A friend of mine from France just sent me this photo of a foot joint from one of Tom Aebi’s new designs…apparently this is based on something Rudall and Rose used to do. Three bottom keys (is the bottom note a B?) and a tuning slide at the end of the foot joint. I’ve never seen anything like this myself. What does the tuning slide do? Does it allow you to change the lowest notes?
I’ve seen a similar thing on the pipes. You can adjust the bell tone depending on whether you want to play a lot of hard low D’s in tune (this is for the pipes). Maybe something similar for the flute…
Modern baroque flutes sometimes have an extendible foot - I think it’s used to correct intonation when using a middle joint at a different tuning. Could Aebi’s design allow you to tune up to Eb or down to C using the slide and the foot?
Eric
[quote=“bradhurley”]A friend of mine from France just sent me this photo of a foot joint from one of Tom Aebi’s new designs…apparently this is based on something Rudall and Rose used to do. Three bottom keys (is the bottom note a B?) and a tuning slide at the end of the foot joint. I’ve never seen anything like this myself. What does the tuning slide do? Does it allow you to change the lowest notes?
It must be to tune the lower notes in the foot C#/C/B. Looks cool, but would make a heavy foot, so I guess it would be a “foot doctor”.
Jon
it would be to correct the bottom notes on a flute that was designed to be played in a few different pitches.
Unless one is after a correct replica, I’m surprised that a modern maker would bother with this, since we just play at 440, I’m even surprised that modern makers bother with the Pewter plus on the foot, but I guess it has more to do with authenticity then playability (I hope these are real words 
).
e.
Would a lead foot help me play faster?
Well, I suppose I could just ask Tom directly what he had in mind, but my thinking was that, given the position of the tuning slide, it would be used to change the bottom B to a Bb.
A B footjoint is not so uncommon, but it would be cool to have a footjoint that could also go down to Bb.
I want a foot that can go down to G. Oh yeah.
That is a great looking Flute there.
Here’s a foot extender on a Rod Cameron Baroque flute.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=7328397985
Kevin Krell
The device in question used to be called a register, or foot register. It was introduced at the time that different bodies (corps de rechange) were used to give a range of pitch. If you changed to a different corps you also tweaked the foot register and the stopper position to optimise the tuning of the flute throughout the range.
The range of the foot register is usually pretty short, so I doubt if it is intended to pull the low B down to Bb on the flute illustrated. That could be achieved by a plug-on section which would look the same but be longer.
I’ve often wondered about having a foot register so that players could set the bottom D as flat as they want depending upon how much push they want to put into that note. Of course you can always flatten the bottom D a little if you want by pulling the foot out on its tenon.
Terry
Brad,
I have a Richard Potter boxwood flute with a tunable foot joint, which Potter patented. Pulling it out reveals numbered lines that correspond to numbered lines in the head-joint slide; apparently the idea was to set both slides to the same number in order to get the flute in perfect tune.
Dick Abrams
You’re so right, Dick.
Potter did this…NOT Rudall & Rose.
In fact, I’ve never seen a single R&R with this type contraption.
Then again…they did do just about anything, so you watch as one pops up.
But there are currently none in the catalogue with anything like this.