Doc Jones wrote:But does a two-piece (ie Healy, Olwell or whatever) sound just as good as the standard?
Doc
By the way Jason, glad you're liking the M&E I quite liked it too, just don't need the keys. As for being a five-piece..doesn't matter 'cause it's polymer and you don't have to take it apart.
I've heard flutesmiths say that when you
get to keyed flutes, anyway, shorter pieces
enable you to save more of your work
if something goes wrong further down the
barrel. Possibly something like this pertains
to keyless flutes, too.
Doc Jones wrote:But does a two-piece (ie Healy, Olwell or whatever) sound just as good as the standard?
Mark Hoza says his does. He says he puts at much into cutting the headjoint of the no-ring, no-slide model I bought as he does in his full featured flute.
Other makers will probably answer this question honestly. The Healy web site says his simpler model has the "same embouchure" as his full featured flutes. I don't think many of these makers want to put their name on less than their best work.
Tell us something.: To paraphrase Mark Twain, a gentleman is someone who knows how to play the spoons and doesn't. I'm doing my best to be a gentleman.
mrosenlof wrote:Mark Hoza makes a two piece flute. I have one and like it even though he isn't one of the big shots.
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I have a Hoza 5 key, probably the only one in existence. I wouldn't say he isn't one of the big shots. Tried a Hammy and Grinter. and the Hoza was in the same league.No offence of course to Hammy and Grinter. My FLOA(?) stopped with the Hoza acquisition.
Tots Tolentino! Good to see you around here. I had your keyed M&E for a while, but eventually i had to sell it to make money to buy another flute. I agree, Mark makes great flutes. Unfortunately he isn't cheap either, but the flutes are gorgeous and sound great. And he's the nicest guy, he'll goes out of his way to help you get a good instrument.
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog!
--Wellsprings--
I theorize that the reasons flute makers make multiple-piece flutes are as follows:
1. It's easy to find short, good pieces of wood
2. If you screw something up you only have to pitch 1/5 of your work.
3. It's kind of a pain to work with a real long reamer.
4. It's easier to upgrade a 5-piece to a keyed flute because you only need to replace the mid-section (as does Hammy).
5. They really get a charge out of making tenon joints
OK, so I'm not so sure about that last one :roll:
It would be nice if someone who actually makes flutes could chime in and enlighten us.
Micah wrote:So the difference between a two piece and three piece (keyless) Healy is purely aesthetic?
I believe the reason Skip gives on his website for a more-piece is reason #4 above.
glauber wrote: I agree, Mark makes great flutes. Unfortunately he isn't cheap either, but the flutes are gorgeous and sound great. And he's the nicest guy, he'll goes out of his way to help you get a good instrument.
Actually, I bought my Hoza on a "how much flute can I get for how little money" experiment. I got his absolute cheapest model. It was $365 with a case and shipping from Australia. I've been extremely happy with the fluteness per dollar ratio.
To describe it a little more for Doc:
It's a large hole, large bore style made from Cooktown Ironwood. The wood is kind of a cinnamon brown with a wavy white grain pattern. It is a two piece flute, with no tuning slide or metal rings. The single joint is thread wrapped. The headjoint is turned with something of a bulge around the socket since there is no metal to strengthen it, the foot and head ends are also rounded making the whole shape more soft and curvy rather than hard and angular. The wood is dense, and the flute is not light. There is obvious hand work on the embouchure hole and the tone holes (overcutting on all).
The finger spread is not difficult for me at all. The right hand holes are placed in a slight arc, making them very easy to reach. (I don't have small hands, but not huge either). I have little problem going back and forth from this to a Bohm flute.
It's hard to describe the sound, and of course it depends so much on the player. I'm not really an Irish musician. I do play Irish music occasionally, but I use this flute more for Japanese tunes or improvisation, often in the Japanese, or native american scales. I've started pollishing up a few Christmas songs recently. I've been playing flute for a little less than four years. I take lessons on the Bohm flute and probably play that about 10 times what I play a wooden flute.
I can play fairly loud, but not as loud as on my Yamaha. The sound is mellower than I get from silver. I can get a nice focused sound, or play it more open. If I try, I can sometimes get a reedy sound, but that's not normally what I want. It plays pretty well in tune. First C-nat seems best fingered 0xx x00. If I recall correctly, the high C-nat is only really there with 0xx xx0. Either 0xx 000 or xxx 000 is OK for the high D. The low end is plenty strong, but I haven't gotten (or tried!) much above the D above the staff.
I'm happy with the thing. Having never played an Olwell, Hamilton, or other "famous maker", I can't give much of a comparrison...
All of your reasons are pretty much on the money Doc, the other reason is that people are making historic reproductions flaws & all. The old 5 piece flutes were made for a time when A wasn't defined as A=440 & flutists were expected to fudge around with several barrel joints & other contraptions to make one flute play everything from A=415 to 450.
Anyway, with more tenons there's more chances for air to leak & those tenons disrupt the bore.
As for the Skip question - The main difference between Skip's 2 piece & the 3 piece is that a three piece can be keyed up easier down the road. In fact I doubt we key 2 piece flutes.
PM with any questions if you want
Don't totally discount the ergonomic issues of making a flute with joints. Ergonomic in the sense of wanting to rotate the toneholes one way or another. . . you don't have to search very long in the annals of C&F to find discussions of how people have switched to the split-middle R&R style flute to bring the bottom tone holes into more optimal position. Most makers will do either design (head-body-foot, head-tophand-bottomhand-foot) for "either design" (Pratten, Rudall, whatever). Same can be said for key position . . . though I know that one of the motivations behind the long-body Pratten style is pinblock placement.
Though, I know first hand that timber is also an issue. I have a boxwood flute on order, and the maker asked me specifically if I was OK with a single middle section because he'd found a particularly nice long piece of boxwood.
I'm not a maker, but wish one would chime in, as this thread has gone to two pages with lots of opinions and very little fact.
That said, here's my take, based on listening to makers and playing flutes for some time.
While the embouchure cut is by far the most important part of a flute sound, there are also inside bore requirements, which would be more accessible to the maker in shorter segments to possibly fine-tune the overall sound, intonation, etc.. Some makers (Wilkes, I believe) chamber their flutes, or claim to, which means, apparently, that there are subtle variations inside the bore, as opposed to one long ream down to the end. There are also those that feel the end piece, on a Pratten, say, while not critical for tone, contributes somewhat, which is why there are often short and long foot segments offered, even without keys. Stuart's mention of shifting hand position is a good one, obviously not applicable to the Pratten one-middle piece style, but still, the middle piece is far shorter than one continuing into the foot joint.
For your basic keyless Irish playing, I think there is probably very little reason why a one-piece can't be as good as a multiple piece keyless flute, but in my experience, all the ones I've tried (not many, I'll admit, and often a lesser make, like Sweet) have been inferior to the three or four piece flutes. Skip stops short from saying, specifically, that there are NO differences between his two piece and his more professional models other than the number of parts. I've played both, and the two piece was quite nice, but it did not sound as good as his three piece. More attention to quality, or some actual differences in his ability to control tone and intonation, I don't know and can't say. Few makers make a two piece, which either speaks for itself, or only speaks to what their customers want and expect, or only what the makers prefer to make. But to make the assumption that they only do what they do because it's more traditional, flaws and all, is nonsense; very few makers would ignore an easier and more effective way of making flutes if it was doable.
Mark Hoza's flutes have been spoken very highly of, both his two and three piece flutes. I've never played his flutes, so I can't say which (of his offered flutes) sound better, or if there's a difference, sonically speaking, between them.
The lower price of a two-piece flutes may speak to two separate (ironically) issues; it's cheaper to make one or two less tenons, and/or the quality may suffer by jumping this step. I suspect it's a bit of both; more often than not, two piece flutes skip the tuning slide as well; not a problem, really, but it shows a certain lower-budget attitude on the part of the maker, the flute(s) often touted as "good beginner" flutes.
If a maker put his/her full attention into a quality two piece, could it rival a similar quality three or four piece flute? Probably, but I'd be interested, for eg, in opinions on the 3rd octave, and other tonal considerations from either makers and/or players more experienced in these flutes than anyone who seems to be contributing to this thread.
No offence intended to anyone; just seems to be a lot of unsubstantiated support for something no one seems to know much about.
Gordon
I think that when a maker sets out to make a certain model, he looks for the best sample available, take measurements, and makes reamers. The idea is to make a flute very similar to the original, with few "tweaking". This research and tooling takes
much time. To make a keyless version, one would use the same reamers, and the bore remains true to the original.
So much goes into the head joint and embouchure cut, while the tenons are easy to do. In fact many makers will do a Pratten type bore in two body parts with no extra charge.
I think that it's just not the market niche that some of the "high end" makers aim for,
so they do not invest in the tooling, making a whole separate set of reamers, only to make the same model flute but in one piece.
I could be way off, but I know that when I was making one piece Renaissance flutes, the tooling was so much different, there the bore is cylindrical and you do not need to cut a long tapered reamer, and chuck it on the milling machine to cut a flute (a flute in the reamer is the cutting edge for the bit to cut into wood) in it, I know that none of my two milling machines could cut a flute in a tapered reamer that long.
Hope it was wise to write before having my morning coffee
