tube. You may want to consider making an entire low C whistle from scratch using the dimensions from Dr. Guido Gonzato’s website: http://www.ggwhistles.com/howto/index.html
Hold off on drilling into that carbon tube for a while. A first time whistle maker will almost never get the dimensions right the first time. We tend to make trash or what I prefer to call “artifacts of valuable experiments” at first. Buy some PVC pie of a similar diameter, identical diameter if at all possible. Then use a tone hole calculator to determine the sounding length and the positions for the tone-holes for you minor scale. Realize that it will not be perfect, perhaps not anywhere near perfect, the first try. The reasons for that have to do with how the calculators work and the variables they use for things like “end correction” as well as how they calculate the depth and area of the voicing window. You will likely have to make some adjustments. So make the first tube.
Always cut the sounding length a bit longer than calculated and then trim it down to get to the bell note pitch.
Assess the pitch by playing in a normal fashion just as you would when playing a tune. When most people blow a note against a tuner they will unconsciously adjust the air pressure to make the note register as being “in tune”. So try not to trick yourself.
Drill your holes a little smaller than calculated and then ream/file/etc them out to get the proper pitch.
Work from the bottom up. First the bell note, then the lowest hole, then tune the second from lowest holes, etc., etc.
Expect the upper second octave notes to be a little flat. It would take too many words to explain why here and to also explain the ways to address that. So work on the first tube and see how you do.
Analyse your first effort and make adjustments to the hole positions based on your findings. Drill a second tube based on your findings and assess the results. Drill a third tube if needed and so on. Once you have things right you can figure out what to do with that beautiful carbon tube.
Tone-hole calculator: Phill Van Leersum, who is a member here known as DrPhill, has provided a straightforward hole calculator for whistle makers called TWJCalc. You can find it here. http://twjcalc.sourceforge.net/2.10/TWJCalc2.10.html There is a lot of background to that work. You can search the archive here on this forum to read about that.
Hope that helps.
Feadoggie
