Here’s question on different woods. Maybe one of the flute makers can chime in or someone who’s done some experimenting.
I love boxwood. I really, really love boxwood. My most beloved of all flutes is a boxwood flute.
Having said that, I think boxwood is kind of a pain in the neck to tend.
So I’m thiking of commissioning a flute but don’t want to baby another boxwood baby.
So my question is; how much effect does the body timber have on the sound. If, say, I were to play two flutes one of all boxwood and the other of blackwood or mopane with a boxwod headjoint would I be able to tell the difference?
In other words is a boxwood headjoint enough to pull off the whole boxwood sound thing?
I know Casey Burns makes a Low-Bb or A flute with just a Blackwood head and Mopane body. So does a blackwood headed flute sound indentical to a all-blackwood flute?
But again, my real question relates to boxwood heads.
Well, the first question is: lined head ?, partialy lined ?, unlined ?, cork faced, unfaced, metal faced ?
Edit: come to think of it do you have another flute (beg, borrow or you-know) that you can try your existing head on ? My personal choice would be to keep a head that you really like and get an addl. (wood) body.
I thought I would beat out Marcus this time, with the old argument about flute materials…
Concrete Flutes
John W. Coltman, a U.S. physicist, recently demonstrated a concrete flute during a conference on music and human adaptation at Virginia Tech. With their eyes diverted, the attendees could not tell the difference between the concrete flute and a cherrywood one. The flutes were identical in all respects except for the material that enclosed the vibrating air column.
A Scientific American article on this subject makes an interesting observation:
But to many musicians, even a mountain of research remains unpersuasive. “We all know that wood flutes are much more dolce, much sweeter,” says flutist Paula Robison. In contrast, “a gold flute sounds like an instrument made of gold. The silver flutes are much more perky.”
And, as flutist James Galway points out, the workmanship of an instrument made of $70,000 worth of platinum is likely to be of extraordinarily high quality. “People pick up my flute and say, ‘This is better.’ Of course it’s better; it’s like getting into a custom-built motor car,” he says.
So even though dozens of studies have been done proving Coltman’s point, we bring with us beliefs about preciousness and rarity which are hard to give up and have little to do with the facts. Admittedly, the craftspeople working in platinum may be more skilled than those working in copper, but they may not be. The metal or rare woods have nothing to do with the quality of the sound. What is important is the design and workmanship, the exactness of the air column, the thickness of the walls and the shape of the tone holes.
In visual work, particularly jewellery, our associations with preciousness are more difficult to abandon, perhaps because a visual judgment is harder to make than one based on identical sound.
In response to this web site, Coltman emailed: “In my talk I made the same point that you did - we often think highly of something just because it is rare or expensive, ignoring its intrinsic merit. I often shake my head over the value placed on natural emeralds, a pretty poor gem, usually, and much inferior to synthetic gems having much better crystalline properties.”
In Coltman’s presentation comparing the concrete and cherrywood flutes he comments on:
the powerful psychological effect of association. Note that the preferred materials are often expensive or rare ones, and have qualities of visual or tactual beauty that are in themselves appealing. My concrete flute is not likely to have a large market, whatever its tonal qualities might be. We often prize things for their association, rather than for their intrinsic merit.
There would be a lot of advantages to concrete flutes… The disadvantage would be the weight. I wonder if you would go with post mount or (conrete) block mounted keys!
Music and Human Adaptation are highly trained and motivated individuals!
The difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference but in practice there is.
If the bore of the concrete flute is exceptionally smooth, I would predict the sound to be indistinguishable from any other exceptionally smooth bore. I’m a little surprised the cherrywood one sounded as good, since cherry is harder to get very smooth.
I made a Northumbrian smallpipes chanter out of koa, and it was fine. I tried to make another and it was awful. The second piece of koa was much softer than the first, and the drill bit left a splintery (furry?) bore. I have made a couple of flutes out of bubinga (“African rosewood”, but not really a rosewood). They play wonderfully when newly oiled but as the oil soaks into the wood and leaves the surface they turn not quite so good. (I’m hoping that enough oil for long enough will do the job.)
The machining properties of the material are what matters. Can it be polished very smooth? Will fine detail break out? Unfinished but oiled wood also seems to deal with moisture in nice ways.
Jessie once posted about a test she did with her Olwells. IIRC, she found that the sound changed more with the body than with the head. You might want to contact her. I’ve tried it with my flutes, but none of the heads fit too well on the other bodies.
Why not split the difference and go with one of the other (non-black) rosewoods?
As someone that had always been looking for the “Nirvana” of headjoints, I’ll chip in here. (I haven’t tried this with Irish flutes, only Boehm flutes). On a Boehm flute the headjoint makes a tremendous difference. Changing the material of the headjoint (from silver to gold or wood) does dramatically change the sound quality, although adding a wood headjoint doesn’t take you as far as playing with a wood head and body.
So I’m guessing that putting a boxwood head on a blackwood or mopane body would give you some of the nice tonal qualities of boxwood, but not as much as an entire boxwood flute. Sounds like a good idea to me.
Okay, Doc, you say you want to avoid the pain of tending to a boxwood flute. Consider this: The big pain of boxwood is its extreme response to changes in moisture, i.e. it swells and shrinks a lot in comparison with other woods like blackwood. Also, there can be warping problems that might end up with you feeling like you’re playing a banana rather than a flute.
So, to avoid the warping problem you eliminate the boxwood body and go for a harder, less moisture sensitive wood like blackwood. Okay as far as it goes, but then you propose sticking a boxwood head joint on it. Well, that boxwood is going to swell more and shrink more at the tenon as you play it than the blackwood body will, unless you spend a lot of effort regulating the humidity level of the area where you store the flute. You might even need to have separate storage areas with different humidity levels for the head and the body to keep them in equilibrium with each other. Would that be too much of a pain in the neck for you?
So, to reduce the swell and shrink range of the boxwood head joint, you get it lined. (I know from personal experience that lined head joints shrink and swell less than unlined ones of the same wood. I have both a lined blackwood Olwell headjoint and an unlined one. The unlined one is really for my C flute, but I can use it interchangeably on my D flute’s body. But the unlined headjoint is very loose when I put it on, tightens up nicely as it’s played, but then loosens up again rapidly even in the high humidity of a Washington DC summer. The lined headjoint shrinks and swells as well, but not ever to this extreme.) Okay, so you’ve now got a lined boxwood headjoint on a blackwood body. I submit that in your hands it will sound exactly the same as a lined blackwood headjoint would.
Where does this leave you? If you really really want the sound of a boxwood flute, then you’ll need to get an all-boxwood flute and live with its maintenance issues. Ifyou really really want to avoid maintenance issues, then get a blackwood flute with a lined head joint and live with the fact that it doesn’t sound like boxwood. You can’t have both.
John I had that very thought myself last night…great minds think alike I guess.
You’re probably absolutely right. I guess it’ll have to be all or nothing. unless it was a boxwood head and delrin body…hmmm…that would eliminate 50% of the swelling/fitting issues.
doc,
you sound like someone who wants a wife and a girlfriend but not the complications…or someone who is not sure how much sugar you want in your tea ( how much is enough?).
a little love and _tend_erness, now that’s a solution to your boxwood dilemma.
I have a boxwood flute with a lined head. The sound is different from my other flutes with lined heads.
The flute test with the concrete has been discredited. I believe that the only part that was concrete was the head. Most flute-players believe – correctly - that the wood does make a difference. The difference in sound between boxwood and other woods is more pronounced than the difference, say, between cocus and blackwood. The difference in any case is trivial compared to the improvement in sound you’ll get with more time spent practising. OTOH if you enjoy playing a boxwood flute more then you’ll play more and the flute will sound better yet.
Paul O’Shaughnessy plays a boxwood flute with a lined head. Both of our BW flutes are Olwell’s Nicholson flutes (medium holes). The sound is lovely. It’s bright enough to be heard in a loud session. Paul travels and tours with his flute. Jimmy Noonan plays and travels with a boxwood flute. Ditto David Migoya. Brad Hurley plays a boxwood Bb, which is certainly capable of warping since it is so large. If you just use common sense in caring for a boxwood flute you won’t have any problems.
The ceramic is called Grancrete, which, when sprayed onto a rudimentary Styrofoam frame, dries to form a lightweight but durable surface. The resulting house is a major upgrade to the fragile structures in which millions of the world’s poorest currently live.
Grancrete was developed by the Virginia firm Casa Grande in conjunction with Argonne. It is based on an Argonne-developed material called Ceramicrete, which was developed in 1996 to encase nuclear waste. The resilient Ceramicrete permanently prevents hazardous and radioactive contaminants from leaching into the environment.
“Originally, Casa Grande was looking for a concrete substitute for American industry, because concrete erodes in acidic conditions,”
I had a correspondence a few years ago with John Coltman, the physicist who did the concrete-vs-wood flute demonstration, and I’m 99% sure he said the entire flute was made of concrete; it was a cast of the wooden flute.
I still think there is a real difference in sound between boxwood and blackwood, and I suspect it has to do with the relative smoothness of the bore…boxwood doesn’t finish quite as smoothly as blackwood, which you can see for yourself by looking down the bore. I suspect the slightly less polished internal surface of the bore of a boxwood flute sets up more perturbations in the airstream. But that’s just a theory.
My Bb boxwood flute (unlined headjoint) warps like crazy when the humidity drops. It doesn’t warp lengthwise; instead the tenons warp out of round and become oval. If the humidity is low enough, I can’t put the flute together; the tenons won’t fit in their sockets. But the solution (other than moving to a more humid climate) is simple: I keep it in a humidified Tupperware container.
Yes my boxwood flute becomes a happy banana as well when it dries a bit. I’m doing the tupperware humidor thing which keeps it happy (though it smiles less ).
The flute I’m consiering is going to be keyed. So I’m a bit worried about the key blocks getting warped and whacky and causing problems.
Anybody playing a keyed boxwood?
Also, what are you doing to prevent mildew on your humidified flutes. I haven’t had that problem but worry about it.
).