Bore roughness and tone

[GreenWood]

It is an interesting discussion. Personally I approach every instrument as having an individual character, even those that are meant to be identical. Therefore it is more a question of a player making their peace with that instrument, learning to compliment it as best possible, eventually naturally if you play it enough. I understand the aim for consistency, but perfection is a difficult complaint. So any rejected instrument is just a poor sad creature that has not found its partner, because you can make some kind of enjoyable music with just about anything.

With bores, when the sound becomes rougher than I am used to on my flute, half the time gently cleaning the embouchure is what is needed, half the time swabbing is the more noticeable. The embouchure is very very delicate in my opinion - I don't mean not robustly made enough but just reacts to variation most, a piece of lint or having inside bore edges not clean for example , shape and edges are very important especially if they are too far out of being acceptable ( the line there is hard to define but obvious enough if you recut an embouchure).

So I go for rough bore as being characterful, rough in the sense of not being a perfect cylinder. Too much fuzziness on the bore for whatever reason does tend to damp the tone though, that can be ok for some styles of playing also, but I find a good swabbing or oil occasionally keeps the tone in the "original" range if it loses some tone for that. Changes to bore shape roughness might be obvious enough to improve the quality of sound, but you have to be sure the new sound is really what you are after...because a flute will not sound or play quite the same afterwards ... and you cannot easily return it to previous state . So my advice is if anyone is trying to correct a flute, then over time unless they are sure. That means just letting repeated but more frequent cleaning, or repeated gentle polishing, reshape the bore and sound, and obviously when you are happy enough with it it is just a question of maintenance only.

I expect all sorts of bore finish were achieved in earlier days, and I expect serious makers chose a level that was found consistent , possibly aesthetic also, whatever that level was.

For polishing inside the bore, the best advice (and which applies for so many other facets of flute making or repair) I have is slower low power (e.g. battery drill) with the ratchet that disconnects the drive set so that it will stop spinning at the slightest extra resistance to simple spinning. It can always be slowly dialed up if it stops too often.

So that is a slightly different approach to it all maybe, and I don't say that any approach is more correct or better than the other - it really is up to any person to decide what suits them, to decide what they are looking for. When we are playing or learning music often our understandings and perceptions adjust to some degree as we we gain experience, with ambition tending to have to adapt to reality to a varying degree rather than the other way around (and I don't mean that at all in a negative sense).