source file: mills2.txt Date: Tue, 8 Apr 1997 12:29:14 -0700 Subject: Re: TUNING digest 1039 From: John_Gzowski@goodmedia.com (John Gzowski) Bill Alves writes: Does anyone know more about or have any references on the acoustics of flute hole placement? Thanks. This is the second time I'm going to suggest this book as an answer, but is the best thing I've seen so far and relatively new. Bart Hopkin's book Musical Instrument Design (See Sharp Press) gives the best advice I've seen. A couple of years ago a friend of mine built a copper saxophone and tried to tune it to 7 tone pseudo-African scale (derived from a kalimba). He spent months researching, tried Helmholtz's book and other source material. He eventually gave up and guessed with poor results. There is no one formula that takes all the factors, such as tonehole diameter, air chamber diameter, tonehole placement, register holes, hole depth and other factors and gives neat accurate answers. However, I've never seen as good a list of how each factor acts and how it affects other factors as Bart's book. On top of that, he talks of reeds, mouth pieces, materials, gives contact addresses for materials and suggests many alternate designs. On top of that he gives similar advice on tuned percussion, strings and just about everything else. E-mail him at ExpMusInst@aol.com and order the thing if you really want to build an instrument. Sorry to repeat myself, but it is a very good book. John Gzowski Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Tue, 8 Apr 1997 22:26 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA02682; Tue, 8 Apr 1997 22:26:30 +0200 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA02680 Received: from by ella.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) id NAA26815; Tue, 8 Apr 1997 13:24:31 -0700 Date: Tue, 8 Apr 1997 13:24:31 -0700 Message-Id: <334A947B.2552@sciplan.com> Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@ella.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@ella.mills.edu