Wooden Boehm flutes

[david_h]

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So I suspect I could be mainly hearing the difference between wooden boehm flute players and metal boehm flute players rather than the between the wooden flutes and metal flutes. Though when a borrowed a metal boehm flute for a while (I play simple system) what came out had a 'metal tube' sound.

[Tonehole]

Dunno David.

In concerts every audience member who happens to like or comment about the music we make, comments on how refreshing it is to hear a wooden flute over the common garden silver metal typewriter Boehm flute.

As a wooden flute player, I feel the difference: the overtones reverberate and it feels more connecting and soothing. The metal Boehm is fine, if not overly loud, penetrating, unsubtle and lacking in softness.

In any case, the OP is going to struggle to find an open hole Boehm layout wooden flute for less than the order of $£thousands. It is pretty much a grail flute for most players into the Boehm simplicity of layout for contemporary music. The closest (cheapest) call I can think of will be a Rudall Carte Rockstro with the optional open/closed holes and only a few of these I've come across play at A=440Hz. Then again, the challenges of open Gs, inline keys and all the other quirks of the 19th century will make it more likely that a custom order is the only option to satisfy.

[Kirk B]

One thing to be careful of: there are a lot of Chinese made wooden Boehm flutes out there at attractive prices. I don't think they're as bad as the dreaded Pakistani "Irish" firewood flutes, but you get what you pay for.

[fintano]

I've been seeing ads for Chinese-made wooden Boehm flutes for prices around $800-$1000. It makes you wonder, if they can make metal Boehm flutes and sell them for $300, why does a wooden Boehm flute have to cost $15,000?

There were student-grade wood Boehm flutes made in France in the 1920s. One of them came up on Craigslist here a few months ago for around $700, but I did not have a chance to check it out. Possibly similar instruments were made in other places at that time as well.

I'm curious about those Chinese flutes. A few brick-and-mortar music shops seem to sell them. (There was one in LA, if anyone in LA is willing to do an investigation.) I haven't seen any credible reviews of them. But if a Chinese factory can make clarinets, why not flutes? It's possible they could be passable and not a scam. I'd just like to see more independent evaluations.

However, I've also seen people saying that what is being advertised as Yamaha clarinets online are actually counterfeits. No serial number, etc. So it's a jungle out there.

I've played a wooden Boehm flute, and it sounds much more like a metal Boehm flute than it does a conical-bore flute. So for playing ITM, you might as well just use a metal one and focus on getting the right tone, following the models that other people have mentioned.

[Kirk B]

I'm curious about those Chinese flutes. A few brick-and-mortar music shops seem to sell them. (There was one in LA, if anyone in LA is willing to do an investigation.) I haven't seen any credible reviews of them. But if a Chinese factory can make clarinets, why not flutes? It's possible they could be passable and not a scam. I'd just like to see more independent evaluations.

With Chinese instruments you might get a good one that plays well but the issues are fit and finish, reliability of the mechanism, ability to stay in regulation, etc. If you get one that's out of adjustment then you can plan on spending some money with a tech to get it playing well. I have a couple of Chinese made saxophones and they play OK but I've had to spend some money with my tech to get them that way. On my soprano sax, one of the necks came unsoldered from the connector and the pearl fell off of the G sharp key touch and was lost so I had to get that repaired. It only cost about 30 bucks but if issues like that keep popping up then it adds up. Think about how many keys and pads are on a Boehm flute. $700-$1000 is a lot of money to spend if you have to keep spending money in the long run to keep it playing right.

[Geoffrey Ellis]

I've been seeing ads for Chinese-made wooden Boehm flutes for prices around $800-$1000. It makes you wonder, if they can make metal Boehm flutes and sell them for $300, why does a wooden Boehm flute have to cost $15,000?

However, I've also seen people saying that what is being advertised as Yamaha clarinets online are actually counterfeits. No serial number, etc. So it's a jungle out there.

I watched a performance of a friend of mine who used both a silver Boehm flute and a wooden one (made by Chris Abell). My friend was just auditioning the flute, really, since the price tag was around 11K at that time (this would be more than ten years ago). But from the audience, I couldn't tell the slightest bit of difference between that wooden flute and the silver flute that was also played. There might have been some nuance, for sure, but by the time it travels through a microphone and out of a PA system, that nuance was long gone.

I know that a big part of the job in making such a flute revolves around "stringing", or the addition of all of the key work. That is highly specialized work and I'm told that many makers actually contract that job to a specialist. I think Chris did as well, but it's been long enough ago that I wouldn't insist on the accuracy of that memory. After hearing that I toyed very briefly with the idea of making a wooden Boehm flute, knowing that I could probably manage the wood-working end of it so long as I didn't have to manage the key work, but it would be a very expensive experiment (because I'd have to pay the stringer a huge chunk of money to find out if the flute was worth a damn).

The Chinese have great talent for streamlining mass-produced gear, and a lot of stuff coming out of China these days is not the crap that was being exported in the past. I've bought some gear for my shop (a type of indexing 4-jaw chuck) and it was very nice quality and absurdly inexpensive for what it was. I don't know how they manage it, but it has got to be because the workers are probably getting paid peanuts. I also got a water-cooled spindle for my CNC mill that was Chinese made and it is of excellent quality. And I've played some very inexpensive bamboo xiao from China that are very nice instruments--good quality to price ratio.

But producing a wooden Boehm flute at 1K or less...that's pretty impressive if they are even of moderate quality.

It is a jungle out there. Myself and a few other makers have had the dubious distinction of having our good names hijacked by some shady company operating out of Cyprus. There are websites where you can buy my flutes (complete with photos of my work--much of it copied from the Irish Flute Store--and even a photo of me taken from my website), even though I don't sell my stuff through any retailer apart from IFS. Anyone naive enough to buy one of these flutes will receive what is basically a hollow branch with some holes punched in it . And because of where they are operating, there is no recourse for the makers whose work is being used as the bait.

[Kirk B]

It is a jungle out there. Myself and a few other makers have had the dubious distinction of having our good names hijacked by some shady company operating out of Cyprus. There are websites where you can buy my flutes (complete with photos of my work--much of it copied from the Irish Flute Store--and even a photo of me taken from my website), even though I don't sell my stuff through any retailer apart from IFS. Anyone naive enough to buy one of these flutes will receive what is basically a hollow branch with some holes punched in it . And because of where they are operating, there is no recourse for the makers whose work is being used as the bait.

The same thing is happening in the saxophone market. There are foreign operators selling "Selmer", "Yamaha", and "Yanagisawa" saxophones at ridiculously low prices. They either have the company's logos engraved on them or they're using photos from elsewhere. It's a jungle out there.

[pancelticpiper]

I got to play quite a dozen or so wood headjoints (of four or five different woods) on the same silver Boehm body and my experience was that most of the tone and performance came from the headjoint, not the body.

I would keep the Boehm body I'm already used to, and try various wood headjoints on it.

My favourite, blending some of the flexibility of Boxwood with some of the volume and projection of Grenadilla, was Brazilian Rosewood.

[Cyberknight]

Thank you all for the advice and expertise! I greatly appreciate it.