Actually it’s not a whole lot of work. It probably took as long for me to write it down as it would for me to do it. Carey will take a bit longer.
As to guarantee of return, I’ve done all these things and more to a number of flutes in the past and in every case I’ve ended up with a flute that is very playable; with adequate volume for a session (but not usually a real honker) decent tone, and excellent tuning. AFAIK most of these German flutes are better than most of the Pakistani flutes in that they have better well seasoned wood, and better key work, so I personally think a German flute is a better starting point than a Pakistani one.
Anyway Carey is keen to have a go so I’m only offering him what help I can. I am not suggesting he should do this, just saying that I think it’s doable and that I’d do it myself if I owned it.
I won’t claim I’m following this as closely as it deserves (lot of stuff going on over here I have to concentrate on), but I’m not convinced that you need to cut anything off the head.
This “slide completely closed” scan shows that A4 is almost up to pitch:
I’m not entirely convinced that the Flutini plot is a very accurate picture of the flutes tuning. I’ve got a new file from Carey of him playing for a lot longer and the Polygraph figures for 440 with tuning slide fully in are
D -39
E -35
F# -62
G -33
A -15
B -19
C# -31
d -22
e -23
f# -55
g -16
a -10
b -29
These are probably a lot more accurate than the approximate first figures I listed.
Yes we could start by enlarging the holes and might not need to take any off the head end. But my bet is still on wanting to remove 5mm from the head after we finish with the holes just to give a bit of tuning ability for when it’s cold. Personally I think I would start on hole 5 for F# then hole 4 for G just to see how it went. But I wouldn’t go too far with them before making a decision on whether or not to take some off the head before returning to the holes. Actually this raises the important point that we don’t actually need to know exactly everything we’re going to do before starting out - you can approach it incrementally, but with the knowledge of what the options are and what effect they’ll have.
Note the new (more accurate) figures above show that low D is quite a bit flatter than 2nd octave D, something that will be fixed (to some extent) by enlarging the bore in the foot. How exactly to do the foot end will depend on the tuning of low C C# and Eb if we want to use those keys.
I haven’t seen offset holes on an old flute before either, but I have seen hole 6 cut on an angle like this one.
So is this “grain of sand on the beach” (nice simile Anavil) a unique grain of sand? Note the precise shape of the rings. It looks quite sharp compared to other examples I see in photos. Library of congress for example. but those are truely Meyer’s, not the “nach” variety. Do you think this flute is late in the run? That’s my guess, but not for any good reason.
I do like playing it, and I would like to be able to play it out. I told my fiddler he should tune his old school fiddle to the flute and he could grab it and we’d at least have a duet.
Regarding the A4, with the slide closed I tune checked with the session last Sunday on A4 (sneaky eh) and all nodded and off we went. But one-by one people (with good ears) stopped playing because they just couldn’t abide the result when playing elsewhere on the flute.
It’s about as cold now as it gets here. Well, actually it’s hot outside, which means the A/C is cranked up in the pubs and I have to wear jeans to avoid freezing. In the winter, the doors and windows are all open and it’s not so cold. (and the bodhrans have trouble getting tight enough in the sea air.)
It seems I should try to bring the worst notes in line with the others, keeping the whole flute flat, and then decide if the final move in the game should be to enlarge the holes more or remove material from the head.
Then there’s the option of enlarging the embouchure hole to raise all notes some. I’d be up for starting there, cutting away the back and sides of the hole maybe? I don’t know how big is too big tho.
I should also try to get RTTA running again so we’re all working with the same view.
Just a quick note to let you all know that I have not dropped the project that Graeme spent so much of his time on. (Thanks for that.) I’ve got to fix the tool first. The steady rest on my lathe won’t accept something the size of the flute, so I have been spending the time for the flute working on modifying the lathe. Which is turning out to be the most complicated part of this job.
I think it would be good to take some length out of the head so I can set the flute up so it will be A=440 with three or four mm of slide exposed, and I’d like to do this on the lathe of course. I might do some finger hole modifications first, just because I can. Whatever my actual approach, I’ll take photographs, make plots and post my progress - for better or for worse.
One of the many value judgements the maker has to make is whether to carry out any particualr job “the hard way” or invest some time setting up better to be able to do the job the easy way.
Clearly, if it’s a job you are going to do regularly, the decision makes itself - you’d be nuts to battle on day after day doing things the hard way. And if it’s likely to be a one-off, the decision makes itself - you’d be equally nuts setting up to simplify a job you’ll never do again.
It’s the middle ground that’s harder. But that becomes a life-and-death decision for the maker. I’ve known makers (not just of flutes) that seemed paralysed - unless everything was perfect they couldn’t continue. One extreme case was half a million dollars in debt setting up exotic CNC machining for a big instrument for which there was only a dubious market around here. But I’ve also seen makers who struggle on with the crudest of tools and setups, never daring to take the time off to really equip themselves with the right facilities to do a decent and efficient job. Both approaches end in disaster and heartbreak.
I won’t claim to always get the balance right. I sometimes finally get around to making a specific tool or jig and then say to myself - that took an hour to make, and how many years have I done without it?!
And then you get the ultimate let-down. You spend an hour making a new tool and then you use it for the first time. It does the job is about 20 seconds, and you are left, perhaps like a new bride, thinking “is that it?”. Extending the metaphor, the reward only comes with continued use.
I think it would be good to take some length out of the head so I can set the flute up so it will be A=440 with three or four mm of slide exposed, and I’d like to do this on the lathe of course. I might do some finger hole modifications first, just because I can.
I’d normally suggest you bring that hole 5 up so that F# is no longer tragically flat and see what the effect is on the pitch in general. But I remember you have the head apart, and you won’t want to put it back together to find out if that is enough to lift the pitch. Unless it will hold together and be playable without having to glue.
Whatever my actual approach, I’ll take photographs, make plots and post my progress - for better or for worse.
Ha, made me laugh, that one. It’s exactly right of course. Customers of my high CPVC whistles have been pestering me to make some lower ones, but not having a proper steady rest has been blocking that project as well. So, even if I don’t ever do another nach Meyer “tweak” it will see continued use. But even on the steady rest itself, I have the relatively quick and dirty approach and the long hard approach. I’m trying the quicker way first. It wouldn’t do for cutting steel, but small bites of plastic or wood should be OK.
I suggest you keep any adjustments to the head till the end and then you can start by temporarily sticking that head slide back into place with, say beeswax - it just needs to be solidly enough in place that it can’t move or twist at all which might leave a step sticking out into the embouchure hole. It can’t leak either (suck test it carefully). That way you’ll be able to test your modifications to the toneholes as you go…Though I suppose you could take say, 3mm off the head to take it closer to start with if you’re sure it will need at least this much…Doing it this way you know at the end just how much you want to finally take off the head for sure…
I wouldn’t look for tuning adjustments by modifying the embouchure hole which you asked about above - I’d leave any (hopefully slight) improvements to that till the last too - I think of adjustments to an embouchure hole as being aimed at the response and tone rather than the tuning.
All the setting up that you have to do to get the job done is a lot of work the first time - there’s always a number of ways of doing it depending on your circumstances - or as Terry points out, your own perception of your circumstances.
If it doesn’t work out to your satisfaction you can always plug the holes with a similar wood, turn the flute over and start again!
With the slide 100% closed the flute nearly played A=440, but the other notes were off. I have a gut feel that taking some material off the head would be a good thing for this flute. But I still might start elsewhere and get two or three data points first. A little data can out-weigh a lot of conjecture.
Ha, yes Garry, I’ve been thinking along those lines. But actually went a step farther and figured I would bore 12mm holes that I could insert round plugs into and I could either swap out the holes to my heart’s content, or if I made them flat I could drill the hole off-center and rotate the insert to find the best positions for all the holes. That way I could have ET and JI holes for the same flute! (Only 3/4 joking, I think there’s a useful R&D flute in there somewhere.)
I took a little time tonight to install Tartini, and R and it’s working fine. I wanted to see how best to record what I was doing, so I hooked up the web cam and played around with the audio settings on the capture software. I turned the record volume lower than normal for voice so the flute’s strong notes wouldn’t be clipped. Here’s the first video I shot this evening. I post it not for it’s technical content, but because it shows my surprise at seeing myself. Ha!
Now I’ve only had a flute since mid-May, so don’t expect much in the way of skill at playing yet. That and our session went for 7 hours yesterday, and I think my lips are shot.
It did work to play the video with Windows Media Player and record it into Tartini or Audacity. From Audacity I could export a WAV file and analyze that file with Flutini. I thought I could do the same with Tartini, but I couldn’t sus it out, so I just played it and let Tartini listen to that and do it’s thing.
The plots below were made from playing directly into Flutini and Tartini and following the normal display procedure.
I didn’t use the same file, but I did play pretty long single notes from D thru D and on up to A and back a number of times. With Flutini I could watch the bars move and counts increase so I knew it was hearing the right notes. With Tartini I could watch the tuner and see that it was hearing me. I exported the data from Flutini and displayed it with the same R script.
Both gave pretty similar results, which is good, because I’m really testing the tool at this point more so than testing the flute. But, a puzzle - why are so few notes displayed when I watched all of them register on the tuner dial? Do I need to configure something so it will display notes it’s not expecting? On Tartini I set it for the key of C# (A=440) as that most closely matches what I see.
Hi Carey
Don’t worry about telling Tartini what key/pitch you’re in because that only affects the graphed output that Tartini is showing you. But do tell Polygraph what pitch you’re at eg 430 if you’ve got the slide all the way in, and you’ll get a reasonable plot. You’ll still have some problems because of F# being so low in pitch that some of it is getting assigned to Fnat etc…
And you can email me Tartini’s output file (rtest.txt or whatever you call it) and I’ll have a play with the different settings to show how to get a meaningful plot when the flute is basically not near A440 and not very in tune at any pitch.
I was hoping you’d step in here, Graeme. Seems to me that the flute tuning or something is giving potentially misleading results, not a good thing when you have the chainsaw running.
If, as Carey seems to think, the flute is distinctly flat all over (compared to modern pitch), a lot of the notes are going to be interpreted wrongly - low F#s as sharp Fnats, for example. You can minimise that if you are aware of it by adjusting the ref frequency, but if you had a flute that had really bad tuning as well as really flat (or sharp) tuning, the whole picture could get rather confusing.
I wonder if we could devise some way to set the fences between notes more meaningfully than the nominal +/-50 cents? It would be interesting to plot the incidence of all the recorded notes from say Carey’s flute against a semitone scale and see where the minima actually fall, and place the fences there. Could that be done, either manually or automatically?
In some cases the fences could be further from the intended notes, eg if you are not intending to play Eb’s or Fnats (i.e. you’ve opted for diatonic in D), the fences need not be on the quarter tones, but could be at Eb and Fnat. The fence between F# and G would have to remain around the quarter tone.
Terry, I wonder if RTTA is the right tool to be using at this point. Or rather I wonder if using it in this manner is appropriate. The flute is not in tune well enough to need the sophisticated analysis of live playing that RTTA provides. The needle on the tuner is good enough. But the needle on the tuner does not persist.
As you say the issue is confusing the different notes. I will make 14 seperate files and look at the notes one-by-one, then there will be no confusion about which is which. I will play notes into Audacity where I can select out the better (more representative) ones and miss out the ones where I don’t get the tone started well etc. and then feed them to Tartini, like with like, and see what we see. I suspect this will lead to a better procedure when approaching instruments that are way off.
Some things are better left to the human than to try to make the computer do it, especially when it’s not mundane (yet.) (Refer to the fixing the tool conversation here.)
Aside: I spent 10 years creating software for professional race teams and I knew I’d spotted something that I could sell when I said to myself - “Now THAT’s a stupid job for a human!”
OK, going back to a known quantity to test the testing tools, here’s the second Tipple flute I made. the process seems to work OK on a decent flute. (This one thicker walled than Doug’s specs so I had to figure out the holes on my own, so don’t blame Doug for the tuning here.)
Why not just scan along the Tartini ‘Pitch Contour’ and move the reference frequency around until the almost horizontal parts in the middle of the notes (of some, or maybe only one, pitch) line up with the grid.
I may be getting the ‘wrong end of the stick’ with all this RTTA stuff but in all the clips of the experts I have looked at (that we are not allowed to talk about), and in my own efforts, most of the tails of the distributions in the summary statistics are in the transitions between notes and around cuts and things. About the only thing my playing and the experts have in common is that somewhere in the contour of all but the shortest notes is a horizontal bit (or wavy if its fiddlers with vibrato) that is returned to repeatedly and varies by only a very small amount during the tune (although in my case it sometimes slowly drifts sharp or flat before I get to the end).
Sorry to sound like one of those cynics over on the thesession.org but it seems to me that the devil is in the detail. I find Tartini a superb tool but I get questions rather than answers from summary output. Thinking about a post-processor for the Tartini output to select the ‘horizontal bits’ but time probably better spent practising.
Ha ha - crossed with Carey’s last two, must remember to check before submitting
David, I think you hit the nail on the head. I had just recorded a scale of full breath notes in Audacity that I am going to feed to Tartini by clipping out the stready tones from the middle of the notes. Same thing, just done on the front end where I know what it is I’m up to so the software doesnt’ have to guess about it.
Thanks for your feedback! These sorts of comments are what will make this effort pay off for all of us.
Another thing that is revealing if you record directly into Tartini and watch the trace is that sometimes it gets the octave wrong (I think there are settings to reduce this).
But amazingly when playing a long note and altering the character of the sound it will sometimes change its mind about the octave and go back and re-write the contour of the part of the note that it has already displayed - spooky when that happens.
I have a Nach-Meyer LP (low pitch) which had the usual tuning issues, etc. It has an ebonite hj as well. A few years ago, on the advice of someone here on the board (and not knowing any better), I started to file the holes and the embrochure hole, trying to raise the pitch of the instrument and better the tuning. The flute plays, with the slide all the way in, almost at A=440. I have only based this on my plaing along with a concertina player. I can blow the flute in to tune, but it requires rolling out, and really blowing! I don’t really have a clue how to go about using Tartini, but I can make a sound sample and post it if someone else would like to figure the tuning out. The flute has been sitting in my bathroom, put together for about two years. I pick it up and play it occasionally, and can get a decent tone out of it after a while. Ill try and get a sound clip posted in the next couple of days.
Arbo
