I left this until last simply because the posts in this series have been long enough, without adding text about the problems you can encounter as you go along. 1. Leaks. If the bore is not completely airtight, the tuning will go wonky, the flute won’t play well, and things will be pretty awful in general. […]
Tag Archives: How-to
12 – Final Finishing, and Marking
So – that’s it, isn’t it? The flute is tuned TO PERFECTION, and will play beautifully… sadly only for about a week. Now we need to “Finish” the flute to prevent environmental conditions getting into it and wrecking our carefully crafted wood’s shape and size. This has the interesting and fortunate side-effect of making our […]
11 – Fine Tuning
So – we’ve coarse-tuned – the flute was roughly correct when we left it last night, and it’s now been a good 12-24 hours since we did anything with heat. It is 18°C in our shop, and we’ve cut the block which our flute is going to run the rest of its life with. Play […]
10 – Cutting a Block
I’m putting this next simply because the shape and construction of the bird can make a huge difference to the sound and tuning of the flute… so until we have the flute’s final block, we can’t effectively tune it! But – here you’re only really limited by your imagination and one small rule; NO LEAKS! The block […]
9 – Initial Tuning
Tuning This is where we get more “mathy”. (Mathsy for us Brits 😉 ). There are a number of ways to work out where the holes go on a flute, and that’s just for “Minor Pentatonic”. There’s the “Flutomat” at Flutopedia; there’s an Excel Spreadsheet by Bob Grealish, also on Flutopedia; and there’s a nice “rule of Thumb” […]
8 – Initial Finishing
So – having done the basic shaping, what we now have is a flute-shaped tube with a gaping hole in the front surface; it is rough, unpolished and has no playing holes. The next parts could be done in either order – it doesn’t really matter… but I prefer to do the initial sanding now, […]
Making the body of a Flute
You may remember some time ago that I posted the first in a series of posts which talk about how I make these wonderful instruments, where I talked about shaping the flute. Today I’m going to show you something of how to make the basic body of the flute – which is actually one of […]