The indefatigable MR. Terry McGEE has asked that attention should be drawn to the new addition on his site on the above subject.
http://www.mcgee-flutes.com/FluteMyths.htm
How could one resist him ?
Sorry for the duplication. We were doing it together !, as I have heard one should.
It may be interesting if any forum member with any putative flute
myth were to post it here for discussion.
( Or even downstairs. We don’t want to compete on threads !).
Terry wrote:
Thread is better than cork
Certainly better for darning your socks. As a lapping, I prefer cork - it’s more resilient and doesn’t cause the bore to compress. Neither is fatal, so consider anyone who gets hysterical about either approach potentially dangerous. 
Good one Terry!
It’s interesting that he put on that list, as a myth, “partial slides will not crack flutes.”
Interesting to read that page, it is.
Stuart
I thought he had some nice points on this page, but there are a couple of things I find myself questioning:
On Good flutes should be hard to play, he states:
If you’re finding your flute hard to play, and you’ve put a reasonable amount of effort trying, then it’s pretty likely it isn’t the flute for you. Don’t let anyone bully you into persevering with it, stop wasting your time on it and invest that time looking for the flute that is the right flute for you.
Some flutes are harder to learn to play than others, that’s true, but to say that a flute that’s easy to blow and fill is automatically a good flute, and a flute that’s harder to blow and fill is by definition a flute not as good, is to say that there’s nothing that the harder-to-fill flute can teach you that the easier-to-fill flute can’t. That is contrary to my own experience.
He again says (in the Pick a flute that is played by a professional you admire section):
My own experience is that you may need something easy at first. My first wooden flute (in about 1971) was a Boosey Prattens in less than perfect condition. It exhausted me and I could not keep it up. In London in 1974 I bought a midsize holed B&S flute from Paul Davis which I could manage. Years later I went back to the Prattens.
Evidentally he thought there was something worthwhile in going back to the Pratten flute, something he couldn’t get from the easier-playing flute?
Also a point was raised on the woodenflute list by Bill Goelz that wooden flutes aren’t cheap and not everyone lives where they have sessions and can try several flutes before buying. I think this point hits home: if you aren’t independently wealthy, and you don’t have the ability to spend five-digit figures buying flutes until you happen across one that works for you, what criteria should you use for picking a flute, assuming you don’t have someone else locally who plays and whose flutes you can try?
Overall, though, Terry McGee has put together a nice page.
-James
Disclaimer: this post is not intended for, nor to catch the attention of, the Irish Illuminati Protectorate. If it should so happen that this post does catch the attention of the IIP and they happen to post a response, I disavow all responsibility for whatever they may post.
If you are genuinely interested in some maker’s flutes try and persuade him to send you a loan flute to try for a couple of weeks, at least a keyless model so you can get the feel of it. If we all ask for this makers will respond and gradually accept sending out loan flutes as normal practise. To try the flute before putting in a firm order beats anything.
If you are genuinely interested in some maker’s flutes try and persuade him to send you a loan flute to try for a couple of weeks, at least a keyless model so you can get the feel of it. If we all ask for this makers will respond and gradually accept sending out loan flutes as normal practise. To try the flute before putting in a firm order beats anything.
I think this is a fine idea for the makers who will do it.
But unless you already an experienced flutist, two weeks isn’t long enough to really discover a flute. But I do suppose it’s enough to give you a good idea of the instrument’s feel and personality.
Also, there’s still a challenge here, although the Internet has helped greatly. For a beginner, finding the makers can be quite a task itself.
I do think you have a good point; I’d like to see more makers take up this practice. I think Terry McGee also had a great idea with his sending one of his flutes out on a “tour” to interested flutists.
–James
Disclaimer: this post is not intended for, nor to catch the attention of, the Irish Illuminati Protectorate. If it should so happen that this post does catch the attention of the IIP and they happen to post a response, I disavow all responsibility for whatever they may post.
Forgive me for awakening the old dragon:
I played for decades acoustic guitars with rosewood back
and sides. I liked the bright singing quality
rosewood lends to the the sound. It’s distinctive.
This seems
unlikely to be a consequence of the way
air travels rapidly over rosewood or even
the roughness of the surface. Much more
likely to involve something about how rosewood
vibrates.
I’ve played rosewood flutes and recently bought
one. It has a bright, singing quality (as did the others),
like the sound it lends guitars. It’s hard for me to
believe that the properties of rosewood that
give it its distinctive sound in guitars aren’t
playing a significant role. I believe, therefore,
that the wood is vibrating and this partly explains
why rosewood flutes sound as they do.
Something like this has happened with maple,
which is used in the back and sides of
acoustic blues guitars and also some flutes.
The efforts to reduce the distinctive sound of different
flute (and whistle) materials to smoothness of the
bore, etc, strike me as implausible. I find it hard
to believe that the material isn’t implicated further.
I have one luthier who would agree. Another I think wouldn’t although we haven’t explicitly discussed this particular issue. Both are excellent craftsmen. I tend to agree with the former and therefore with you. The choice of wood does make a difference.
“The efforts to reduce the distinctive sound of different
flute (and whistle) materials to smoothness of the
bore, etc, strike me as implausible. I find it hard
to believe that the material isn’t implicated further.”
It’s been my experience, working on and polishing the bores of several hundred instruments over the last year, that both items play a major factor:
-
Changing the smoothness of a bore, say from sanding with 180 grit sandpaper, to finishing with 1200, will make quite a difference. Even more of a difference can be noticed when taking and older instrument, where the grain has raised a bit, and then sanding the bore mirror smooth, the difference can be quite significant.
-
Having said that, not all woods can be brought to the same level of smoothness (without using a filler of some sort), as the more porus and grainy woods (like many rosewoods) simply can’t be sanded to as smooth a finish as boxwood, ebony, or even better quality grenadilla.
-
When all bores have been sanded as smooth as possible (or reasonable), boxwood still sounds different from grenadilla, which sounds different from Rosewood, etc. I can say this fairly conclusively in that we typically make instruments in batches of 50-100 at a time, with a certain portion of each batch usually being made of box, another of grenadilla, sometimes rosewood, tulipwood, kingwood, etc. being thrown in the mix as well.
Now, with recorders, unlike flutes, the instruments final voice has little to do with the player, being a fipple flute. That, and the fact that we have ways of maintaining very strict tolerances during while making the instruments, gives me a high confidence that the differences in sound from one type of wood to the other, is not merely a difference in instruments, but really is attributed to the wood.
Does this mean that, on a microcopic level, the difference in smoothness of a boxwood bore, relative to that of a grenadilla bore sanded the same way, is to account for all the difference in tonal character? I can’t say with scientific certainty, but my gut tells me it has more to do with the density of the wood, and it’s ability to vibrate sympathetically with the standing wave inside the bore, than anything else.
Loren
But be careful (this doesn’t follow directly from Loren’s comments, but rather from earlier ones) comparing guitars to flutes.
The wood in a guitar DOES MOST DEFINITELY resonate. Or the wood of the sounding board of a piano. They’re MADE to be resonant. Not so with a flute, whose body is a container for a column of air. It’s just plain different with stringed instruments. As Loren suggests, it is entirely possible that there’s some interaction between timber and air column in a woodwind, but I personally find it hard to imagine that such an interaction would be anywhere near as crucial to woodwinds as it is to strings. My opinion.
That said, I think that material probably does make some difference with flutes if for no other reason than that different timbers take the finish differently. And they feel different to the players. So, it makes a difference because we think it does.
Do you really need/expect to be able to define the science of WHY materials MIGHT make a difference in how the flute sounds? Isn’t it enough to think that it does, and to be happy with such thoughts? Who benefits from the idea that material makes no difference, really? (Rhetorical. I know there’s an answer to that question.)
Anecdotally, isn’t it interesting that nearly everyone attributes tonal qualities to timbers the same way. It’s not like some people think that boxwood produces a clarion’s call and cocus is mellow and soft; we all, more or less, attribute the same global impressions to the various timbers. Maybe it’s all group think, or group hallucination, but in a purely subjective field, it’s as valid as anything else.
Yellow cars have been shown to be the most visible. Red cars get the most citations. Grey cars are the least visible. But not all cars are yellow. Some people buy red cars. I drive a grey one.
Stuart
I agree 100%, Stuart.
Loren
This is very helpful.
What I believe
is that the stuff flutes are made of
vibrates enough, in a way
determined partly by the stuff’s
molecular structure, to
somewhat color the tone.
Same for fipple flutes.
I read and reread Terry’s comments and loved it for quality and for information. But I can’t totally agree with the easy player/hard player and give up on the hard player bit. I confess to, at times, wanting to slam my Healy against a corner post and forget it returning to my Copley or Ormiston. But dogged determination, and a few emails and phone calls to Skip Healy (being friends for a few years makes me not want to slam it), caused me to want to “conquer” it, to some degree. Just this afternoon I got onto the Healy and found a real hard ten minutes – DOGGED DETERMINATION and reading Lesl’s comment after mine on the woodenflute.com list, I went back to it and in ten more minutes was making it sing. The thrill of the next 20 minutes of practice on the Healy will keep me at it. WOW! Will it continue? I hope so.
BillG
Hi all
I thought I’d drop in to see what you all thought of my exploding myths (if anything!). I’m not used to the Forum medium, so please correct me if I use in ineptly.
The topic of whether resonance in the material of the body is a good thing, a bad thing or an irrelevant thing crops up all the time, and has just been the feature of a published experiment in which the modes of this vibration were mapped. Unfortuantely they weren’t quantified in any useful way, so we still can’t answer the question “are they likely to be audible?”. Possibly misleading too in that the flute was clamped by the cap end so as not to damp the vibrations with the clamping method. But in use of course the body of the flute is clamped by the hands which will damp mecanical vibrations considerably.
I think the comparison with the back of a guitar is actually quite relevant, in that the back of a guitar doesn’t resonate significantly - again it is clamped against the body - but acts to reflect energy and not absorb it, rather like the walls of our flute are supposed to contain energy, rather than dissipate it - either by absorption into myriad cavities or into structural vibration, like my poor pine Prattens. So we need to be aware that materials can influence sound in ways other than by resonance.
Like Loren, I believe I can tell a clear difference between at least some timbers. I think the total of the three criteria I quoted for containers (smoothness, airtightness and stiffness) is enough to explain why this belief is reasonable. I think it’s also shown by the fact that flutemakers always gravitate to the fine, hard and heavy end of the wood heap.
Terry
So, if I’m understanding this, there is the possibility
that the rigidity of the material affects the
woodwind’s tone. That is a very interesting idea.
You seem to use the format very well.
Thanks for the myth-discussion, and
please stay with us when you can. Jim
Hi Terry,
Welcome to the board!
I enjoyed reading your flute myths page, this is the forum where some of the myths are generated…
When I was messing around with different woods, thinking “out of the box(wood)”. I made a Pratten out of Holly wood. Holly has a very tight grain, but is not very dense. although, it was a major drag to make a flute out of it, as it is so dry, and the bore was sealed with tung oil, but it did make a very vibrant and loud flute. Would not the walls of a flute act like a sound board to generate sound though the wall of the flute? Didn’t you make a flute out of balsawood once?
I like when a flute jumps in your hand, vibrationally, when you can feel the sound at your fingertips. It makes the flute seem alive and vibriant..
I remember reading about the flute material test. For one thing they used a delrin head for all the different materials, the different bodies spun on a gattaling gun type frame. I would thing a more complete test would have been to have a head joint made out of the same material as the body.
To quote you:
Boxwood would be such a timber - about 80% of the density of timbers in the african blackwood category. Coming back a little more, the “fine furniture timbers” - rosewoods, walnut, etc are half the density or less, and a good deal coarser in the grain - we should certainly expect less of them. And that’s why they are not normally used for flute-making
The cocobolo that I have been turning seems like a fine tone wood, and very oily, though the grain isn’t as tight as blackwood it does produce a nice sound. The wood is also quite hard. I don’t think it would be fair to group even regular rosewood with a wood like walnut.
Walnut .53
Teak .56
Goncalco Alves .56
Birch .60
Maple .63
Beech .64
Oak .65
Rosewood, Bolivian .71
Rosewood, E. Indian .78
Water 1.00
Cocobolo 1.10
Ironwood 1.30
http://www.cocobolo.net/hardwood_density.htm
Jon
Now, if only I still had my old job at Airbus as a structural dynamics test engineer, I could have taken a flute or two to work and tested them. I used to do this sort of work with bits of aircraft, either full size or models, and it involved putting accelerometers at various places and exciting the structure, either with a (very expensive!) hammer, or some form of shaker.
Fundamentally, the resonant frequencies of a structure are a function of the stiffness and mass (distribution). A stiffer structure has a higher frequency for a given mass, and a heavier structure has a lower frequency for a given stiffness. I would guess that the natural frequencies of a wooden tube would be quite a bit higher than the standing waves inside it, but that would just be a guess. There may be some (much) higher frequency overtones that could interact with the structural frequencies, resulting in flutes made with different materials having a different tonal colour, so that aspect would need to be measured too.
I’ll see if I can find out more and get back to you.
Andrew.
Yes, please do. There seems to be no wholly
satisfactory explanation so far, IMO.