Maybe it is a silly question, but I’ll ask it any way!
I like the recorder because it is keyless and it is fully chromatic. But I prefer the sound of a flute. So…why nobody makes a recorder with a flute beck ?
Look into a “traverso”. This is the one-key flute from the era before they started adding 4, 6 and 8 keys.
These are fully chromatic and were typically used for baroque music. Many modern flute makers provide reproductions/replicas and the good ones can be fairly pricey. They are not always in A440, so you need to check.
Or, look into one-key “folk flutes” from the mid-19th century. These are often in boxwood trimmed in ivory, and come up regularly on eBay or Irish Flute Store. These are NOT typically fully chromatic, and are designed to play in the folk-tune keys of D and G.
You REALLY do want that one key to make the Eb possible, and help with intonation on the E note.
As far as I know, only two companies makes flutes (well, they’re really piccolos) with recorder fingerings.
First, there’s the Yamaha “fife”: https://usa.yamaha.com/products/musical_instruments/winds/recorders/abs_resin_fife/index.html. These are extremely cheap, made of plastic, and marketed for “beginners.” Which is odd, given that (almost) no other instrument exists like this, so if you “begin” on it, you’d have nowhere to progress. 
Anyway, it looks like they basically use German recorder fingerings and are fully chromatic: http://www.thewhistleshop.com/catalog/otherinstruments/flutesfifes/yamaha/fingering.htm. Here’s a review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Put-TG4kVA&ab_channel=FolkieFlute.
Second, there’s the Mollenhauer “picco”: https://www.thomannmusic.com/mollenhauer_8105_picco.htm. This looks similar to Yamaha’s, but it’s 10 times as expensive, is made of wood, and looks like it has an option for baroque fingerings instead of German fingerings. Overall, looks like a much nicer instrument, and may be closer to what you’re looking for. But it also seems to be marketed to “young people.” Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCEx2Q4TZyQ&ab_channel=trixpix100.
Aulos also makes a “fife,” similar to Yamaha’s: https://aulosusa.com/products/aulos-fife. But theirs uses weird fingerings that aren’t exactly like a German recorder or a Baroque recorder: https://www.aulos.jp/en/products/pdf/AULOS_FifeManual(EN).pdf.
If you don’t mind using a finger system that departs significantly from recorder fingerings, but is still keyless and fully chromatic, you might also consider a 10-hole instrument. One option would be a 10-hole fife, which uses a fingering system similar to a Ukrainian sopilka, with one hole for each of your fingers: http://www.aebi-flutes.com/index.php/en/10-hole-regimental-fife. But fifes are traditionally pitched in weird keys that don’t work well for trad music. Thankfully, it looks like Skip Healy and Jos Morneault also make 10-hole piccolos using the same design as the 10-hole fife. These would have the advantage of being in D, so they’d works well for trad music. https://www.skiphealy.com/index.php/en-us/instruments/fifes-and-piccolos/ten-hole-piccolos.
https://musiquemorneaux.com/contemporary-fifes/.
Both these makers also make full-sized flutes using the 10-hole design. Personally, I don’t think I’d buy these because I suspect the finger stretch would make them too hard to play. https://www.skiphealy.com/index.php/en-us/instruments/keyless-flutes/keyless-chromatic-flute-10-hole.
https://musiquemorneaux.com/product/bass-fife/.
Personally, if I wanted a keyless chromatic flute for Irish trad music, I’d probably go for the 10-hole piccolo. But I am intrigued by the Mollenhauer picco. The price looks good for a nice pearwood instrument.
It should be possible to saw the mouthpiece end off a recorder and turn it into an end-blown flute like a quena - just cut it off at the top of the window and then modify the end for comfort and redesign the ramp if necessary (it may be too wide for the jet of air you’re going to blow at it). It should work, but I’m not going to do that to any of my recorders to make sure. A less drastic solution would be to get someone to make a 3D-printed replacement head section for a specific brand of recorder and modify the top end to match the shape of a quena. That could become a commercially viable product. Come to think of it though, you could also make a silicone mould from the head section of your recorder and then use that to make experimental tubes out of resin that fit the rest of the recorder, all with the right bore geometry. I might have a go at that myself the next time I have the right amount of silicone rubber solution needing to be used up.
I decided to go ahead with the experiment, so I now have a 1970s Dolmetsch descant recorder head section filled with liquid silicone rubber. Will extract that tomorrow and then do an external mould to go with it.
Edit: decided to skip the silicone outer mould and just made a tube out of material that resin won’t bond to, so it’s now filled up with resin which can be extracted on Friday. It should be sufficiently cured to start shaping it next week, and it’ll only take a few minutes of that to get it playable.
If I may a keyless flute with Eb key is functional for just about anything.
The cross fingerings from baroque flutes work pretty well and you are
fully chromatic. Doable.
Experiment completed early. The tone is horrible when I replace the descant recorder head section with a quenilla head section made with identical interior geometry. I think this is caused by the bore being narrower relative to the jet of air I’m blowing into it. I find it easy to get good tone out of quenas (bore 16-22 mm), but quenillas with 15 mm bore are noticeably harder to play without the sound turning ugly (they need to be played with more force to find the high quality notes), but with the recorder it’s absolutely hideous, the lowest notes being worst affected. Maybe a treble recorder would work better. The blowing angle doesn’t help though - you wouldn’t have the underside of the ramp horizontal on a quena.
I then fitted a windway to it to see if the problem was caused by the loose-fitting tuning slide, but good tone was immediately restored. This particular windway is very narrow, and the result was a recorder that plays quietly, so I’ll turn this into a proper whistle/recorder head for night playing. They ought to have made them that way for schools.
Piccolos have narrow bores and work fine, so maybe it’s less of an issue with transverse flutes, but I’ll leave that experiment to someone who knows how to make those. Even with the poor tone though, I can hear that a lot of the character of the recorder is retained.
Any chance you can include a couple of photos of your experiment? I couldn’t quite picture what it is you have tried to do.
I’ll have to make a video for that. I’ve done more work on it now though and can get much better tone out of it with only the note D still having an ugly sound to it - I had to file away a lot of the blow-in end to make it slope so that I could direct the jet of air in a better angle. The lower notes are all inferior though, most likely because the bore is so narrow down that end. The high notes are actually pleasant. Interestingly, it’s the D that’s the strongest note when playing it with the recorder head - it has greater resonance than the rest, and yet it’s the poorest note with the quena-style head.
This is quite interesting. I would not have expected the performance to be so poor with the quena mouthpiece. When I’ve made quena with tapered bores, I didn’t find that there was a problem with power on any of the notes including the fundamental (bell) note, though it did make the second octave sharp (and the third octave fundamental note was really sharp). Of course a recorder has quite small holes compared to something like a quena, so that will make a difference.
Part of what I was hoping to get a glimpse of was the blowing notch that you created, and its position relative to the window of the recorder head joint (meaning is the current quena-style blowing notch occupying the same position that the window of the recorder used to occupy?).
Big improvement: it’s still evolving as I modify the shape of the blow-end by filing more material away to try to improve the blowing angle relative to the wedge (by which I mean the thing with the sharp edge that you blow the jet of air at). On a quena you normally have the end square on to the tube, but I’m now sloping it by nearly 30°. The most recent bit of filing has turned D from ugly to pleasant, as well as making it resonate stronger than the other notes just as when the recorder head section is used, so the fault was down to me not getting the angle right before. If I make another of these, I’ll change the wedge alignment instead to make it like a conventional quena while retaining the rest of the bore exactly as it is in the recorder. The only note that sounds a little sub-par is now C; it seems to have another note running along with it a tone below, but I can hear that faintly too when playing it with the recorder head. The first octave can be blown into tune with the second.
The blowing notch (wedge) is very similar to the one on the recorder: slightly rounded at the edges as that was easier for my tools; in the same position as on the recorder, the internal surface of the wedge is horizontal as on the recorder; the external surface of the wedge slopes at the same angle as on the recorder. The whole thing is essentially the same as a recorder with the “beak” cut off. The only significant difference now is that the angle I’ve had to file the end to means that the average length of the bore is a fraction less than before, but that doesn’t appear to be catastrophic for the tuning.
I now find that I can improve my quenillas too by filing a bit more material off the blow-end (just taken a whole millimetre off one). I had diverted my efforts into whistle head converters for them as that was getting a beautiful sound, and I didn’t want to risk spoiling them for that by changing them any further, until now. This is a good advance towards making more professional instruments. Still a lot of work to do though as I continue to learn how to craft them better.
Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF-FGopm-vo&ab_channel=DavidCooper
Great video! That really helped me get a grip on what you were doing.
And a very interesting result–I’m intrigued by the unusual ramping on the inside of the bore (as shown by your cast of the inside).
Something you might consider is creating from scratch a simple, cylindrical head joint. Meaning, rather that recreating the inner bore of the recorder and then adding a mouthpiece, create instead a length of tubing with the correct diameter but leaving out that inner ramp and any other anomalies, and then put a more classic quena blowing notch on it. You might have to size the notch to be proportional to the bore, but I’d be very curious as to whether that would change the tone and response.
And one thing that also occurred to me is that with such a small recorder, and especially given that it’s a conical bore instrument, your blowing notch on a quena head joint would need to be fairly small compared to your quena. But a down-sized version of that quena notch, reproduced to match it in every other respect (meaning the “ramp” on the outside and inside of the notch) would probably give you a cleaner result. Plus your embouchure is going to have to be much tighter and more focused than on a quena.
I was playing a dizi in high D not long ago, and these are in essence just a tiny transverse flute in D, same tuning as a high D pennywhistle. The embouchure hole is quite small–maybe 8mm wide and 6mm across? I’d have to measure it to be exact, but way smaller than anything I’m accustomed to playing–more like some of the Baroque flutes, only with a very narrow bore (about 12mm). And the player is obliged to really focus and tighten up the air stream to get a clean tone. Quite a different experience. I wonder if the quena/recorder will require the same sort of adjustment?
Anyway, I’m interested to hear where your experiment goes!
Nice video David!
For what it’s worth, here are a couple of thoughts I have on this. First, I think the fundamental approach is very much worthwhile. But I think you need to be careful about a couple of small details. One is the angle at which you cut off the top of the tube. Most whistles and recorders terminate the upper end of the bore perpendicular to the axis of the bore. When you cut off the top at an angle and then seal the end with your chin or lower lip, as with a quena, you are slightly modifying the bore length at the head, by losing a bit of bore volume under the window. This might affect things. I’d tend to try to account for this loss by very slightly (proportionately) extending the head bore length, so that the end can still be cut at an angle (which is necessary for ergonomic reasons).
Second, the air flow that leaves your lip embouchure when playing a quena, or any embouchure flute, is not really the same shape as the flow leaving a rectangular recorder or whistle windway. For optimal tone, you need to really match the shape of the labium edge to the shape of the air flow. The U-shaped labium in a quena is probably not shaped that way by accident! One of the most critical, and finicky aspects of flute making is the embouchure cut, where the minutest details can make the difference between a great sounding flute and a mediocre or poor one.
On the bore profile, I would avoid messing with the body bore profile at the foot, or anywhere else, at least initially. The bore profile and tone hole lattice all work together to enable the tuning of the notes over the full range, including the cross fingered notes and the ones that use higher harmonics. If you mess with the bore profile you throw all this off. It would probably be easy enough to get the low octave notes to work, for example, with a simple cylindrical bore. But if you want to preserve the chromaticity across the full range, then the bore profile and tone hole lattice details really matter, right down to the finest details.
I do agree that these higher pitched recorders and whistles are harder to play with an embouchure-style head than a lower pitched instrument would be. The reason is the smaller size of the embouchure hole, which has to match the small bore, and the very tight embouchure required from the player, which is very strenuous on the embouchure muscles. Playing a piccolo is much more “heavy lifting” for the embouchure than playing a flute, for example. So, I think your approach would naturally yield much better results when applied to a lower pitched instrument than say a high C or D instrument. Something like a low F might be an easier target.
Thanks - it took six goes to get a concise video that covered everything, although I forgot to demonstrate the ramp angles in the final version. I don’t think the interior surface is so unusual as quenas often do it like that too, though sloping down as they go in rather than being horizontal. Others lack the internal ramp (they call it a bisel in Spanish, which must be our word bezel). Domingo Uribe talks about there being dos biseles as he has two of them in his designs, one inside and one out. If you don’t have an interior one, the thing just curves in multiple directions to merge seamlessly with the cylinder of the bore.
Something you might consider is creating from scratch a simple, cylindrical head joint. Meaning, rather that recreating the inner bore of the recorder and then adding a mouthpiece, create instead a length of tubing with the correct diameter but leaving out that inner ramp and any other anomalies, and then put a more classic quena blowing notch on it. You might have to size the notch to be proportional to the bore, but I’d be very curious as to whether that would change the tone and response.
Yes, that’s what I’ll do with the next one as I want to be able to blow it the conventional way. I doubt it’ll make any recognisable difference to the sound quality beyond making it easier to get the best out of it. I’ve done a lot of experiments with varying the shape of the ramp on quenas by using blu-tack, and really all it does is make it harder or easier to get better quality notes with multiple solutions providing the same character of high-quality notes. You can also go to a lot of trouble shaping the ramp and the sharpness of its edge, then stick a lump of blu-tack over it and find that it often makes no difference. It’s mostly about how you blow the jet of air at it and how easy it is to get that right for a given shape.
And one thing that also occurred to me is that with such a small recorder, and especially given that it’s a conical bore instrument, your blowing notch on a quena head joint would need to be fairly small compared to your quena. But a down-sized version of that quena notch, reproduced to match it in every other respect (meaning the “ramp” on the outside and inside of the notch) would probably give you a cleaner result. Plus your embouchure is going to have to be much tighter and more focused than on a quena.
That’s something I still need to work on. I asked the Chilean quena maker mentioned above for advice on that, and got the impression that the escotadura (window) should be of much the the same size as on a quena, and they do work that way, though shortening the window length does seem to help. I still haven’t made one that I’m fully happy with, but I’m getting good sound out of a couple of them if I press into them harder which indicates that I probably need to file more material off the blowing end. I really prefer them as whistles though, so it’s more of a priority to take things in that direction as the tone I get from them is beautiful.
I was playing a dizi in high D not long ago, and these are in essence just a tiny transverse flute in D, same tuning as a high D pennywhistle. The embouchure hole is quite small–maybe 8mm wide and 6mm across? I’d have to measure it to be exact, but > way > smaller than anything I’m accustomed to playing–more like some of the Baroque flutes, only with a very narrow bore (about 12mm). And the player is obliged to really focus and tighten up the air stream to get a clean tone. Quite a different experience. I wonder if the quena/recorder will require the same sort of adjustment?
My main problem with them is doubtless lack of skill with the highest notes. I can get half way up the third octave on a Quena in G, and no higher on a quenilla in C, so there’s really no gain from using a quenilla unless you have those lip muscles in top condition for that, other than that it’s easier to carry in a pocket and fine for tunes with a normal whistle range, but the note quality is just so good when they’re made into whistles that I’d rather just play them as whistles.
Thanks - I need to do more where I play the instrument properly because it may have more potential yet than it initially seemed. I’m getting all the notes but the lowest to sound nice sometimes, but it’s uncomfortable and I’ve only just realised part of the reason it may be so awkward: I need to try filing off the spikes to either side of the window to make them perpendicular to the part pressed against my lower lip because they’re likely inhibiting the movement of the upper lip.
For what it’s worth, here are a couple of thoughts I have on this. First, I think the fundamental approach is very much worthwhile. But I think you need to be careful about a couple of small details. One is the angle at which you cut off the top of the tube. Most whistles and recorders terminate the upper end of the bore perpendicular to the axis of the bore. When you cut off the top at an angle and then seal the end with your chin or lower lip, as with a quena, you are slightly modifying the bore length at the head, by losing a bit of bore volume under the window. This might affect things. I’d tend to try to account for this loss by very slightly (proportionately) extending the head bore length, so that the end can still be cut at an angle (which is necessary for ergonomic reasons).
It does indeed affect things, making the instrument play slightly sharp, but that can be countered using the tuning slide. I’ll shape the ramp like on a conventional quena with the next prototype. Interestingly though, when I add a fipple to one of my quenillas or to that modified recorder, it works horizontally regardless of the ramp angles, which is not the case when blowing it with my lips. The jet of air from the windway must just be so much more regular, which is also why whistles create such sweet, pure notes without the same “flute” character.
"Second, the air flow that leaves your lip embouchure when playing a quena, or any embouchure flute, is not really the same shape as the flow leaving a rectangular recorder or whistle windway. For optimal tone, you need to really match the shape of the labium edge to the shape of the air flow. The U-shaped labium in a quena is probably not shaped that way by accident! One of the most critical, and finicky aspects of flute making is the embouchure cut, where the minutest details can make the difference between a great sounding flute and a mediocre or poor one.[/quote]
There are quenas with an “escotadura recta” - straight edge to the ramp instead of the usual curve, but they have a reputation for being a bit harder to play. My quenilla whistle adapters though are producing beautiful notes with standard curved shape, and I wonder if that may actually be optimal. If you think about it, the air blown through the middle of the windway should be fastest as it’s slowed more to either side by the side walls, so the edge you’re aiming at maybe should be shaped to take that into account. It may be that they’re normally cut straight here because of the tools that are traditionally made to make them, and the fact that our tradition is to make flutes with a hole on the top rather than having them end-blown, while the ones with wedge shaped ramps, whistles and recorders, are likely done with chisels rather than round files to get a shape the lines up nicely with the windway along the full legth. When you use a chisel for two slopes that meet each other, you get a straight edge. When you use a round file, you get a curved edge. I don’t know how they shaped their quenas before European tools arrived though - most likely filing with rounded edges of flatish stones.
On the bore profile, I would avoid messing with the body bore profile at the foot, or anywhere else, at least initially. The bore profile and tone hole lattice all work together to enable the tuning of the notes over the full range, including the cross fingered notes and the ones that use higher harmonics. If you mess with the bore profile you throw all this off. It would probably be easy enough to get the low octave notes to work, for example, with a simple cylindrical bore. But if you want to preserve the chromaticity across the full range, then the bore profile and tone hole lattice details really matter, right down to the finest details.
Yes, that could be a big problem. With any luck though, I might turn out to be wrong about the poor quality of the lowest notes. I’ve got pretty good quality out of all but the the lowest note now, though it’s really poor. Maybe the fact there are two small holes there instead of one big one is the cause of the problem, or the huge slot underneath it that could be disrupting the air flow, and that’s only there to let you rotate it to the most comfortable angle for the length of your little finger. That could be fixed.
I do agree that these higher pitched recorders and whistles are harder to play with an embouchure-style head than a lower pitched instrument would be. The reason is the smaller size of the embouchure hole, which has to match the small bore, and the very tight embouchure required from the player, which is very strenuous on the embouchure muscles. Playing a piccolo is much more “heavy lifting” for the embouchure than playing a flute, for example. So, I think your approach would naturally yield much better results when applied to a lower pitched instrument than say a high C or D instrument. Something like a low F might be an easier target.
I would have used my treble recorder if I could find it, but I haven’t seen it for about 20 years. I really don’t like recorder fingering, so I switched over to whistles and quenas and only have a few pieces that I prefer to play on a descant recorder.
I’ve made a new quena-head for the recorder, and this time cut a quena notch into it so that it can be blown in the standard way. The resulting recorder flute plays well this time, and it sounds very recorder-like indeed. I’ll make a new video about it soon. Before making this new part, I did further work on the previous one and managed to get good sound out of all notes other than C. With the new one though, even C sounds good, so it’s a much more viable instrument than I thought. I’ll have to do an outer mould to do the job properly (for aesthetics reasons), and I’ll embed magnets in the end for fitting windway attachments so that it can be played quietly in recorder mode.
What you seek is a Giorgi flute.
https://vmcollectables.com/product/giorgi-flute/
They’re a little strange in scaling, but the idea is solid. The mouthpiece – basically a flute mouthpiece on a vertical flute – works pretty well.
You need long fingers, though, to cover the left-hand C# hole. Giorgi fixed that years later with the addition of a key, but then that led to more keys and pretty much negated the 11-hole keyless concept.
I’m working with a flutemaker at the moment to design a retrofit Giorgi headpiece that will work on a regular 8key flute. The idea is for when the left wrist is so bothersome you can’t play traversely. This would solve that. Will let you know whenever progress is beyond prototypes. Stay tuned.
Hmmm. I’ve played an original Giorgi, and have since tried to mock up an example out of electrical conduit, and I reckon the idea is fatally flawed. I think there’s something dodgy about trying to blow directly against the returning reflected wave, but I’ll be delighted to be proven wrong!
For those not familiar with the Giorgi, here’s a great article by Rick Wilson: http://www.oldflutes.com/articles/giorgi.htm
And you can see Giorgi’s Patent Application here: https://www.mcgee-flutes.com/Giorgi-flute-patent.htm
But I also agree we desperately need to come up with a vertical and/or angled version of our flute to make it easier for we senior citizens to keep playing. I had hoped to get to this myself by now, but I’m still overwhelmed with orders. I’m practicing saying “No”, but I’m clearly not good at it!
My teeth are gritted though this time. Which makes it hard to play flute…
I reckon one or both of the approaches that the Flutelab people use for modern flutes would work for us just as well. See https://www.flutelab.com/
Go down to the images of the Swan Neck and Vertical headjoints to see the full details.
Happy to collaborate with anyone on this topic. I think it’s important.
Is the main problem for seniors the horizontal hold, or the weight being held that way?
At my ripe old age of 71 I can still handle playing my big and very heavy Lehart Bb six-key flute in Blackwood, but not for extended periods. I don’t find my Noy 8-key Blackwood D flute uncomfortable to play, not yet, but I’ve got what may be some developing arthritis in my right shoulder that may eventually be a problem.
If that happens, I think I’d just switch to my Olwell bamboo keyless D flute, which is so lightweight it sometimes feels like it wants to float up in the air when I’m holding it.
Anyway, just my opinion, but I think lower weight might be the direction to go for a “senior” version of our Irish flutes, rather than a drastically different vertical design. At least if you want to sell them. If the problem is the horizontal hold, fluters already have the option of a vertical hold with a low D whistle, although it means giving up dynamic range and keys.
Would a 3D printed flute be the answer if the solution is lighter weight? I don’t know if the materials used would be lighter in weight than Delrin for the same wall thickness, but it might at least reduce the weight of the keys for a keyed version. And maybe thick walls like a wooden flute aren’t essential anyway. My Olwell bamboo flute has very thin walls and sounds great.