Didgeridoos

About

Didgeridoos, native to Australia, have been around at least 1000 years. They are traditionally made of a eucalyptus tree that has been naturally hollowed out by termites. Modern didgeridoos are made from a variety of materials, including PVC and a wide assortment of hardwoods. Hand-made didgeridoos have a multitude of variances that make each instrument unique, and sometimes even extremely different from all others. There are one trick ponies that do a few things really well, and may be blandish otherwise. This is not to say that the didgeridoo with the most features wins, quite the contrary. For example most Australian didgeridoos have only one usable overtone, and some have medium back-pressure, but might have amazing volume, tone and ring tone. Tube length, shape and harmonics The hard part first, cuz this is how the drone tone note is related to its length. With the exception of PCV-like didges, which are just tubes, any quality didgeridoo has a taper to the bore, and actually is composed of 3 distinct chambers. The upper chamber is the actual note-producing sound column. The next or middle section is a resonating chamber which gives tonal quality to the sound column. Then the bottom section forms the bell which amplifies and broadcasts the final sound. More on these later. Slightly potentially confusing is that the drone tone is the 1st harmonic, and the trumpet tones (overtones) start with the 1st overtone for first trumpet, 2nd for second, etc. The reason that we do not call them 2nd harmonic, 3rd harmonic, etc is that they are pretty much never multiples of the drone tone, which would be like a guitar string or a bugle bore. Those have particular overtone series that are harmonics and are mathematically related to the base note. Trumpet tones of a didgeridoo do not follow that math at all. Every didge is a freak of nature. A tube with no taper, like PVC, has a drone tone note, or Key, exactly proportional to the length, defined by the formula for the speed o