I happened upon a John Calmont keyless oboe. (Similar to a simple-system flute except for being an oboe.) Although much of the fingering is obvious (i.e. similar to a keyless flute), some accidentals and C# are not. Does anyone else happen to have one or any information about them?
I have a fingering chart for a Baroque oboe. However, the Calmont ones have only 6 fingerholes and the Baroque ones have rather more. So that’s not so helpful when it comes to accidentals.
Post a picture of it please! Or send me one.
I’m curious, too.
I’ve searched on the name and come up empty.
The idea of a keyless oboe that is in the same pitch
as an Irish flute makes my heart beat faster. Please
tell us more…
I was thinking of moving this to world/folk winds. But it doesn’t really fit there either. So I haven’t.
Carry on.
I suspect they are designed for a strictly diatonic scale, and that fingering for any accidentals would be just that, accidental.
How easy is it to go between octaves, and how is the tuning between the octaves?
All right, so what am I missing, here?
(From an seanduine’s link.) The distance from the lowermost fingerhole to the bell tells me this item could never be musically serviceable. If instead there are vent holes placed on the side that we can’t see, then still, why the length to the bell end? Conspicuous consumption?
Can’t see why not, but okay.
Judging from pictures of baroque oboes, there should be a vent hole way up from the bell end (probably on the side where you can’t see in the photo, and the fingerhole positions then look right.
You are right about the vent hole! See pictures below.
I saw a couple of these for sale on eBay a few weeks ago. My curiosity got the better of me and I bought one (I guess I must have got the other one?). I have never played an oboe, but my sister used to play one in a school orchestra and I thought this might be a fun gift for her. I also wondered if I might try to make one, but common sense has since prevailed and I’m going to keep my attention focused on making flutes and doing all the other jobs and hobbies I don’t have enough time for.
So, Casey, if you are really interested in getting your hands on one of these for a close examination, I’d be happy to send mine to you. I would eventually like to get it back so I can give it to my sister, but she is not coming over to visit until summer, so there is plenty of time. Just let me know.
Here are a few pictures I just took in order to try to show the vent hole. If you look carefully, you should be able to see it on the side about half way to the end. I included a ruler so you can judge the size.
In terms of tuning, I also noticed that the top note in each register seems to be C natural, not C#. However, being an absolute novice to playing the oboe, its very difficult for me to play well enough to really judge anything about the tuning. I simply don’t have the embouchure development. I have noticed that the choice of reed makes a huge difference to both the tone and the tuning. So far I have only had satisfactory performance (i.e., can produce a sound that doesn’t sound like a duck being strangled) from a Fox Renard reed.
Aside from all fingers off playing Cnat, and not knowing where C# is, the fingering is basically the same as a keyless flute or whistle. It doesn’t seem especially hard to play the second octave notes. Well, what I mean by that is that its extremely hard to play any notes, but once you can play one you can probably play most of the others. Then after a few minutes my cheek muscles blow out and I’m finished for a while. It also seems to take a LOT of breath pressure, but again that is coming from someone who has never played oboe or had any lessons, so don’t take it as any kind of judgement about this particular instrument.
Overall, this oboe is surprisingly small, compared to a D flute. This is because the acoustics work in a different way for a closed tube not an open one. The tone holes are exceedingly small, especially for the upper hand. There is a lot of slanting and undercutting in the tone hole that vents F# in order to get it in a comfortable position. The last picture attempts to show this. However, despite its very small tone holes and narrow bore, its quite loud. If I could play better I’d be happy to post a sound sample, but I probably shouldn’t inflict that upon you all!
I’ve had the best luck with a Duste reed from Forrest’s, but this is the first time I’ve tried messing with a double-reed instrument and it’s all unstable. Our local woodwind repair person supplied the helpful suggestion that the duck noises often come from having too much reed in the mouth. She also pointed out that even mass-produced reeds like Fox can be randomly good or bad, so a different reed of the same model might work better/worse.
On a good day, I’ve gotten it to play up to B in the second octave.
C seems to work slightly better with something like the C natural flute fingering (e.g. 2nd and 4th holes closed) A big reason why I posted is that I’m not sure how C# is supposed to work. Depending on the reed, I can sometimes get a C# with all holes open. But (again depending on the reed) sometimes with all but the top hole closed (i.e. same as D) and messing with the embouchure, which is what I found on a baroque oboe fingering chart. I’d love to know which the maker intended.
I have only tried three reeds: the Fox Renard in medium hard, and two Jones 101 reeds, one medium and the other medium hard. All are relatively inexpensive reeds ($15 to $20 each). Neither of the Jones reeds works well for me. They both seem to be too open, and produce a very loud, rough sounding tone. But maybe I just got a couple of duds. It sure feels that way. The tuning is lower pitched by at least 50 cents with those reeds than it is with the Renard, even though they appear to be a similar length. I like the tone of the Renard much better, when I can actually produce it, but it feels as though that reed doesn’t quite open enough, even after soaking. I really think that a lot of experimentation with different reeds will be necessary to explore the true potential of this instrument.
Just for the curious, and the masochists among you, here is a very short sound sample of what it sounds like when I can produce a noise with the Renard reed. Sorry, I know I said I wouldn’t inflict this on you, but you don’t have to listen! 
I do think that a simple system oboe like this has some potential for ITM, in the right hands of course. It has a hint of the character of both flute and pipes. I’d like to hear someone who could really play one of these.
If you’ve only been doing this a few days, that sounds pretty good. I could totally see the virtue in perfecting a reed lip and doubling on oboe. More so with early music or folk, perhaps, than ITM.
The C-Natural Flute fingering I am more familiar with is 2nd and 3rd closed.
OXX OOO
(Where X is closed and O is open)
Though having 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 6th closed produces a stronger C-Natural.
OXX XOX
I would expect that half-coving holes should work for some accidentals (like it works for some accidentals on flute).
The acoustic tube length is only very slightly shorter, since it’s a cone not a cylinder (see http://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/pipes.html). However, you measure that acoustic tube length starting from (more or less) the end of the reed for the oboe and the embouchure hole for the flute, so the wood part of the instrument ends up a lot shorter. Also, the bore is conical so the bore (therefore the instrument) is very narrow towards the reed end. (More narrow than a piccolo, which means oboe sites have long instructions and a tool for when, not if, you get the swab stuck.)
The reason I put it here in the first place is that it seems to be intended as an alternate for a flute (e.g. like the Breton subois) rather than for the roles/music that you’d play on a duduk or bombarde. Calmont seems to have also made bagpipes and flutes.
The key difference between an oboe and a flute is that acoustically an oboe behaves as a tube that is closed at one end, whereas a flute behaves as a tube that is open at both ends. A closed tube resonates at the same frequency as an open tube that is twice its length. Or stated another way, the standing wave inside the tube is a full wave-length in a closed tube, and only half a wave length in the open tube.
This basically means that an oboe can be much smaller than a flute of the same pitch. Both flutes and oboes can have conical bores, and in fact our Irish flutes do have conical bores like an oboe, just not as narrow. The effect of over-blowing a closed tube is also different than for an open tube. You can see a more precise explanation here.
The acoustic length of this oboe is roughly the distance from the reed to the vent hole on the side, not to the end of the tube, which is much smaller than for a D flute.
Nanohedron’s question about the purpose of that bottom section is pertinent here. I had a similar question. Not so much why is it there at all, but why isn’t it a bell shape like on other oboes. Anyhow, the acoustic length of the tube is not completely terminated by the vent hole, especially for higher harmonics. So the amount, and shape, of the tube below that has some effect on the tuning of them. Its for reasons like this that cross-fingering works on small-holed flutes.
One thing to bear in mind here is that the tone holes are much smaller on this oboe than on flutes. For example, on our keyless flutes we often complain about the difficulty of half-holing Eb because the tone hole that vents that note is often only 6 mm or so in diameter. Well, on this oboe the smallest tone hole is only 2.6 mm in diameter! This makes it basically impossible to half-cover. Some of the lower tone holes are larger, but still considerably smaller than on a flute. It seems to lend itself to cross fingering more than half-holing.
I have wondered if the difficulty in playing C# (with all tone holes open) was simply due to the fact that even a very slight shrinkage or blocking of a 2.6 mm tone hole would have a significant flattening effect on the note it vents. In this case, a very slight closing of that hole might cause it to produce a C natural rather than a C#. The small size of this tone hole is exacerbated further by the thickness of the wall at that point in the instrument, meaning that the chimney height for that hole is very high in addition to its diameter being very small. So, acoustically it is an extremely small hole. I’ve never seen anything even remotely like this before. Its surprising to me that it speaks at all, never mind as loudly as it does.
Perhaps it’s just designed to play in D Mixy? I’m no history buff, but I seem to recall that many old bagpipes had a flattened 7th. Maybe I’m misremembering, but I seem to remember a good piper telling me about old uilleann or pastoral sets and the prevalence of D Mixy tunes. It is possible that there is a connection between certain bagpipes and your oboe, besides the obvious double-reed similarity.