I just sent 3 Bb flutes off into the world this morning - one to the East Coast, one to Hawaii, and one to Galicia. I make about 20 such low flutes yearly. Its a great honor to have people out in the world such as Matt Molloy, John Skelton and Grey Larsen playing my low flutes on a regular basis. As a flute maker, it just doesn’t get any better than that!
Mine are based originally on a Rudall and Rose 4 key with no slide in the Dayton Miller Collection (see http://www.loc.gov/item/dcm001277). I measured this flute the first time I visited that collection sometime in the early 90s, and blew on it for just a few seconds to determine its tone quality, etc. It was a great instrument. On my next visit a few years later, I noticed the head joint had a newish crack running the length of it. I asked the curator about it and he said that someone had come in and played it for an hour or so, probably thinking he was the next Matt Molloy. Ugh! The curator at the time felt that since this was public property, that he couldn’t really limit what people did with these flutes and he had to allow people to play them. His hands were tied from above.
One of the few good things to come out of Homeland Security is much better supervision and policing of the collection. They now have security cameras set up and blowing a single note into any of these instruments is considered a Federal Offense. So far everyone has played by the rules. While it might limit evaluation of the instruments in terms of pitch, quality etc. it preserves the collection without further deterioration. A good maker should be able to estimate the pitch by measurements and if one wants to know what something sounds like, making an exact (as much as possible) copy from measurements is the way to go.
On this original the bore of the head joint is 20.25mm. On the flutes derived from this one, I usually use a 5.25 to 5.75 chimney height on these, and keep the embouchure under 11.50mm long by 10.45mm wide. The body tapers on these original Rudall Bb flutes are interesting, and reveals an economy of tooling perhaps. I discovered that the bores for the two lowest joints were very similar to sections of the bores on D flutes of the period - and thus Rudall may have simply used his D flute reamers for these parts,rather than conjuring up some new tooling. So when I tooled up I made a reamer for the upper middle joint only, and experimented with my various D flute reamers for the bores of the lower joints. It close enough and it seems to work. Generally that part of the bore is not as critical shape-wise and dimension-wise compared with higher up on the flute.
Grey Larsen and I experimented with a larger bore to the head joint for my low A, which is a derivation of this flute, to see if we could deliver more punch. We went as far as 21mm, and a slightly thicker wall. Grey had me make a head joint which he later had Chris Abell voice. Chris’s embouchure works well for Grey (I prefer my own though) and its a little large which introduced a few scaling issues. Its still in tweaking and development stage.
Today I experimented with increasing the chimney height to about 8mm and severely cutting the fore and aft sides of the outside to see what the result would be. I was inspired by some of the extreme embouchures used on contrabass and subcontrabass flutes (look up videos of these on YouTube - they are really cool). The results were not good. There is too much enrichment of the overtones which results in an unpleasant buzziness on my flutes - and introduces some annoying heterodyning on the middle D (in D flute terms, i.e., 0XX XXX). This works for some of the jazz players who make their instruments pop and buzz like a string bass in a New York Jazz club. This isn’t the sound we want from our Celtic Flutes however!
I am happy with my Bb design though and am now tweaking it to make it perhaps a bit easier on the hands and develop a smaller handed model. I am now making a 3 piece blackwood Folk Flute version (send me an email if you are interested - web page additions are in progress).
Its this practice of tweaking and experimenting such as what I described above that one arrives at a design - aided by the legacies that Rudall and other makers left behind. Although it is theoretically possible to design a flute in one pitch based on another by doing the “maths”, what results is usually a long shot, unplayable and commonly un-fingerable. I’ve tried, using the complex iterative calculations that Nederveen developed (see http://www.amazon.com/Acoustical-Aspects-Woodwind-Instruments-Revised/dp/0875805779.
Making reamers is an impediment and thus once one has an easy to produce bore profile that works, one is loathe to change it. Still it would be interesting to go to a larger bore generally to see what happens. But my guess is that Rudall and others more or less tried that and zeroed in on what seemed to work best.
What I have noticed in just changing the head joint bore and wall thickness on these alto flutes is that these have less impacts than the shape and size of the embouchure itself. There is only so much energy that one can impart into this system and above a certain size changing the bore size to something larger will do little to increase the punch of the instrument, and will actually make things worse off. Similarly there are limits going the other way. I am able to use my Bb head joint and to a lesser extent the one for A (with a 21mm bore) all the way up to C. The Bb works well for this and by swapping parts one can have a flute in C, B, Bb and A (i.e., my low Combo flutes).
But putting the Bb head joint onto a D body simply doesn’t work. The scaling is all wrong and the octaves play way out of tune. But one can take a headjoint for a D flute with a bore of 18.85-19.05mm and make that work for an Eb. However, it becomes a little narrow in bore for C, at least the ones that I make. My C flutes with the 20.25mm bore in the head joint play like a Pratten. What few attempts to derive a C using my Standard flute bore in the head joint just aren’t as nice.
Its fun working on these - though its becoming somewhat harder on my increasingly arthritic hands. I am investigating some ergonomic workarounds and trying to develop something a little easier to hold and play. I really love the pitch of these. And when one returns to a higher pitched flute in D its always a great thing!
Everyone, keep out of trouble!
Casey
