I have not had the opportunity to see first-hand any “real” Irish flutes, only been making my PVC ones, so I don’t have much exposure to the variety of embouchure holes.
What I would like to know is the various opinions of you pros on how embouchure shape, size and cut affects the sound. What do you guys prefer?
From what I have seen from vids and pics embouchure holes can be round, oval, small, large and can have a (relatively) steep or shallow cut.
I ask this because one of the early flutes I made was flat so I decided to cut the embouchure larger just to experiment. I have been doing 3/8 sized holes (seems to be the norm for PVC) and I bored this out to 7/16. It is now playable in tune and is a fair bit louder. In order to play it in tune I need to have my bottom lip just over the bottom edge of the hole but the result is some flexibility on tuning I don’t seem to have with the 3/8 hole. I like the extra volume this generates as well. Gives me a good vibration on my tinger fips.
Your typical Irish flute has an embouchure that’s kind of oval, 10-11 mm in the radial dimension and 12-13 mm along the flute axis. That’s about 7/16 by 1/2. To get to circular embouchures, you have to go back to the Baroque era. By the late Baroque they’d discovered that widening and flattening out the embouchure hole gave more volume with little sacrifice in character. These were smaller; I haven’t measured any of mine. Later flutes have gone to the rounded rectangle in McGee parlance, which is much more powerful but to my ears lacks character. Undercutting is hard to measure, at least for me.
Give me an oval embouchure that’s appropriate for the flute and type of music, without too deep a chimney.
Take a look at Terry McGee’s site, in fact, read through the whole site. There’s more to learn there than you could imagine. Here’s where to start on his embouchure cuts. The pictures may help you some as well,
Here is a couple of options:
a rounded oval: 12.4x10.7mm cut the blowing edge 5%, the upper an lower edge a 5% then rounded off, the edge where your lip touches 5% can be slightly rounded off. Then I adjust the andl of the blowing edge so the octaves are balanced. The rule of thumb: the sharper the angle, the better second octave, but to much and the first octave will be weakened. Make sure to keep the bloing edge a straight angle, with no rounding off.
The square or TV tube shape embouchure: This is a louder and easier embouchure to play, as the blowing edge or sweet spot is larger. 12x 10mm same under cutting, but cut the emb. hole the shape of a old TV tube.
Good luck!
Jon, thanks a ton! I know I have a ton of testing to go - well, it’ll never stop I am sure - but it is a great hobby. Tips like this help me a lot and I appreciate it.
Feadoggie, thanks for the link. There is soooo much on Terry’s site to read (which is a VERY good thing! Thanks Terry!) that I had missed that.
