have any of you encountered “reverse” or “negative” tuning slides? Normally, the headjoint sports the inner slide and the barrel has the outer slide fed into it. By swapping this order, i.e. by mounting the outer slide to the headjoint and the inner slide to the barrel, the taper of the bore could (approximatively) be extended into the head bore, making it possible to shorten the low flutes a bit more.
I have a Bb prototype with the taper extending quite a bit into the headjoint, at this seems to work very nicely. I’m however wondering how to attach a tuning slide to this. The “negative” slide would be an option. The upper middle joint’s taper ends at 17mm, the head bore is 20mm. By using a 22x1mm outer slide and a 20x0.5 or even 20x1mm inner slide in the barrel, an approximated taper could be created. One could even add more tubing on the inside to make the steps smaller and file/sand the steps down to resemble a real cone, as there’s no inner slide that has to go into the barrel - the barrel already is the inner slide!
Any thoughts?
Cheers,
Gabriel
PS: I know that I maybe should ask this in the flutemakers list, but for some reason only half of my emails arrive there and most of the times I don’t get a reply anyway (Terry, your reply regarding Bb flutes arrived here - thanks, and let me know when you’ve got something in the pipeline!)
Just a thought, Gabriel, but whether or not you invert the usual set up of the slide tubing, on the much longer lower flutes, there is no mechanical/manufacturing need to keep the proportions of the joints the same, save for visual aesthetics of proportion - you could easily shorten the down-tube part of the head joint below the embouchure and start the tuning mechanism much closer to it (lengthen the upper body and shorten the head, moving the barrel towards the embouchure)… unless there are other acoustical reasons to retain the same proportions of cylinder bore to tapered bore (I wouldn’t know about that…). Of course, changing the bore that radically would open up a whole new set of tuning/voicing parameters, or at least a need to completely re-calculate them (or an extended empirical process with a bunch of “wasters”)!
Whistle slides are made like this sometimes. You could do it on a flute too I suppose…but it might have a greater tendency to leak due to the general direction of the air and condensation in the bore, considering the way joints in pipes which carry fluids are normally orientated with the inner tube being the one which the fluid is coming from and the outer tube the one where it’s going.
By swapping this order, i.e. by mounting the outer slide to the headjoint and the inner slide to the barrel, the taper of the bore could (approximatively) be extended into the head bore, making it possible to shorten the low flutes a bit more.
I don’t grasp what you mean here…The relative lengths of the conical and cylindrical sections will need to remain the same no matter which way round you make the slide or else the flute will be out of tune…The slide is always located somewhere in the cylindrical section - normally at the junction with the conical section…
I have a Bb prototype with the taper extending quite a bit into the headjoint, at this seems to work very nicely.
But this wouldn’t mean that you’ve managed to shorten the flute to less than its usual length while keeping the overall tuning the same…