I’ve been thinking about this and saw it mentioned on the “small hole flutes” thread. It seems that the part of the flute that has the greatest impact is the embouchure hole and how it’s cut. Perhaps the makers here can speak on this. Certainly tone is generated via the emb. hole, but also intonation, playability–I just don’t know for sure. Screw up the embouchure and the flute is kindling.
jason
90% of the flute might be an overestimation, but I’d certainly go so far as to say that it can be 50% of the problem. Which, as I sit here thinking further about it, makes some sense, because the flute is the combination of a generator (the embouchure hole) and a resonator (the long tube that normally sticks out to the right). Just like they used to say a car engine can only refuse to go for three reasons (fuel, spark and compression), we have basically two to worry about.
And what can be frustrating about an under-performing embouchure hole is that it can be quite hard to see why it’s under-performing. Normally, it’s dead obvious to the experienced eye. Sadly mishapen through lack of care or subsequent damage, an affront to the laws of acoustics and aerodynamics, and easily rectified.
Sometimes though it needs a microscope. I remember one time absolutely transforming a really high-end head with a single deft flick of the scalpel. The amount of wood removed would be unweighable. The owner was amazed. I was quite impressed too!
But sometimes, they just seem to have lost (or never had) the will to live. Those ones puzzle me, and I’ve listed that issue as one of the the things to address under the Flute Tone Investigations:
23. New heads on old flutes
I’m in a cleft stick on one of them. My inner scientist insists that the material a head is made of should not affect the tone (given identical dimensions, finish, etc). And yet I’m very aware of a certain unpleasant raspiness of tone that I associate mostly with flutes that have lip plates extending round to the blowing edge. So, whatever I find, one of me is bound to feel cheated! Or both.
Terry
I have taped over the finger holes and can still play a tune or two.
I have never been able to cover the embouchure and play.
The big hole down the center seems important too.
Length seems to have something to do with it too, my fife doesn’t play in D.
Find a tube, blow across the top and play any bugle tune. A bugle is a tube, so is a flute 99.9% of the time.
drainage, innit?
The embouchure fills quickly without it.
I know what you are saying Terry, sometimes the flute just doesn’t play, swap heads and the flute sings!
Other times I see people discarding nice head joints for a new replacement, when to me the original sounds better…
I wonder if there is any sharp edges in the air channel to cut the sound waves, on your questionable head joint?
liner edge on the edge of the embouchure, etc… But I am sure you know all that.
I have some flutes with lip plates like that, but they play nice and clear, like my nice old Blackman flute. Might be the way the lip plate edge is finished? The nice thing about the lip plate, the edge probably hasn’t changed much over the years, versus the wooden edge.
There are other factors besides the embouchure itself that might account for one head playing better than another. The most testable one is the cork position.
Then there are other factors such as the bore diameter. Sometimes a slightly wider bore will improve a flute. Or even a narrower bore. There is no way to predict this, except by testing. Easy to do if you make flutes - not so easy for players.
The position of the embouchure with respect to the flute body is also important. To stay at pitch, the embouchure will need to be sized larger if higher up on the head joint. Or smaller if closer to the body. Again, one observes this while making several flutes.
Then one runs into the embouchure with respect to where the bore goes from cylindrical in the head joint to conical in the body. Too high up or too far down can ruin the balance and sometimes the overall scaling intonation. There has to be a sweet spot. This is only found by making several flutes and tweaking this aspect to find that sweet spot. But putting a different head joint on with a slightly different embouchure to lower end length sometimes is the responsible factor above anything else. The embouchure or bore inside the head joint may have nothing to do with this.
As to the embouchure - there are several factors. Wall thickness, x versus y size, the shape of the undercutting, the edge sharpening, etc. When voicing flutes I try to stop when I sense that one additional cut with the knife will ruin the balance that I have just achieved. It takes making several flutes to learn just where this spot lives. And it can change over time as one’s reamers wear, and cut a slightly different bore pattern, or from other variables.
Don’t mess with and attempt to change the embouchures on your flutes, especially after you hear “advice” on C&F or elsewhere online! I don’t even mess with embouchures on old flutes, or ones made by other makers - and I have made thousands of wooden flutes! Simply won’t touch them - otherwise its a Pandora’s Box, kind of like that gusher in the Gulf.
Casey
IMO, the answer is an emphatic “NO.” I can make any embouchure work well, but there are other factors that are hard to overcome. I don’t have Casey’s or Terry’s knowledge to comment on things like bore size, but I do know that fingerhole size and placement make a lot of difference. If you don’t or can’t cover the holes, you’re in trouble. If the flute doesn’t seal, you’re in trouble. There are better and worse head joints/embouchures, but 90% of the flute? I don’t think so.
Nice thread. I suppose this goes without saying but at the end of the day, you’re only as strong as your weakest link. Putting a number such as 90% on the value of a flute component is perhaps misleading though I would say that if the headjoint is poorly made or has issues, you’ll want to figure that out if you want to sound the best you can on your given instrument (or get a different one). True, an experienced player can make any flute sound better than a less experienced player but this can only be relatively true and is why experienced players generally wind up playing flutes that give back what they’re putting in to them. (i.e. Any pros playing pakistani Irish flutes out there? 
It does make me wonder what percentage of the time spent on individual sections are to make.
Stopper, barrel, foot, rings, keys, head joint, body, etc.
IMHO it is impossible to assign percentages to certain parts of flutes to express how much they form sound/tone/playability, except one*. The flute is a system of different parts (including the player) and if you change one variable, others will change as well. A headjoint that works great might become less resonant when you change the position of a tone hole or two. A change in the bore profile might render a bad headjoint great, or a great one bad. Changing the cork position might render a difficult flute into an easy player for person A, but mess it up for person B. All that isn’t static, but dynamic, and the goal is to find a good combination of parameters, as Casey said. Trying out different cork positions certainly is a good idea, as you won’t damage anything and the effect can be huge, really.
\
Thanks for all the posts, Chiffers. Of course, the percentage in the title is arbitrary and on the one hand rather meaningless. Good conversation starter, though, and made my point of how important the emb hole seems to be.
Cheers,
jason
it’s what separates 'em from the fipple flutes, innit
Aye.
So, can I say that 90% of the flute is actually the player?
Terry said, “It’s my routine experience that a 19th century flute usually benefits dramatically from being fitted with a new head.”
Just before I read this thread, I posted a new thread about how much my Boosey Pratten’s Perfected improved when I replaced the original head joint with my Olwell head joint. Maybe another example, Terry. I suppose it must be the cut of the embouchure, since they are similar heads in other regards.
90% ? Who knows? All I know is that it has transformed a real chore (filling the Pratten’s and getting enough breath to play a full phrase) to a pure pleasure. I can now play 8 to 12 bars with each breath, versus 3 or 4 with the original head joint.
Does the ‘routine’ mean ‘all such’, or merely ‘all which end up under a flute-surgeon’s care for any non-specific malaise’? Is suppose this means, are there a stack of 19th century flutes that you might see only to measure, which no one would consider mucking with the head joint that you include, regardless? Or is it the set of all flutes that provoke the jaundiced look of non-specific dissatisfaction that you mean?
Or more, by weight.
That’s what bothers me, Lars. Sometimes it’s really obvious what the difference is - the original has been hacked, or its edge is really rounded, or is not undercut at all, or something equally obvious. But often, the differences in performance are massive, but the difference in physical appearance is little. The discrepancy is enough that I think it warrants investigation, and I’ve listed it in the Picklist of Potential Investigations. The investigation might just point up how unobservant I am, but even that would be more comforting than wondering!
90% ? Who knows? All I know is that it has transformed a real chore (filling the Pratten’s and getting enough breath to play a full phrase) to a pure pleasure. I can now play 8 to 12 bars with each breath, versus 3 or 4 with the original head joint.
I’m glad others (and not just makers!) are finding the same thing. It would be well within the psychology of reasonable self-delusion for makers to think their heads were better than the old masters’! The probability is that there is a mix of reasons, which is the usual thing with flutes.
Terry
Closer to “all such”, but I’d have to jump in and say that’s unscientific, as I haven’t consistently tested all comers. (Which is more than a bit slack, given how easy it now is. I made up a special test barrel which enables me to fit my heads to almost all comers.)
Of course, I can’t be sure that if I found one of my heads better than the original, then the customer would too. But I’ve certainly made lots of new heads and had very positive feedback from the customers.
One factor that may be significant is that most of my heads are the “eccentric bore” type, which gives a deeper chimney with the usual outside diameter. So immediately we can’t be sure if that’s an issue in identifying reason for difference. Couple that with the usual day-to-day variability of a human player and you are much at sea. I hope that when I get to making the artificial flute blower, we might get the repeatability needed to determine these things.
Terry