On a whim, last week I glued a dime on the cork of my Seery flute (with superglue) just to see if I preferred the Seery’s tone with metal facing on the cork (this made a difference on two former flutes I owned).
Last night, playing Christmas carols, I hit this point where I could play from low D up to C fine - sounded totally normal - but anything above it was totally unplayable. Naturally, I just figured it was me since it usually is, but after about 10 minutes of terrible sounding notes from mid D to F# and none above that, I took the flute apart and what did I find…but a dime lodged down around the LH 1 tone hole!
Naturally, removing the dime improved the flute’s upper octave immensely, but I’m still curious why the lower octave played fine.
Any guesses?
Oh, and FWIW, I preferred the Seery without the dime anyway.
my guess is that the dime was constricting the bore at a vibrational node that was specific to the frequencies of higher notes. kind of the opposite effect of opening the LH1 tonehole (oxx|xxx) to make the mid/high D notes easier to sound. however, it’s certainly more complex than that in actuality.
As a person who has worked as a bank teller for several years and who has handled a lot of money, including a million pennies, my theory is that the result that you experienced, Jayhawk, has something to do with the value of the penny, more than anything else. I believe that flutes have personalities. Let me ask you a simple question, Jayhawk? If you were a flute, how would you feel if someone glued a worthless copper penny to your stopper? Would you feel indignant and rebel? I bet you would, as well, and just wouldn’t deliver the notes as requested.
There is a dime glued to the cork in my old 8-key.
It doesn’t seem to have any effect on the tone, though…it just gives me something to push against without denting the cork, as this is a fully lined head and the cork tends to stick in place moreso than in my other flutes.
I like to remove the cork in a flute every several months and clean things up a bit. This makes it a lot easier to get that cork out.