John C said in a different post that : “The cut is a rounded oval, not an easy embouchure, but worth it in the long run.”
I have a flute with three hjs - one with a smallish round cut, one with an oval cut, and one with a new, two semi-circles cut. All three play well but sound different to me, though not to listeners apparently. The oval cut is about 12mm x 10mm, the others smaller, and it gives the most volume and honk. Its the one I’ve been playing the longest and like the most.
So I’m interested in why the oval cut “is worth it in the long run?” Is there anything I should be trying to develop with an oval cut in particular?
The “problem” with modern embouchure cuts is they work too well! It doesn’t matter how you blow they still work, so you don’t get any feedback on how you should blow. With an oval cut like on the antique flutes I play they don’t work very well at all unless you blow them properly, so you get continuous feedback on how to improve your blowing. And with the better blowing comes tone, and control of that tone. Plus on the older flutes the tuning all falls into place as well.
Which isn’t to say you couldn’t get there with a modern cut, and it isn’t to say that a modern cut wouldn’t work even better than an old oval if you already had the blowing sorted out. But personally I found the feedback essential, although it did take a few years.
I’ve had a long, very informative PM on this that echos your comments, so the message I’m getting so far is to stick to the large oval embouchure, which I’m happy to do as I get a good reverberating low D and effortless higher octave with a volume I can’t get on the others - including a conical blackwood, with a similarly large, oval embouchure.
I’ve tried two different flutes with both modern- and traditional-cut embouchures. I had a Noy flute for about a week with two headjoints and the same body. What I found was that the modern-cut had amazing power and was capable of playing further into the third octave. But the traditional oval cut was capable of a much broader sound palate. And that wasn’t primarily apparent to me, but to my wife, who convinced me to ask Peter to make me a flute with the Rudall-cut. More recently, I had a Copley Delrin with the modern-cut embouchure, which I liked very much, but when I bought one with the oval embouchure, I was absolutely blown away. I unpacked it, put it together, and started playing a tune, and my wife said “WOW”.
There’s a sound that’s accessible from the oval embouchure that’s not accessible from a straight blowedge. It may be what Graeme was alluding to – that your breath only couples well to the part of the embouchure hole that’s perpendicular to your breath. So the straight blowedge (modern or two semicircle) makes a purer sound, while the oval makes it easier to get the “dirty” sound that is characteristic of Irish music.
The circular embouchure is very unforgiving and, as Graeme said, will challenge you. I’ve just gotten to the point where I think I’m getting something out of my Noy traverso, which has a very small, almost circular embouchure. I wonder what I’ll get out of an Irish flute when I switch back in a month or so.
This is a very interesting topic for me and I appreciate the thought thats gone into these posts.
I have had a background in small bansuri and dizi embouchure to oval Irish (which was a challenge) and recently Boehm which was a cinch.
I have a large embouchre cut on the Boehm and a large bamboo C flute with lip plate made by David Chu.
One thing that the large cut has over the more precise oriented ones is, what I call, the “meri capacity”. Meri is a shakuhachi trad term for rolling your mouth angle for to obtain another note. This is much easier on large cuts which are very responsive to this. Like if you’re on your bell note but want to slide down to a lower note (that isn’t there as far as tone hole/key pad options) or youre at a keyed Eb and don’t want to clearly go down to D but rather to slide into it.
It is great fun to play a sweetheart A flute and other such high pitched flutes,
because the embouchures are demanding and you finally can make
them sound very interesting.