Placing the Holes in a Wooden Flute

Video Transcript

"So a little bit more about where to place your tone holes. If you see this large bass instrument you'll see that the six holes are pretty much equal distant between the top and bottom of the flute, maybe slightly up from the bottom if anything. I can't give you the exact place to put your holes because I don't know what kind of flute you're making and I don't know how big it is and there are formulas for such things. But the way I figured it out was just empirical, I just did it by trial and error and this is what I discovered. If you place the hole a particular hole too far down on the barrel of the flute it will end up bigger than you need it. If you place the hole too far up it'll be smaller. So with this very large flute you'll see that the holes are still very reasonable in size and that's because I put them a little bit up from the bottom of the flute. So I moved all the holes up a little bit so they would be slightly smaller. The way that you tune a flute like this is first of all before you put the holes in tune the lowest note. The way you tune the lowest note, it sounds barbaric but you're just going to chop of the bottom of the flute. So if you have a tuner or another way to tell where the pitch is of the flute you can just slowly, very small slices cut off the bottom of the flute until the pitch raises up to the pitch you want to start at. "