I asked this in another thread, but just wondered if any clever person can shed more light on it for me. How can you control the fingering for Cnat when making your whistle? I never know until I play it what the fingering is going to be, and although the surprise is fun I should like to be that little bit more in control! Obviously I can half hole, and often do, but I like the option of cross fingering , especiallyOXXXOX. Am I missing something obvious here, or is this totally in the lap of the gods? Any help would be appreciated.
Lesley
I tune the C nat and C# at the same time. I start from the bottom of the whistle up when drilling tone holes and tuning, doing each note individually and playing the whistle as I go.
I tend to leave the C# a little flat to start with (by drilling the B hole smaller than is needed) then play a D scale up to and just past the C# and listen to how far flat it is, then I play a G scale playing G A B Cnat D E F G A B Cnat and listen to how far out, usually flat, the Cnat is. My lower Cnat is fingered so..OXXOOO and the second octave Cnat is fingered like this OXXXXO.
I then file away little pieces of the top edge of the B hole (top hole on the whistle, and file the edge of the hole nearest the fipple) and then go through the scale again and again.
I had noticed that a lot of the low whistles that I had tried tended to not have a strong Cnat so I set about trying to sort it out by making whistles to suit what I wanted/needed to hear.
I don’t know about the other whistle making folk here, but this is what works for me 
Thank you. I am obviously still very new at whistle making, although I have been playing for more years than I care to admit to. I tune like that, but omitted to tune the Cnat, just doing the normal D scale, hence the surprise fingering, presumably? I also read somewhere here that my B hole may be a little small, so will fiddle with that as well.
Lesley
I have a few different patterns I use when making whistles, one with smaller holes, and one with wider ones. The smaller holed pattern has the OXXOOO fingeing for Cnat, but I tried your OXXXOX varriaton, and ti works pretty well (a might confusing for me!) The wide holed pattern works best with OXXXXO varriation. Developing these tubes was part mathematics, part looking at other whistles, part trial and error. If you make a good whistle head, you can make the bodies alone, and swap out the head to see how they work. I use copper tube, and I’ve gone through yards and yards of it expiramenting. There are places around that will pay money for copper scrap, so I wind up getting some of my money back by selling off ‘rejects’ or mistakes.
If you like, I could send you the measurements for one of my patterns so you could check it out.
Thank you both. I have been reluctant to change the hole positions dramatically as, rather by luck than judgement, all the whistles have so far been nicely in tune in both octaves. I seem to get a Cnat best using OXOOOO, which I don’t like, and I assume it needs more venting from that top hole in order to be able to use more fingers down. I will try making the top hole larger but not sharper and see what happens. I know many whistles require specific fingerings for Cnat and some can take whatever you want to do - my Burkes (Narrow Bore) are OXXXOX and I use them most; Silkstones are either that or OXXOOO; Hoover OXXXXO, etc. I would just like to be able to control that aspect of the tuning and couldn’t see how - other people seem able to be consistent, so why can’t I? I’ve ordered Daniel Bingamon’s books, which may well shed some light on the subject too. All advice gratefully received by a rather cack-handed female! Plastiman’s help with back pressure worked brilliantly, so I am learning!
I don’t have the answer but I can perhaps point you in a direction.
I have been recently trying many hole combinations, using information/equations posted by Peter Hoekje and his spreadsheet as modified by Daniel Bingamon and little bit by me, to calculate the hole positions having choosen some hole sizes. The spreadsheet has a section of cross-fingerings which I have not investigated carefully but does not seem to help with c nat - I’m not sure the assumptions and simplifications made in the calculation mean that modifying the equations for say oxxooo give meaningful results.
I am sure it is possible to model a whistle to predict this after all there is a web calculator for the modern keyed flute which will figure out what pitch any fingering will produce (I should add that I don’t play flute and have not tried the calculator so I can’t comment on how well it works).
So back to your question. From my experiments it seems that as one enlarges the first hole (top hole, the one closest to the mouth piece) oxxooo will rise in pitch. This is with keeping a constant 6th hole size and adjusting the other holes (position and size) so there is some kind of logic to the cut off frequency. Of course the size of this hole also effects other things and so you the whistle maker have to decide which trade offs you want to make.
The size that gives an intune oxxooo will also depend on the fourth hole size, the bore, and probably the fipple design.
Having not varied the size of hole 4 while keeping the correct pitch for G I can’t comment its effect on oxxooo
Did that help? or confuse?
executive summary:
bigger hole 1 (with hole 4 matching in some way) higher pitch for oxxooo
Bill