Spacing Holes in a Wooden Flute

Video Transcript

"So this is one of my taper bore flutes which I call a Winnispesaukee. As you see I've marked the holes here and what I do since I'm not fond of the big power tools is I have this little portable drill press kind of thing and I put a little hand drill on here. Once the flute is shaped I set it in here carefully, drill the holes out. What I always do since my flutes are all different on the inside, the bore shape is all different because I do it by hand and that will effect the tuning as well as the size of the holes will effect the tuning. So I always drill them small and then widen them as I tune the flute. I actually am very conservative about that because I don't like to wreck flutes by drilling the holes too big the first time. So, the process of tuning the flute other than that lowest note that you've already tuned is basically drilling small holes in the approximate place you want them and then enlarging the holes one by one to tune the flute. What you do is enlarge them from the bottom. I'll show you here, if you had no hole on the bottom the note would be this. As you make the hole bigger I'm going to simulate that by moving my finger. So the larger you make the opening of the hole the higher the note will go. So you want a minor third at the bottom and you make that hole large enough where you get something like that note and then you try the next one. Skipping this hole but you can actually cross your finger like that. Finally the highest hole. You can do this by ear or you can use a tuner an electronic tuner. Once you've taken the wood out of the bore of the flute to get each of those holes up to something like the final pitch, you'll find that your lowest note has actually gone down again. The reason is because you've widen the bore and it's really the volume of the bore, the volume of the air in the bore that causes the pitch of the flute. So you've actually made more volume inside the bore and therefore the low note has gone down, so you want to chop off a slight bit more or sand off a little bit more of the bottom."