I was reading the fajardo thread, and I wondered…
Anyone made a similar wedge to the tipple and used it in a wooden, conical bore flute?
Wouldn’t be that hard to whip up…
John
no need…conical bore
A second question; Has anyone made a wedge for a whistle? Is there a size where it doesn’t accomplish anything? Ok that’s two questions.
Ron
Seems to me the tapered interior of the whistle head is, itself, a wedge.
If everyone only did things for a need, there would be a lot of inventions missing. I was just curious if anyone has ever tried it out.
John
sometimes I’m such a pragmatist
John, the purpose of the wedge is to improve the intonation of the upper part of the second octave due to the cylindrical bore of my flutes. A secondary benefit is that it does seem to make the flute tone more complex, which is good for ITM playing because it sounds more like a wooden flute when the flute is played with the wedge in position.
One of the common ways of correcting second octave intonation problems of a cylindrical-bore flute is to have a conical bore in the body of the flute. Most wooden Irish flutes are made this way, as well as tin whistles and wooden recorders. However, for concert flutes, Boehm’s great innovation was to form a parabolic taper in the headjoint of his flutes. With this tapered headjoint the flute body no longer needed to be conical for all of the notes in the range of the flute to be in tune.
To answer your questin about inserts in the bore of a conical-bore flute, I don’t see any good reason for doing this, and I haven’t heard about anyone who is doing it. I would tend to think of an insert in a conical-bore flute as an unnecessary obstruction. Of course, like many other things, I could also be wrong about this.
I don’t know much about flutemaking (yet), and I understand the reasoning. I’ve always wondered, if it’s a more complex tone that people are after, why they insist the bore be completely smooth. I would think that some minor ripples/waves/whatever would make a much more complex tone, hence the reason for thinking about the wedge.
I don’t know how much effect it would have on the tuning of the flute, etc., but I have that M&E that nobody wants (:D), maybe I’ll try some small wedges and see what happens. (Obviously not gluing them in.)
John
John, I think we have a trade-off here between complexity of tone and having the notes of a flute being in tune. With a digeridoo it is good to have a rough surface in the bore, because ripples and roughness cause some backpressure and will make the sound more complex, which is good. However, with the Irish flute you have finger holes. First and foremost, you want the flute to play as close to being in tune as possible. I think that any significant rippling or obstructions (other than small dimples or pits, of course) in the bore of the flute would make the tuning harder to control. It wouldn’t be a problem to get the first octave notes in tune, but I think the second octave notes would be problematic. No doubt, someone will soon figure out how to do this, though. This is your next assignment, John.
Glah, like I don’t have enough assignments finishing my teaching certification… 
John
I made a wedge for a whistle. It (or I) tended to play a bit flat in the upper octave. (moreso that whistles usually tend to). I shaped it out of some plasti-clay type stuff. It worked. Or at least seemed to, to my ear.
I have a low whistle I need to make one for. I shaped one out of the plasti-clay stuff for it, but it didn’t seem to help much. Perhaps it wasn’t big enough.
For some players, either of those whistles might not have been a problem without the wedge. But it was for me. I try to keep the amount of air to get the second volume to a minimum if I can. Upper octave can really come through too much at times. Pushing to get the upper octave in tune is just too much at times.
How do you come up with the dimensions? Volume displacement, ear, eyeball?
With 3D printing, it’s a fairly simple matter to print wedges of various sizes for experimentation. My 3D printed whistle head was designed with an internal wedge, I had to go through several iterations to find what worked best for evening out the upper and lower octaves. See the “instructions.txt” file here:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6844068/files
Iskandar
During a long phase where I experimented with Fajardo wedges, I did actually try one (just for grins) in a conical bore flute. As others have speculated, it was completely redundant. More than that, it threw off the tuning. Second octave got really sharp–too much. The conical bore had already solved that problem, so piling on with a wedge did nothing useful at all, and in fact it sort of choked off the response of the flute. To some degree the negatives stem from the size of the wedge, but for a flute with a conical bore, pretty much any wedge is too much.
I’ve also tried them on end blown flutes with cylindrical bores, such as whistles, and Chinese xiao. With whistles, there is some advantage for sure, and lots of whistle makers use some type of limited constriction at the head. But I found that it takes very little constriction on a whistle to balance the second octave tuning. My first attempts and constriction on whistles were too aggressive and the results were not good. So I kept dialing it back until the constriction was very subtle, and it worked great. With the Chinese xiao, one is dealing with a much higher aspect ratio for the bore (which is cylindrical), and constriction was also redundant, with the added factor that it spoiled the response in degree.
With non-whistle end blown flutes (like the xiao, the quena, the shakuhachi, etc.) the player is sealing the open end of the flute with their chin. This is the equivalent of taking your transverse flute, and moving the stopper so far forward that it actually occludes half of the embouchure hole! We all know that if you push the stopper forward, the second octave sharpens, so an end blown flute can be quite balanced between octaves without doing any type of constriction, relying instead on tweaks to holes size and placement, as well as keeping the wall thickness to a minimum. Using this approach on end blown flutes, the second octave is not perfect, but it is so close to being in pitch that the player can use technique to nudge it that final distance without messing up the tone color. And while whistles are similar (the sounding window is right up near the top of the bore), the “stopper” does not have quite the same relationship to the window (the equivalent of the embouchure hole on a transverse flute). Plus the player cannot control the focus of their air stream–they can only control the dynamics (blowing harder or softer). So the whistle can benefit from some constriction.
In terms of creating some resistance and bringing interest to the tone, I’m not a fan of a rough inner surface on the bore. It does create resistance, but I’ve never found it to be of a kind that I liked! It impeded the response of the flute. It does do some interesting things with the timbre at times, but at too high a cost in my view. A tapered bore (either body or head) creates a nice feeling of push-back, but the response is still sprightly and immediate. A rough bore felt like swimming with an anchor tied around the waist. In the world of shakuhachi, however, fans of the jinashi-style (natural bore bamboo) love the challenge of working with some of the anomalies that come from a less finished bore. Resistance and unexpected tone color and response are sometimes coveted as being part of the wabi-sabi aesthetic.