Mi Contra Fa

Mysterious harp string breakage - solved

I have had my wire-strung Kilcoy harp for about a decade, and in all that time, I've never had a string break.  I had one go just before the winter solstice, and I had another go last month.

Well, I said to myself, maybe ten years is just the lifetime of these bronze strings.  They'll all be going soon.

I took out my poor neglected instruments two nights ago to tune them up.  Both were about two tones flat!  I started tuning, but it seemed really hard to raise past a tone - so, not wanting to snap strings, I left them tuned a tone flat.  The next night, I raised another semitone so that I was only a semitone flat. Almost there.

The third night, last night, I sat down to bring them all up to tune.  I took up my electronic tuner - and stopped.  The temperament indicator wasn't 'PG,' the Pythagorean I usually use.  As I cycled through my options to set that correctly, I noticed that the calibration indicator was no longer set to A = 440 Hz.  It was some random number like 483 Hz.  A memory came back to me in a flash - taking the tuner away from one of my boys, telling him to stop pushing buttons.

Oh crud.

I cycled the calibration back to 440 Hz and picked up a harp.  Sure enough, I was a half-tone sharp.  I relaxed all of the strings and, except for the new string that's still settling in, everything was in tune.

If I've been tuning almost an entire tone above where the harp is supposed to be tuned to (B = 494 Hz), no wonder I lost two strings!

10-Minute Monochord

 

10-minute monochord

 

 

I'm teaching my Early Period Music Theory class next weekend at Fall University. As part of it, I want the class to measure out and divide a diatonic scale and then play it on a monochord. Problem: no monochord.

No problem! The thing I made isn't pretty or period, but it gets the job done. It took about 10 minutes or so, using spare hardware around the house, with most of the time being spent fussing with the right way to wrap the fishing line around the eye bolt so it would tighten when I screwed it in clockwise.

1. I found a piece of scrap wood in the house about 18" long.  Anything longer than 14" or so would have done.  About an inch from one end, I screwed in a wood screw, leaving plenty of metal above the wood.  About an inch from the other end, I screwed in an eye bolt (eye screw?).  Exact distance between them doesn't matter, because I don't care about making this A = 440 Hz.  It's a diatonic do-re-mi scale player, and do can be whatever frequency it needs to be.
2. I got the 80lb fishing line from the cigar box lyre project and tied one end to the screw.  The other end went through the eye bolt, then wrapped around it, like you do for harps, zithers, etc. 
3. Turn eye bolt until fishing line gives a reasonable sound.
4. The moveable bridge is a stack of two LEGOs, with a half-height smooth-topped LEGO on the top.

 

 

 

            


Eye bolt/screw; screw; LEGO stack

To use:

1. Draw a line on a piece of paper.  30 cm is a good length.
2. Divide up a line into a diatonic scale or a gamut or what have you. 
3. Put line under the string.
4. Place the leading edge of the LEGO bridge on the hash mark for the start of your scale/gamut/whatever, and pluck the string.
5. Move the leading edge of the bridge to the next note marking, pluck.
6. Continue until you have heard all the notes you drew

 

Diatonic scale marked out and ready to play

New bone whistle resource!

Marion Quyn of Bhakhail has a page on making a sheep bone whistle.  Different resources than I have, also ended up using beeswax for a fipple. Interesting technique to fit the fipple!

If I am very lucky on at least two fronts, I might be able to take a class with her about it!  

I'm gonna be in pictures...

Look! After dragging my feet forever on a lyre book - a lyre video!

It has its flaws, certainly - glint, top of my head cut off, et cetera - but I wanted to just get started instead of re-doing it forever and ever, amen.

Duck Bone Flute Follow-Up

So Sunday, I went to the re-opening of Montpelier Mansion just because.  And lo, the gift shop had an assortment of the wooden craft stuff you see at Williamsburg, including a signal whistle.  So I picked up the whistle so that I could study it at home at leisure.

It's not all that good, but the geometry of the fipple is really clear.  So I tried to fix the duck bone whistle by:

• Using a flat file across the upper (mouthward) edge of the blowhole, flattening it and deepening it.
• Using the same flat file to slope the edges of the blowhole.  Shallowly - not the 45 degree angle on the Williamsburg model - but the whistles in my bones book look shallowish, too.  Also, the bone isn't round, it's flattish.
• Removed the fipple and deepened the airway, aiming for twice the depth of the blowhole.
• Reinserting fipple.

Alas, the whistle did not magically work (although... maybe... an improvement in tonal clarity?).  And while trying to remove the fipple for another go with the airway, I cracked off the top of the whistle.  (See: baked bones are brittle.)

But by gum, it looks more like a proper flute blowhole now.  Maybe I should give the PVC pipe another go?

Bad to the Bone

We got a rotisserie duck from the Amish farmer's market.  I grabbed a wing bone and said, "What the heck, let's try this."  I know you're not supposed to used baked or boiled bones for making things - they're brittle - but it's what I had.  (And I have a suspicion not a few of the bone flutes from history were made the same way.)

Verdict: Mostly failure.  The whistle (I was aiming for one note) is hissy, not piercing.  Something is wrong.  It may be too small (my book on bone, antler and ivory artifacts only shows bigger whistles). Also, I still managed to cut the blow hole backwards.

But lessons were learned:

• Cooked bone is easy to shear and easy to cut with a paring knife (I "drilled" the holes with the tip of a kitchen knife).
• Next time, buy pipe cleaners.
• Pay attention to which parts of the bone are flat, and which are rounded.  Blowhole should probably go on the flat side, right?
• Files are your friend.

I've put pictures of the result up on Pinterest.  Allegedly, the code I've copied over will embed the pins here on the blog.  It's not showing up in the preview, so let's see if it works.  (If it doesn't, I'll fix it later.)

Top of flute:

 

Bottom of flute:

 

Beeswax fipple:

 

My Little Lyre: Woodworking Is Magic Documentation

Who says documentation has to be stuffy?  Not me.   Download Quicklyre

Whistle update

I ordered 3oz beeswax from The Bee Folks for my whistle project. It came the other day, and I promptly began to try to jam it into the flute to make a fipple.

I heated it in the microwave in 15-second bursts until the 1oz cake was soft around the edges, then twisted off a piece to work with.  It was easily pressed into the tube until just visible through the blow hole.

Then, a comedy of errors involving trying to flatten one edge to create the narrow airway the fipple is supposed to do.  Finally, realized:

1. Force wax into whistle.

2. Let cool and harden.

3. Remove, shave off wax to form airway.

4. Reinsert.

was probably the way to go.

That seemed to be a better way to do it, but it still doesn't work.  I figure the culprit could be:

• The beveled edge of the blow hole might not be sharp enough.
• The D-shape of the blow hole isn't as D-like as it could be across the flat side. I could file that down.
• When the pipe was cut into lengths, the plastic sort of got dragged by the saw blade down across the diameter, so there's a lip there now.  The wax is shaped by the lip into a cylinder a little narrower than the actual inner diameter of the pipe. Maybe I need to clean that all up.
• There could still be some problem with the fipple

For a 'simple instrument,' this is surprisingly hard!

Instruments!

Many thanks to Dave C., who emailed me a whole passel of articles on pre-Conquest and medieval bone flutes! 

Indeed, I jumped the gun a while back.  Just because the 40,000-year old flutes were notched and end blown doesn't mean the Anglo-Saxon ones were and, indeed, the archaeological finds seemed to all be fipple flutes.  I have to go over the articles in-depth, but some measurements jumped out: a fairly intact, large specimen 19cm long and about 11mm in diameter.  That's about a pennywhistle with the last three holes cut off.

Remember the PVC pipes I bought back in March? Finally hauled one of the smaller diameter ones out and drilled two holes in it, near either end.  I used a mitre box and saw to try and turn one of the holes into a D-shaped blow hole, then used a small square file to file down the edge.  It looks about right.

No fipples survive; beeswax has been suggested as a possibly substance that would conform to the irregular inside of a cleaned bone.  I don't have any beeswax, but thanks to having two small boys, I have an abundance of Play-Doh.

Play-Doh does not make a very good fipple, at least not right off the bat.  It's too soft.  I can plug up the entire end of the flute with it, but when I try to make that tiny channel for air along the top, everything just goes squishy.

Maybe I should make a plug and let it air-dry, then file off a flat spot?  It'll shrink as it dries, but a thin layer of fresh 'Doh ought to make up the difference.

In other news: Lyre!  Hoo boy.

Cigar-Box Lyre

The call for class proposals for Fall University has gone out, and I think I want to teach a lyre-playing class.  I know of at least three gentles in Atlantia who have found the lyre on their own; perhaps there are others who would be interested in giving it a try.

Now, to teach lyre playing, you need some lyres.

I asked the folks on the Anglo-Saxon Lyre Group for some advice.  I was getting ready to try and make some resonator-less lyres (boards with hand-holes and strings, essentially), when Master Arden of the East mused that it might be even easier to nail together some wood in the appropriate shape.  Bless him, he even provided notional sizes of the wood needed.  I sure wouldn't have had any idea.

So I have a collection of bits now:

Poplar 1" x 1" x 3' - to be cut into lengths the width of the lyre.  One at the top, one at the bottom, one at around the middle.

Poplar 1/4" x 1.5" x 2' - The sides of the lyre.  Couldn't find any small craft boards that were exactly 1" to match the cross-supports.

Beech (? I have to check) 3mm thick plywood - from a craft store.  Soundboard and back of the instrument.

1/4" x 5/8" rectangular basswood dowel - for bridge.  Grabbed at the last minute in the craft store; I worry the basswood will be too soft.

5/8" round dowel and brass flat-headed screws - possible tailpiece assembly.  The other advice I got was just to put in small escutcheon nails and tie the strings directly to them.

Got sandpaper, polyurethane spray, etc.

Still need: zither tuning pegs, fluorocarbon strings.  (60-80lb, 40lb and 30lb test are decent starting points, apparently).