No, generally the short-footed flutes I've experienced don't seem to suffer flat foot. And the aggressive back-reaming seems to be a very early feature and is certainly a way of keeping low D in tune with middle D.paddler wrote: This makes me curious about whether short foot flutes (6 key or 4 key or 1 key) with only one foot key have the flat foot syndrome to the same degree as the long foot flutes? The ones I've looked at seem to have fairly aggressive back reaming at the foot which might have been a simple way to try to address foot tuning problems (that together with simply shortening the foot from the end of the flute rather than the socket, and enlarging the Eb hole under the key).
This might be another clue... In the early days of the C foot, many makers and players expressed their displeasure, using expressions like "ruining the flute". Unfortunately, they never seem to go into any details about what they didn't like. It's possible that tuning was one of these, and probably the low D that used to jump out (because of its "perfect" venting) was now muted (due to the taper having to taper downwards, not upwards, and the rather imperfect venting of having its own hole and the one below it overshadowed with normally-open pads.
It certainly seems as if development in the US wasn't ruled by what was happening in Britain. Possibly because of input from other European countries like France and Germany? Research into US flute making isn't as far advanced as it should be! (Nudge, nudge....)I find it interesting that flutes from other countries, for example USA, do not tend to have this flat foot syndrome. Or at least it is nowhere near as common as it is in British flutes. I think this can be explained by the fact that they were targeting a narrower range of pitch standards which was centered slightly higher (say A=442, for example) and the demand for band instruments at higher pitch standards didn't have so much influence on orchestral flute production.
Indeed.I think that even if there had existed a single pitch standard, the flutes would have still exhibited some tuning anomalies, due to targeting a particular blowing style or temperament to favor playing in certain keys, but that these anomalies would have been much smaller than we observe with flat foot syndrome.
I wonder if there was just too much going on - C feet/D feet, small holes/Improved era/Perfected era, conical/cylindrical, Nicholson/Boehm/Siccama/Clinton, old low pitch/430Hz/high pitch/Society of Arts Pitch, plus fakes, all while you're trying to scratch out a living and trying to foresee what disruption is coming up next!