Hi. I have a question about the tone of new flutes and breaking in. Does the tone of the flute change as it becomes more “broken in”?
Possibly, but it is more widely believed that the tone improves/changes largely because the flooter gets used to the flute, not because the flute gets ‘broken in.’
Too true 
But consider this interesting notion.
We know that, as flutes are played, cleaned, handled and mishandled, the embouchure “edge” gets softened, often to a point (when we are talking about really old flutes) that they become rounded enough to reduce their efficiency as a jet-switching edge. They become woolen and sullen. A new head revitalises them.
We also know that, when an edge is new, freshly cut, it can be “too sharp”. A too-sharp edge can sound sizzley. Over-bright, under-warm. I imagine most makers do something to take off this excess of exuberance.
Let’s meet three very different makers…
Maker A under-softens the edge (or doesn’t soften the edge at all). The flute will start life very brightly, but gradually become warmer. Reaching its optimum will probably take some time.
Maker B softens it considerably more, so that the excess sizzle is gone, and the warmth is developing well. That flute is already nice, but will continue to improve for quite some time.
Maker C gets it exactly right - the flute is perfect on arrival. Sounds ideal, and will sound great for a while, but it’s downhill all the way from here, isn’t it.
I think it’s true that flutes will change with time, but the nature of that change may depend on where it starts.
Terry
There is a process of playing-in that happens in instruments with soundboards - fiddles, guitars and the like - where the lignin in the wood of the soundboard becomes more flexible as the soundboard vibrates. This happens over a period of several weeks with a new instrument or one that hasn’t been played in a while.
Flutes don’t vibrate that way. The job of the wood is to be rigid, so none of the wood is thin enough to vibrate. So it’s generally thought that the flute does not play-in in this way. The player on the other hand, does have to adjust to the flute - especially our simple-system conical-bore ones where the design is quite variable.
I confess that I am one of the few misguided souls who suspects that the wood of flutes does vibrate, not much, but enough to color tone sometimes. Supposing this for argument’s sake, I also believe the molecules of vibrating wood re-align so as to vibrate better, so that the sound of a flute will, over the years, improve for this reason, ceteris paribus.
I would agree that the player adjusts to the flute and learns how to get the best out of it. But does that fully account for the change in sound of flute sound of the broken in flute?
Martin Doyle for example, when giving advice on playing in a new flute on his website, says “After a few weeks, the ‘voice’ of the flute will begin to develop”.
Terry you make a really interesting point about the softening of the sharpness of the edge. But as you say, this will take some time, and definitely longer than the few weeks Martin is talking about.
Terry, you also say on your website that one of your flutes gained weight while sitting in its case. You believe it was due to the flute absorbing the moister from the swab. Surely the ‘heavier’ water filled wood would produce a different tone?
As a flute is broken in, it absorbs water, just like Terry’s flute in its case. Could this heavier water filled wood produce a different sounding flute after breaking it in?
I personally think that the timber used has some influence as well, although very minor. I think this especially shows up when boxwood is used but I suspect it has more to do with the bore becoming a little oval over time. I don’t believe it is just unstable lengthwise.
I don’t think the small increase in weight would be enough to produce a noticeable difference in performance. I do think there could be a number of surface effects involved…
One could be polishing of the bore by swabbing. How important that is would be a variable, depending on how polished the maker left it.
Another might be filling of surface pores with oil, water, breath condensate. The pores might be tiny, but there will be an enormous number of them. Agauinst that, one would hope that they would be largely filled by whatever the maker had treated the bore with, but without investigation, who knows? Surface pores will appear acoustically as parallel capacitance. Reducing the effect of that is likely to make the flute livelier and more efficient. This could be a factor also in the case of old flutes that need to be “woken up”.
And while you are right about the time it takes for an edge to round dramatically, keep this in mind. The fastest rate of rounding occurs at the start. If the edge had been left pretty sharp, the initial change might well be noticeable in a short time.
All interesting stuff. All hard to prove!
Terry
I had my “new” Wilkes flute with me at Willie Week 2004 and in the back room of the Central Cathal McConnell saw the flute and asked if he could play it. He said it’ s a good flute but it needed to be played in. The flute was 2-3 years old and had been played very little. My 120 year old Rudall Carte was very dry when I got it, both wood and pads. I beleive it must have spent many years unplayed in it’s box. Now 2 years later it plays easy, and has a great tone now which it didn’t have when I first got it. All I do is play it and keep it humified.
Any evidence that Doug Tipple’s flutes benefit from “playing in”? Or don’t?
I was also going to point out that box is different from other tone woods. When I got a brand-new Olwell flute in boxwood, the joints barely held together. Pat said give it time. After it was broken in, the joints were fine, even a bit tight. So the tenons had expanded a good fraction of a millimeter in a couple of weeks. It never seemed to contract again, even if I didn’t play it for a month or two. And the sound of box even changes during an individual playing session – once the bore gets good and wet, it seems to liven up a bit.
Interesting point about that sizzle Terry. My Reviol cast bore flute is sizzly, has a sharp polymer edge that won’t wear out any time soon. I noticed that edge missing when I was flute-hopping the past few years. Never thought about it till now.
Terry - Shouldn’t this be an interesting argument for making an embouchure out of silver, properly carved? Or I suppose delrin/ebonite, if you don’t mind having plastic on your wood flute. Especially if you’re a person who believes the material has no bearing on sound, that it’s all the shape (I’m not one of them though).
We see lots of modern Boehm headjoints made of silver with wooden lip-plates. Why not a wooden head with silver for a conical flute?
The “materials and sound” discussion has surfaced in many forms on this forum and other flute forums. This short paper by John Coltman is worth a read if you have never run across it.
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/marl/Coltman/documents/Coltman-1.06.pdf
There is a vibrating column of air in a cylindrical container. Now suppose the container is itself capable of vibrating slightly, which is not impossible, on its face, in the case of wood. Then it makes some sense that the vibration of the container, due to the vibrating column of air, would affect slightly (color) the vibrating column of air and so have some affect on the sound. Wood that vibrates tends to realign its molecules so as to vibrate more, as with guitars, etc. So playing a flute might improve the flute’s sound. This is just a suggestion, and it offers a not entirely implausible mechanism to explain the difference in sound between, say, boxwood and blackwood, etc.
Interesting discussion. And that paper linked by Geoffrey Ellis reminded me of this experiment with violins. In blind tests, musicians preferred modern violins to old ones - even Stradivarius ones! Which underscores how important perception is in all these things - what we know about an instrument has a big impact on how we perceive its performance.
In my experience, it does seem material plays some role in tone, but I highly doubt it has anything to do with vibration of the instrument itself. The physics behind stringed instruments and wind instruments is completely different; soundboards and tubes are not comparable.
When I first started making flutes I went through a phase where I was experimenting a lot, and at that time I contacted a person in New Jersey who I was told was a master violin maker. I told him I was a flute maker and was interested in woods and finishes that would improve the sound of my flutes. I was totally new to instrument making and thought that if I used the right wood and the right finish, it might make my flutes sound better He was very nice and let me know that I was barking up the wrong tree. He pointed out the fundamental differences between a woodwind and an instrument that relies on sympathetic resonance and advised me not to waste my time chasing that particular chimera.
If one looks at the popular tone woods for flutes, they have certain traits in common which explain why they work so well. It’s all about the inner surface. If you cut and polish woods like blackwood, cocus, boxwood, cocobolo, and others that are either dense and oily or just very fine grained (and not open-grained) they will provide an inner surface that is smooth and relatively free of micro-disturbances (anything that might interfere with the movement of air molecules). As other makers (including myself) have observed in other threads, if you can create an inner surface like that by other means, the wood can be almost anything and will give comparable results. The Coltman experiment does a good job of revealing the subjective bias of players regarding material and how this bias affects their perception. I don’t have access to enough experienced players or I’d be tempted to try to recreate another version of that experiment using different woods
‘The physics behind stringed instruments and wind instruments is completely different; soundboards and tubes are not comparable.’ I agree with this, of course, and the account I gave of how cylinder vibration may affect sound quality is compatible with it.