A Flute Maker's Year

[Casey Burns]

2013 (not 2014! Sorry....) was not a bad year for making flutes. 188 flutes out the door, including several Folk Flutes, a number of keyed flutes, low flute combos, and Requintas pitched in F. Last year the total flute count was 167. This was probably my most prolific year ever! I have one flute to complete today and then I am done with flute production until January. However, I have some bagpipe projects that I want to do for myself and others over the Holidays.

Happy Solstice Everybody!

Casey



1st column from top: Folk Flutes on pins, keys in progress, 3 keyed flute, April's Folk Flute batch

2nd column: 3 flutes from July, Boxwood from Octopus, Curly South African Olive, 3 keyed flute in F (Requinta) with the old bayonet that I used for its reamer

3rd column: Flute making shots, New book by my friend Cano (Alexandre Cadarso Suarez) featuring Requinta music from Galicia, December's Folk Flute batch, and me measuring a Claude Laurent Glass Flute at the Dayton Miller Collection at the Library of Congress. Cano was the recipient of that 3 keyed Requinta pictured in the 2nd column. Here he is demonstrating a boxwood Requinta in G that I made him in 2011 - see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGPzHOvRR3o

4th column: The Galician Pipe Band that I belong to performing at Lark Camp, and us performing afterwards after 2 additional intensive workshop days at the Freight and Salvage in Berkeley. Cano is in front of the hurdy gurdy players and I am standing next to him. We are all playing the Requintas that I made. A page from of my data on a Claude Laurent Glass Flute at the DCM, and an interesting key retrofit solution. Our Berkeley concert is on YouTube. Search on YouTube for "Gaita Extravaganza" and you will find it. Also search for "cbwim" and you will see all of my other videos.

5th column: Celtic Knotwork on a Bb flute, engraving by master Highland Bagpipe Maker Murray Huggins (see http://www.colinkyobagpipes.com ), 4 keyed Bb flute, an old Bulgarian Gaida chanter that I turned back in the 90s that I finally retrieved, and an accidental self portrait out in my workshop (I was checking to see if my POV GoPro camera was recording!)

[eilam]

I'm very happy for you Casey, financially, this year was very hard for me.
that Olivewood flute is amazing !!!

[rama]

do you know where you are right now?
and what is your name?
don't move until the paramedics arrive.

[Casey Burns]

I think I do now..... (note - the date is now corrected)

Am all done, except for one flute that I have to take out of the oil. And tonight I attended a local Irish session - first one in years for me really. I've avoided them for decades (usually due to the smoke) and kept myself as a weak player. This has actually benefitted my instruments some. As a maker I know what I want to get out of my instruments - and by maintaining my chops on the weak side, I forced my instruments to do all the heavy lifting for me. It makes them easy for beginning players to play.

Well now at age 58, I am kind of at that stage that I don't want to become an even weaker player! Quite the opposite. And the gaita playing has helped keep my fingers nimble. I actually really enjoyed tonight's session and kept up with most of the tunes. I plan to become a regular if my time allows.

Plus its fun to go out and make music with friends - rather than only cloister myself in my rather grim and uncomfortable workshop making the hardware for everyone else to go out and make music with, while I am usually too exhausted by the end of the day to practice anything. So tomorrow I am getting together with my friend and Banjo Guitar mentor WB Reid and his lovely wife Bonnie, and on Friday I am showing up at a swing session with Ranger and the Rearrangers. Ranger's dad and I might try something wild together - he's an accomplished accordionist and I am bringing my Gaita in C (and sending him some Gaita tunes beforehand). Am hoping to do some musical activity such as these everyday for the next 3 weeks before I start turning flutes for everyone again!

Casey

[tompipes]

Well done Casey!

That's a lot of happy flute players out there.

Tell me how does the olive wood compare to the Turkish boxwood.

I use Octopus boxwood for mounts for uilleann pipes and I find it quite dry so I have to steep it in oil for a bit to stop it cracking or warping. I've made a few chanters from it and over half warped even after years of resting in a climate controlled place. It may not be all the woods fault either.

I might try some olivewood as a lighter coloured timber option. I'd be content to work with mopane, ebonys and rosewoods but some people ask for a lighter coloured wood. So my real question is does olivewood darken much after being worked and oiled.

Again, congratulations on a great years work!

Tommy

[Lucas]

Tommy,

I've had similar experiences with boxwood from Octopus. All my flutes came out warped or oval. I was going to try Casey's way of preparing the wood the pieces I have left.
Olivewood does darken quite a bit over time getting an orange hue.
The best alternative I found for boxwood is zapatero or south american boxwood. It's much more stable and very light in color.

[Casey Burns]

The boxwood that I am using from Octopus is at least 5 years or more since cut, dry at around 5%, and stable as far as cracking is concerned. Most of the blue stain-free boxwood that he sells is only 1-2 years since cut and requires additional seasoning. That being said, I have found little or no difference in how the wood warps in use between this relatively new boxwood and some excellent French and English boxwood that has air dried since the 1980s. It all has a tendency to warp.

Thus I use a variant of the technique Rod Cameron developed of microwaving the wood to size or "prewarp" the wood before use, so that the final shape is less likely to warp in use. Similar to preshrinking fabric before sewing it into a garment. In my practice I turn the wood sections round, and then pilot bore the sections to 1/2" or 5/8" for head joints. The ends are sealed with a polyurethane sealer. The wood pieces are then microwaved at 30% power for 10 minutes. The wood is then left to sit for the next 2-3 weeks. Any warping that it will do happens in the first 96 hours depending upon other conditions. Its faster in the summer. The wood is then turned to its final shape and usually doesn't change shape further. Rod nukes his wood much longer, then soaks the wood in water immediately afterwards. Then lets the wood dry for a month or two.

I've only done one flute with South American Olive. My impression is that it is very boxwood-like in tone but with a bit more projection, like blackwood. I suspect it has similar tendencies as boxwood as far as warping etc. so I plan to give the next flute out of it the microwave treatment.

Casey

[mkchen]

Casey, my friend Will said he saw you at the Global Bean session last week! Good to hear you're back in the game. I'll be seeing WB tonight at the monthly Northern tunes session at the Couth Buzzard, same venue where I host my twice monthly Irish session. Have fun!

Ming

[Julia Delaney]

From Casey Burns: "...by maintaining my chops on the weak side, I forced my instruments to do all the heavy lifting for me. It makes them easy for beginning players to play."

I really don't understand why being a weak player would result in a better flute maker. I would think that a better player would be able to make a better flute. An accomplished player is much better able to discern weaknesses in a flute. Beginning/weak players have weak embouchures and tend to overblow, resulting in tuning problems, to mention just one issue.

[Casey Burns]

Julia, its one of my trade secrets. I have not always been a weak flute player. Quite the opposite. I started messing with flutes at age 6, playing around with an old family Civil War era fife that I still have. All throughout grade school and high school and into college I played the silver flute, and even made it to one of the preparatory orchestras of the Portland Junior Symphony before high school graduation ended that. There were days in which I would practice from the moment I woke up to the moment I fell asleep. On sustained tone competitions - to see who was the last person playing amongst a group of flute makers, I was always the last person standing. Always. But there were way too many better flutists with nicer flutes (all Haynes, while I was struggling with my crummy big-bored Artley) for me to consider a professional carer as a symphonic player. Composing also seemed much more interesting and it remains so. Then I had a brief flute playing hiatus after college abruptly ended due to my inability to afford it.
A number of years later after involving myself in lutherie, I started making flutes and immediately for Irish music, since there was local demand for it with Jan Deweese living and teaching close by and getting the Portland Irish Music scene started, along with Artichoke Music which had a nice collection of flutes for sale including some Rudalls and Clementis, not to mention Kevin Burke and Mícheál Ó Domhnaill who arrived a little later. I was there when it started. I also had some excellent instruction and played in sessions at Lark Camp and other venues, as well as for contradances in Portland and elsewhere. The pub scene though was something I couldn't handle due to the secondhand smoke. One hour at Murphy's in Seattle and I would be essentially disabled for days. I am still hypersensitive to tobacco smoke, probably from growing up in it, as my parents both chain smoked.

During those years in the mid 1980s I was making Pratten copies (the originals I measured are owned by Mickie Zekley) and the west coast term for my flutes was "Honker", nicknamed by Richard Cook who taught us at Lark Camp. I was playing a bunch of flute then and got a big tone out of my instruments and wanted to keep getting that big tone out of my instruments.

But then I got distracted by bagpipes and other types of music. French bagpipes, Spanish, Uilleann, Northumbrian, Swedish, Breton, Dudelsacks, Lowland, Scottish Small Pipes, Union Pipes. And then there were Bombardes and other noisy instruments. I am still distracted by these, especially the Galician Gaita which I do play regularly and increasingly. Then reed making and I was one of the "yogurt reed" pioneers. Meanwhile all the Irish sessions where I lived were just too dangerous smoke-wise so I avoided them like the plague. I got out of the habit of playing the flute recreationally totally and confined my flute playing to the workshop, only during tuning and voicing and testing. At one point I was living with another full time musician and she occasionally gave me a hard time saying that I should practice all the time and be out trying to play as much music on the flute as possible, if I wanted to consider myself a legitimate flute maker. Instead I was retreating into my workshop and feeling bad about myself for not being out playing so much. I grew sort of reluctantly content with the idea of "performing with my lathe" and avoiding the stage.

In the workshop however, I always stuck to what the flutes should feel like to the player and sound like as well, etc.. What I didn't realize until about a decade or more later is that as my embouchure weakened from this lack of regular playing and practicing, that I was iteratively forcing my instruments to do all the heavy lifting to create this big tone and pleasant response and feel, which I still wanted and could understand. This can only happen when one tunes and voices several flutes a year and my output has always been around 100 flutes a year minimum. (This year the number is currently 186 but I have two other flutes finished (one is a Mopane Standard Folk Flute that isn't spoken for - let me know if anyone is interested) and I have a number of factory second flutes that I am donating to a Galician Music school in Spain. This year my output of flutes sent out into the world may just hit 200 for the first time).

This is also possible when one has that fore-knowledge of what a well playing flute should feel like, and how big a tone sounds, etc. I can still get a big tone on a crummy flute if its capable of a big tone, but not for long before my embouchure entirely poops out. So I have that muscle memory (similar to how this 58 year old has the memory of being able to ride bicycle 100 miles a day over mountain passes 30 years ago!) - just not the muscle strength to do it very long. However, this has guided my flute design by feel and the result is that my flutes end up being very forgiving to a beginning player - and these players make up the bulk of my business. These flutes also end up working very well in the hands of a capable player. Thus my flutes span the range of people who have never played a flute before to such players as Grey Larsen, John Skelton and Matt Molloy regularly playing on my low flutes in Bb and A - all guided by the same tuning and voicing principles and practice.

This practice also requires never allowing one's flute design to fossilize into something unvarying, as far as embouchures go. I don't stick to the 7 degree standard that Rockstro described of Rudall flutes in the 19th century - but I have seen several flutes by modern makers with pretty much the same embouchures as the Rudall and Pratten originals. These still work for those flutes and play well if done well. But my flutes have their own unique bore profiles and even these haven't settled. Other criteria such as making the flute easier for smaller hands has driven my design some through years of trial and error. I am about to rework the entire bore design on my Standard models, mostly due to the fact that my current reamers have about had it and are on their last legs. Its an opportunity to address some 3rd octave tuning issues (my smaller handed flutes don't produce a very nice high E in the 3rd octave, which is usually not a problem in Irish Music - but is sometimes if one wants to play jazz). The nice thing about making several flutes a year (the majority of which are my inexpensive Folk Flutes which are acoustically the same design as my expensive ones) is that it gives me lots of opportunity to innovate and practice and experiment. It keeps my tuning and voicing skills in shape. Every flute is essentially a prototype for the next. I like the fact that my design is constantly evolving.

I know this may seemed counterintuitive. This has been my experience. I know that I want to get a big sound out of my flutes. I just don't want to have to work hard to get it. Having a flute that plays so easily out in the market results in a happy clientele and helps to keep me in business.

I gotta go wrap presents for the family now that everyone (well, just Nancy. Our daughter Lila flies in tomorrow) is in bed.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Casey

[Squeeky Elf]

Thanks for the peek behind the curtain Casey. I am a proud owner of one of those 188 flutes!

[Nanohedron]

An old bayonet for a reamer! Swords into plowshares indeed.

[jim stone]

Really interesting posts, Casey. Thanks.

[Mettadore]

Congratulations Casey. I'm one of Jan's former students (miss him terribly, but live in Hood River, so can't do lessons anymore) and have coveted his flute you made for years.

-John Metta