david_h wrote:How important is balance? It is to me - I play my flute with the (cosmetic only) crown removed as that balances it how I like it. But I have been accused on this forum of having 'princess and pea syndrome'.
It's certainly important to me - I simply hate playing a flute that has negative balance - ie is "head heavy".
It doesn't get discussed much here whereas weight comes up all the time.
It's not as easy a thing to measure as weight, and that perhaps presents us a challenge. On my 6-key (my Rudall Perfected model), balancing it on a cylindrical pen finds it at about 6.5mm (1/4") further down the flute from the centre of hole L1. But it's not an easy point to find; the flute wants to tip over so that the keys are on the bottom, but that then invites the L1 hole to want to find the pen!
Ah, here's a better approach. Tie a loose knot, or better yet a slip knot, around the flute near the L1 hole in a short length of string. Dangle the flute from the string, then shift the loop up or down the flute until it assumes the horizontal. Now measure from centre of L1 to centre of the string.
And shall we define that as L1 + 6.5mm? Had the balance point been 5mm
above the L1 hole, it would be L1 - 5mm?
Now all of this should be done with the tuning slide extended to A440, or we could get very confused!
Interesting to try it with crown on and off, david_h, to see if our test can tell the difference. Removing the cap from my flute pushed the balance point from L1 + 6.5mm to L1 + 17mm, a startling difference of 10.5mm (just over 3/8"). That made the flute feel a bit foot-heavy to me, but then again, maybe that would only take a bit of getting used to.
I think that might counter the 'princess and pea syndrome' argument! That syndrome could however be said to apply when you move the cork back 1mm to strengthen the bottom octave, but then feel compelled to tape a single frozen pea to the foot to reset the balance...