Barna Gabos keyless F dogwood flute review

Irish Flute
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Hi all, I thought I’d post my initial impressions of Barna Gabos’ keyless F flute in dogwood. I’ve had it for roughly a month now and overall I think it’s a banger of a flute!

If I’m not all mistaken, it’s based on a Pratten design (Barna will surely correct me if I’m wrong). This applies to the inner measurements only, though. Exterrnally it’s not like any other flute I’ve come across. Starting with the choice of wood, dogwood is used more widely in kavals and I am not aware of other makers building Irish style flutes out of it. It is however dense and heavy and has a beautiful pale color so why not! There’s no footjoint and the head and body are connected by a tuning slide, which is the only non-wooden part save from the cork stopper. There are rings made out of a darker wood, which by the way has a lovely smoky scent. The craftsmanship is neat and professional.

I have previously owned another F flute make by Hammy Hamilton, one which I sadly had to sell a while ago. Anyhow it kind of sets the bar for me. I like to be able to “put some wind” into the flute as Conal Ó Gráda has put it, and on the other hand there has to be “sweetness” in the tone. This one’s got them both covered. So in terms of sound, this flute is where I want it to be.

As for the internal tuning, I tooted a bit of long notes with a tuner to find that my aural observations have been accurate. To my ear it has sounded quite good, with B and Csharp (D and E) having a similar flat tendency to them to what I experienced with a Hammy. Nothing a careful ear-embouchure connection cannot fix. It seems more like a feature of F flutes than a malfunction. Tuning is good across the octaves, all notes sticking within a +/- 10 cent range depending on how I blow. So any intonation issues in this flute are definitely between the headjoint and the floor.

To conclude, let me put it this way. In changing from Hammy’s F flute to this one, the only places where I feel I’ve downgraded my flute are the keys. This is a mighty good flute.

Enclosed are some pictures and a short video clip of the flute in action.

https://youtu.be/7BCgUD_5WUU

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Ummm… You might want to scale your pictures to a smaller size…

Pat

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Duh, this is probably the last place in the internet that doesn’t do it automatically. :open_mouth:

Will do it soon.

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Heh, heh. Might not be the last place, but surely is one of them.

Enjoy the flute, looks and sounds nice.

I had a dogwood flute for a while and I loved how it felt, sounded, and played. Unfortunately it was prone to swelling during play and eventually it went out of round. It was a great flute from a great maker though and I would have kept it except that somewhere along the line mold took hold inside which set my asthma off, making it impossible for me to play.

Since your flute doesn’t have sockets and tenons, swelling and ovaling hopefully won’t be a problem for you.

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Hopefully - presently it is about 5x the width of my screen… :laughing:

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Better now, I hope.

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Yes :thumbsup:

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I have the same flute in Rosewood, and love it too.

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I’m curious: I’ve seen pictures of dogwood flutes on this forum (for example in this thread) and they looked quite a bit darker than this flute. Are there several varieties of dogwood?

Apart from that, nice looking flute and it sounds great too :thumbsup:

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Not to my knowledge. I had an Olwell keyless D in dogwood, and it was of the same, mostly featureless light color as in the OP. If the example you link to is actually dogwood, I would expect it to have been stained.

A word about dogwood and jointed flutes: While dogwood performs very well (the wood is very dense, and hard as nails), it is not resinous, and even after linseed oil pressure treatment (as Olwell did in my case), it absorbs and desorbs moisture quickly and rather dramatically. I found that I had to wrap the tenons for a pretty loose fit - wobbly, to be exact - and the tenon would swell to good, proper snugness after only a few minutes of playing! If the tenons were wrapped to more conventional tolerances, after a session the flute wouldn’t come apart, and I had to wait nervously for a couple of hours before it would desorb enough to disassemble. Needless to say, that was alarming. Because of this I would oil that thing almost daily, and even after Olwell’s pressure treatment it would always drink up oil like a sponge, especially at the end grain. And that flute still expanded and shrank from moisture as if none of that had ever been done. Pretty crazy.

Of course, this shouldn’t be an issue with Markus’s flute, constructed as it is. I didn’t notice any effect of absorption on my flute’s pitch, either, but I will add that the far edge of the embouchure cut would raise juuust a smidgen. This didn’t affect playability, though.

BTW, my flute was a prototype without warranty because Patrick had never worked with dogwood before, but I was looking for a solution to blackwood allergy, so knowing of dogwood’s famed hardness, I just wanted to see how it fared overall both as a flute material and a sensitizer. Patrick was good enough to oblige, and here we are. :slight_smile:

Dogwood’s fine, but with flutes it has pretty limited application, IMO; because of its high absorption/desorption rate, I don’t think it’s really suitable for jointed flutes.

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Thanks, Nano :slight_smile:. And how does it fare regarding allergies? Asking this as a person who’s allergic to blackwood and cocuswood :wink:.

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I got no skin reaction whatsoever out of dogwood. Wasn’t a fan of the smell of linseed oil, though.

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gwuilleann,

I concur with nano, Dogwood is generally a very light colored wood and the Gallagher dogwood flute appears pretty obviously to have been dyed: You can see areas that lightened significantly where face and fingers have affected the finish of the flute, and you can also see the darker wood grain on a lighter background showing below the dark color of the dyed wood, another sign there is a colored finish over the wood below. Having dyed hundreds of boxwood recorders a similar color myself, I can probably even guess what hair color was used :smiley: yes, we used hair coloring! Interesting color choice though as John seems to have gone for more of a blackish brown, where the usual recorder dark brown would have looked better IMO. Or maybe he was going for black but got more green/brown than he planned. Could just be the color balance of the photos. John makes very nice flutes regardless.

I also had no skin allergy issues with the dogwood Olwell, which I owned after nano. It was a great flute despite the lack of dimensional stability caused by the choice of wood - played great, sounded great. I am very allergic to Cocus, blackwood, virtually all of the rosewood family of woods really, but I regularly played that flute for long periods of time and never had a skin reaction.

I think dogwood could be a viable flute wood if it were sufficiently epoxy sealed inside and on the end grain, a process used by some recorder and traverso makers. I think John G. might have even told me he does this.

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I played one of the YouTube links re: the aforementioned Gallagher dogwood flute, and I do believe I heard that same certain edginess I noted in the Olwell dogwood. I always assumed this tonal characteristic was due to the wood itself, and I’m more convinced of it now.

But yeah, the dimensional instability was a shame with such a great-sounding wood. Then again, it was an experiment, basically. Your idea of epoxy sealing the bore and end grain surfaces definitely sounds like the thing to try, if only dogwood will do.

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I’ve experimented a bit with dogwood for flute making. The absorption issues Nanohedron mentioned earlier
actually make it a great candidate for stabilization, because it will absorb a lot of stabilizing resin. This not
only improves stability, once the resin is cured, but also means that there is a large increase in density post
stabilization. A lot of other woods will not absorb enough resin to stabilize well. Dogwood also seems to cope
well with the heat required for pre-cooking billets prior to vacuum infusion, and for heat-curing the resin
infused billets after infusion. Some woods are susceptible to cracking when heated like this.

I’ve stabilized a few well-seasoned (~20 years) batches of dogwood in a vacuum chamber, using “cactus juice”
stabilizing resin. After the subsequent heat curing stage and clean up, the measured density of my billets came
out between 1.1 and 1.2, which is fairly close to that of African blackwood. So, at that point you have wood that
is both very stable and has the kind of density we are used to for our flutes. With these caveats I think dogwood
can be a fine flute wood.

I have also done stabilization experiments with some other domestic hardwoods such as hawthorn, pear and holly.
The nice thing about these woods, and dogwood, is that they are very fine grained, and so will hold fine detail when
turned. They will also polish to a nice surface finish. I think these properties, combined with decent hardness, and
the fact that they stabilize well, make them all good candidates for flute woods when stabilized.

The hawthorn seems to take a similar amount of resin as the dogwood and arrives at a similar density. The stabilized
pear and holly absorbed slightly less resin, but still come out well, with density around 1.05 (which is higher than the density
of boxwood, for example).

Sorry if this deviated a bit far from the OP, but I am glad to see flute makers exploring some of these domestic hardwoods.
I think they have potential when subjected to modern stabilization approaches. Hopefully the info here is of interest to someone.

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Thanks Loren for answering my question in detail. I’m quite surprised to hear that hair color is used to dye flutes and recorders: it’s the last thing that would have come to my mind :astonished:

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I believe the photos on that dogwood flute from John Gallagher are not capturing the correct color properly. I have a B (8 keyed) flute from John, and it looks exactly the same in some light, but it is actually more reddish brown most of the time / in natural light. That said, I believe he uses an acid staining, rather than hair dye. It’s been… a long time since I got it, so I don’t recall what he said.

My flute has been pretty well stable, probably no worse than a boxwood flute might be. I probably do need to oil it and play it more, though. I never experienced the really tight swelling, but early on I did have some keys stick due to slight swelling. John uses Virginian dogwood, so maybe it’s different than the dogwood Barna Gabos uses?

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Entirely possible, John G. is very experienced and the color in the photo is not color I’d expect him to choose, or end up with inadvertently. OTH, always possible the person who ordered the flute asked for it to be black so that it would look more like blackwood, and I have seen light colored woods dyed/stained the color in the photo. Maybe the former or current owner will chime in at some point.

That said, I believe he uses an acid staining, rather than hair dye. It’s been… a long time since I got it, so I don’t recall what he said.

Very well could be, the two methods produce similar, but not exactly the same result. Impossible to tell from the picture. The Olwell flute in my avatar picture is acid stained boxwood and it is a dark reddish brown color like you describe. It’s a lovely finish, and a killer flute, of course :smiley: The acid staining process, which I have never done, is apparently a PITA, so it’s not real common these days, but there are makers who still do it and the Gallagher flute could certainly have been colored that way.

My flute has been pretty well stable, probably no worse than a boxwood flute might be. I probably do need to oil it and play it more, though. I never experienced the really tight swelling, but early on I did have some keys stick due to slight swelling.

Interesting thing here: While epoxy sealing the bore and end grain should eliminate the tenon swelling and ovaling issues, it would have no effect on stabilizing the key blocks. OTH I would expect resin stabilizing a flute would likely prevent both problems. I’m speculating though as I have no experience with resin stabilizing flutes, the only direct experience I have is pressure oiling with hardeners, and epoxy coating bores.

Who’s gonna do the comparison experiment? G.E.? :smiley:

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Happy to help :slight_smile:

I’m quite surprised to hear that hair color is used to dye flutes and recorders: it’s the last thing that would have come to my mind > :astonished:

Surprised the heck out of me too! When it was time for me to learn how to dye recorders and the boss pulled out the hair colors (you actually mix them), I was :confused: Like, Loren, how did you set out to learn flute making and end up in cosmetology school???

It’s a bit of a crazy process too: You put the instrument piece on the lathe (set to turn very slowly), mix up the colors with peroxide, and then you paint the hair color on while the piece turns on the lathe. The number of minutes depends on the how dark a shade you are going for. Thing is, there is a very specific brush technique for keeping the piece wet and the dye evenly distributed, otherwise you end up with very unprofessional looking streaks and or blotches. If that occurs then you have to repeat the process and dye the instrument an even darker and usually less desirable color. This is how sometimes, as a rookie, you end up with black :blush: I only made that mistake once or twice early on, but it can happen.

Dying instruments that way is a messy, time consuming process that requires constant focus and attention in order to avoid mistakes. Not real glamorous, but once the instruments are oiled and buffed, you get the satisfaction of seeing a really wonderful result from your efforts. It’s a great feeling. I miss doing that kind of work.

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Resin stabilizing depends a lot on the wood type and how much resin it absorbs. If the wood absorbs a little bit of resin, it helps with stabilizing in degree, but I’ve still be able to track some movement of the wood after it has been worked. If you utilize a wood that is highly absorbent of resin (maple is by far the best in my opinion–it is already quite hard and it will drink up a ton of resin) the end result is extremely stable. It’s not going anywhere. This would certainly extend to all parts of the flute including key blocks. Paddler has stabilized an extensive variety of woods as well and he is much more systematic and scientific about it than I am and might even have some data on the different absorption rates of different woods. I’ve done it to maple, cherry, walnut, boxwood, blackwood, kingwood, vera wood, hawthorne, curly douglas fir, curly redwood, redwood burl, plum, dogwood, osage orange, and probably a few others I’m forgetting about. In a number of cases early on in my experiments, I did it all wrong and got marginal results. In the case of oily tropical hardwoods it was a complete waste of time and actually detrimental to the wood. Non-oily domestic hardwoods are perfect for it, however.