I was looking at the German section of Rick Wilson’s wonderful oldflutes.com, he has an interesting photo of the upper joints of a flute by J. G. Braun (Mannhein, c.1825). This was a six keyed flute built with no tuning slide, and instead came with three corps de rechange, for playing at approximately A=435, A=440, and A=446. Here is a group photo of all three, highest pitch on the left. Underneath is Rick’s text for this pic.
“The second holes of the three centers can be seen below. The shortest joint (A=446) is on the left; it has received by far the most use, and the holes are worn. The A=435 joint on the right, on the other hand, is in like-new condition and was possibly never played.”
The wear on the holes of the shortest joint is something I’ve seen on other old instruments, and I’ve even heard it refered to as “overcutting,” makers replicating it on new instruments.
My question - is this something that just happens from heavy playing, or did old makers deliberately to this to woodwind instruments?
While it’s admittedly hard to tell from the photos, I don’t think the chamfering on those toneholes is entirely due to wear.
‘Overcutting’ or chamfering the outside of toneholes is/was a common practice, it helps the tone, and may raise pitch slightly. Possibly the latter effect could explain why the chamfering is evident on only the highest pitched joint - or perhaps the chamfering was an alteration applied by someone other than the original maker. I am sure Rick would be aggravated by such a suggestion, but there it is.
Wear on toneholes can and does happen, and it seems to depend a bit on the player as to how much wear takes place. That said, the wear patterns that I’ve seen don’t resemble the leftmost photo, it looks too uniform.
Ebony is not a particular hard wood that wears pretty quickly. After six years of playing a noticiceable depression on the back of my chanter appeared, my thumb wearing the wood away. Now, after 20 years of playing there’s a definite depression where the thumb rests. I imagine the rest of the fingers will have caused some wear on the holes.
(italics mine)
Hmm, Peter, I agree that ebony does wear, but it’s generally considered among the most abrasion/wear resistant woods in existance. This is the main reason it’s used for violin fingerboards…
The wear on that flute tonehole shows a very small radius; if it were entirely from play, I’d expect to see a wider depression.
The fiddle boards make sense. I remember noticing, the first time though I played Geoff 's Harrington the wear at the back of the chanter. Geoff told me then the chanter was like new when he got it, that he wore the chanter. This surprised me, until I started wearing into my own chanter. Other than that it was just an observation of wear I noticed myself.
Leo always scalloped his toneholes fairly heavily, as far as I can tell. Then again, an unplayed Rowsome is pretty rare!
The rate of wear on a chanter seems to depend on the individual. Some people’s skin just seems to be more abrasive than others.
I’ve also seen examples of old and long-played ebony chanters that showed very little wear indeed.
This thread started out with the question of whether toneholes were ever “overcut”, i.e. rounded at the top edge, and to that the answer is definitely “yes”. Benade in his Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics makes reference several times to the improvement in tone which this can yield.
Hmm, only that the rounding of tonehole edges which I’m referring to isn’t deleterious. From a theoretical perspective you’d expect it to help acoustically, since the improved harmonic response and reduced turbulence at the toneholes should alllow notes to speak more quickly.
But I am not talking about “scalloping” as it’s usually interpreted - I’m referring to the very subtle chamfering of toneholes around their edge. In fact while I say “chamfering”, which usually means making a sort of bevel on an otherwise sharp edge, I more accurately mean a slight radiusing of the sharp edge.
Speaking more subjectively and from experience, I think slight and shallow scalloping can improve the feel of a chanter somewhat and improve closure of the toneholes, whereas deep scalloping can do the opposite. I do know a number of people who think deep scalloping is deleterious to tight chanterwork (as you suggest), and I tend to agree. But I think that rounding over of sharp tonehole edges does no harm in that respect, and I have noticed improvements in tone and response of my own chanters after fraising the outsides of toneholes.
The shape of the scalloping is important too. You often see scalloping that looks more or less as though a half-round file were uniformly applied to the chanter; this produces finger slots that are rather flat as seen from the sides, and I don’t think this is ideal. The examples of scalloping which I think work best are rounded across the chanter so that the fingers are still seating against a curve. In such a case, the fingers feel an “indentation” in the form of a local change in chanter curvature, but the overall surface is still convex rather than concave in any direction.
In any case, as far as scalloping is concerned, it’s tied closely to chanter design, as the chimney heights of a chanter have a strong effect on tuning. So if scalloping (or lack thereof) is desired, it needs to be built in to the design early on; likewise when copying a chanter, one needs to copy the chimney heights and tonehole fraising as well.
A friend of mine was telling me about seeing Willie Ross’s Highland pipes chanter. Very worn. Willie was a stonecutter. I’m not sure which Willie Ross this is (there was an earlier one and a later WR who made many recordings).
I’m not surprised that Geoff would wear down a chanter, since he’s always working with polishing compounds.
I’d like to see someone stick one of those…invasive endoscopic? probes into an old chanter. Those little cameras they send into people’s stomach, to look for tumours or turn them off McDonald’s. You see them on those cable channel medical shows. Anyway, an old stick, like Pat Sky’s Kenna, which is just filthy looking and sounding; I bet there’s a wall of grime in there from cookstoves, pipe smoke, mildew, etc.
Are Taylor chanters always flat on the face? They were trying to assist the fingering, I’d guess; all the Taylors or copies I’ve played were very easy to get a grip on. Quinn wrote about a Taylor whose Fnat keyhole was actually higher than the F# tonehole! Was that a way of flattening the E? I figured they ran into trouble with sharp Es flattening the chanter’s face, and thus shortening the chimmney of the E in the process. Swelling the thickness of the chanter at that spot’d be weird feeling, perhaps?
My old Highland pipe teacher had a chanter that he had gotten from one of his teachers that was seriously worn away around the low G hole from so many birls…
I have a friend who is infamous in our corner of the musical community for having incredibly caustic skin. I once restrung my guitar at a party and Courtney (my friend) played for no more than five minutes. He handed the guitar back to me and the strings felt like I’d been playing them for a month. Not the same thing as wear on a wooden chanter, but all of his guitars have no more lacquer along the back of the necks any more.
As a teenager, Paddy Keenan both undercut and rescalloped his Rowsome chanter to try to achieve an almost chimney free design, thinking this would increase response. It certainly messed with the tuning and made the chanter much brighter to boot. His new K&Q chanter was ordered in boxwood to mellow the tone, and he asked for the almost no chimney height in the design as well. The new stick was made to play much more in tune. He took delivery of it at my house and using the same reed, the new chanter was mellower and blended with his regulators better. Benedict Koehler since reduced the chimney heights, at Paddy’s request, as he was loath to go quite as far as the original at first. Benedict noted the shorter chimney heights brightened it further.
The deep scalloping and undercutting, along with reed design changes, done by Leo Rowsome may have been an attempt to lower the overall pitch from his an Willy’s concert pitch from A=456+/- to A=440, when the new pitch became standard. These chanters are often around 14 1/8" long.
Ted
It is true that scalloping will raise the pitch of an individual note. However, heavily scalloping most or all toneholes will substantially reduce the overall volume of the bore and thus lower the overall pitch. It is a real balancing act to get the pitch and tuning spot on.
Interesting. I would never have guessed that the overall pitch would drop from scalloping all the holes. I still prefer a tonehole with a nice crisp edge so that I can feel the location of the hole better. When I first got my Gallagher B set, I had the hardest time finding the tonehole for the lower hand, third finger (Eb/D#). The finger spread (right there) seemed awkward, at least different, compared to the K/Q or the Froment B chanters. The reason I had such a time was because that hole would leak due to the fact that the edges of this tiniest hole in the chanter were rounded…almost indented. I really didn’t ever feel the edge of that hole. I just memorized the feel of the finger spread and knew there were no leaks because the chanter would work right.
