The other reason I didn't want to give up

[solarbird]

Savage


Savage (detail)


Savage (detail)

Really, I'd gotten most of the practice I need pretty early, but I just didn't want to give up on a piece of bamboo that pretty, no matter how unsuited it really was to music. spazzkat says Savage makes a pretty good October flute, in that he has that kind of leaf-fall/oncroaching-winter sound. For seven notes and accidents in-between, I think he's got a point.

Third-octave fingerings, for the record, don't give him a second octave. I can't even find even one that gives him a proper high E, even eclectics using too many holes. Dammit.

Comments

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

Oh, very, very nice indeed. I could well imagine a room full of such as these, and the odd voice to go with, although would prefer that such imaginings come in cooler weather. The notion of an 'October flute' does fit; perhaps to be played whilst on the beach, with the logs rolling in the surf?

Angharad
(yeah, you had me friended somewhere else -- I just bailed on that blog, since it seemed to be sailing off in a rather uninteresting direction). Haven't quite grasped the notion of selective filters yet, so am being characteristically cryptic.

[solarbird]

That ridge down the side which I find attractive is also what destabilises the air column. It's unfortunate. Most of mine are not made of bamboo nearly this interesting, but on the other hand, they play sanely.

flutes and tubular chimes

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

How interesting -- years ago now, one snowy Christmas morning in Greenwood, we tinkered around with making tubular chimes out of large-diameter hard-drawn copper pipe (5 and 10 cm diameters, roughly); found that they had a much richer and more complex tone if we hammered dents into them at various harmonic nodes. I have done very little with blown tubes, as opposed to struck tubes. I suspect that's mostly because I haven't had much free time for tinkering. But now I am inspired to think of what could be done with hollow bits of poplar-branch, since the swamp does provide centre-rotted poplar in great quantity. Will try this when I get back home.

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

Okay, destabilised air column makes a lot of sense to me; I take it that in an 'ordinary' flute, if such be said to exist, that internal roughness would be undesirable? My head right now is full of lots of half-remembered hydrodynamic formulae from grad-school (hmm, Reynolds Number is? Froude Number is? Coefficient of roughness is?) -- can always come close by using characteristic numbers for wood-stave pipes (vide Gillette's Construction Handbook, a fine and enduring reference that, alas, does not travel in my baggage).

I also dimly recall that someone wrote a marvellous book about the physics of blown and reverberatory wind instruments. Pretty sure it wasn't Joscelyn Godwin, but... who?

Brain is melting, now. Aaargh. Sleep would be nice, but unlikely in this bloody heat and humidity.

[emrecom.livejournal.com]

It looks pretty darned neat.

of course, my first thought was, What would it sound like distorted through a phase shifter?

[solarbird]

My first thought was, "What would it sound like distorted through a blender?" But then I realised Will It Blend? already has that sort of thing covered.

[solarbird]

Personal jackassery aside (...for once...) it does have an interesting tone loaded with weird harmonics - worse (...or better?) than any other flute I've ever made. So it'd be an interesting experiment, yeah.

and yet one more!

[solarbird]

If you have specific ideas, I can send you recordings of various tones. I could even play things at you. The sample was just recorded on my laptop's built-in microphone (at late thirty, which is part of why the performance is so weak), but I also have good microphones.

Re: and yet one more!

[emrecom.livejournal.com]

That sounds great--'cept I haven'y sussed out how to import sound files into this program...

Re: and yet one more!

[solarbird]

Okay. If you get that going, let me know. I'm up for collaborating if you want.

[solarbird]

More internal roughness... would add air resistance, would lower the volume (kind of a muffling/fuzzing effect, go fig), would... I think... affect the tone emphasising lower notes, and if severe enough, would probably set up all sorts of secondary noises. And almost certainly severely fuck up the second octave, like on this flute.

One of the ways I tried to get this second octave pulled back in to range - and I did move it down a whole note closer to correct, but couldn't get it all the way down - was smoothing out the interiour, most importantly at the bottom node. Clearing those down to glasslike smoothness is key to producing a sane flute. I also ground down the internal ridge as much as I thought I could get away with, but obviously I can't make that flatten out.