The Reed Cane Tube, continued

Though I have seen neys made from everything from hardwood to plastic piping, I am a purist. There is no substitute for cane, due to the complex internal bore. Note the buds which form at each node. They are a weak spot in the wood, and it is common after picking the buds off to seal the spot with paint or glue. A dab of epoxy glue in the depression left by the bud works fine. The tone holes are placed at ninety degrees to the buds around the circumference of the tube.

Neys come in several standardized lengths. For each length, the distance between the nodes must be fairly close to an ideal proportion. There is a specific unit of measurement for each size of ney, and this unit governs the construction of the entire instrument. A mansur ney, the size that I will work with in this article since it is a common instrument, has a unit length of 31 millimeters. The distance between each of the nodes is three times the unit length, or 93 millimeters.

Of course, Mother Nature will not provide us with cane this uniform; the nodes most often increase in length towards the root. Also, the tube widens towards the root. Neys are always constructed with the largest diameter, the root end, towards the mouthpiece. Thus the bore tapers slightly in the manner of a baroque flute. This tapering is also essential to the ney. In this paper, I will call the two ends of the ney the mouthpiece end and the distal end.

We try to find cane stalks with nodes approximately close enough to make a ney, as it will be very hard enough to find cane with segments exactly the right length. I mentioned the variety of cane Arundo donax variegata above because this plant more often has segments that are short enough for use as a ney. Figure 2 shows the relationship between the placement of the tone holes and nodes for the ney; it is a schematic that may be applied to all sizes of ney. By substituting the correct unit length value, the dimensions of each ney size may be derived.

Next: The Oxhorn mouthpiece