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khiemtranStressed to the eyes today, thanks to simultaneous efforts to buy a house, get a mortgage, find childcare and juggle work between home and the office. I shall therefore talk about my bamboo flute.
There are two quite amazing things about my borrowed flute. The first is how much you get from something so simple. A piece of bamboo with a stopper in one end and a few holes in just the right places and you get two-and-a-bit octaves and some quite decent notes in the middle of the range. It's quiet impressive to consider how little you need to make music, when you compare to the complexity of a modern concert flute.
The second amazing thing is all the extra technology that goes into a modern concert flute so that it can do the things that my flute can't do.
A good way of understanding a flute is to think of a recorder. A recorder has a channel that directs air in a nice non-turbulent stream onto a blade (a "fipple"), which then sends edge-tones down a tube. In a side-blown flute, the blade is actually the far rim of the hole you're blowing into. Another surprise for a beginner - you're not actually blowing into the hole or over the hole, you're actually trying to blow a stream of air over the edge. The big difference between a recorder and a side-blown flute is that with the latter you have to supply the channel yourself, using your mouth and lips. The good news is, this gives you more control over what angle and speed you send the airstream at. The bad news is, the job is now handled by an incompetent organism instead of an unfailing machine. Even my $2 plastic recorder (Liem's favourite, because I don't mind if he eats one end while I'm blowing on the other) still gets a better tone than I can manage on the flute.
In my bamboo flute, the embouchure hole is small and round, possibly for strength, possibly because it was cheaper and faster just to make it with a drill. The target edge of the hole is therefore also correspondingly small. In a modern flute, or even a Baroque one, there's actually a fair amount of art and science that goes into shaping the hole and the target edge to allow it to be played with more speed and flexibility.
Then there's the lip plate, the chimney, the keys, the curve at the end of the headjoint, none of which were provided by the bamboo plant, but all of which turn out to be useful in clever ways.
I guess I'm just a natural engineer, rather than a natural musician. Already, I'm thinking about what I would do to make a better flute, and what I would do to make a better bamboo one.
There are two quite amazing things about my borrowed flute. The first is how much you get from something so simple. A piece of bamboo with a stopper in one end and a few holes in just the right places and you get two-and-a-bit octaves and some quite decent notes in the middle of the range. It's quiet impressive to consider how little you need to make music, when you compare to the complexity of a modern concert flute.
The second amazing thing is all the extra technology that goes into a modern concert flute so that it can do the things that my flute can't do.
A good way of understanding a flute is to think of a recorder. A recorder has a channel that directs air in a nice non-turbulent stream onto a blade (a "fipple"), which then sends edge-tones down a tube. In a side-blown flute, the blade is actually the far rim of the hole you're blowing into. Another surprise for a beginner - you're not actually blowing into the hole or over the hole, you're actually trying to blow a stream of air over the edge. The big difference between a recorder and a side-blown flute is that with the latter you have to supply the channel yourself, using your mouth and lips. The good news is, this gives you more control over what angle and speed you send the airstream at. The bad news is, the job is now handled by an incompetent organism instead of an unfailing machine. Even my $2 plastic recorder (Liem's favourite, because I don't mind if he eats one end while I'm blowing on the other) still gets a better tone than I can manage on the flute.
In my bamboo flute, the embouchure hole is small and round, possibly for strength, possibly because it was cheaper and faster just to make it with a drill. The target edge of the hole is therefore also correspondingly small. In a modern flute, or even a Baroque one, there's actually a fair amount of art and science that goes into shaping the hole and the target edge to allow it to be played with more speed and flexibility.
Then there's the lip plate, the chimney, the keys, the curve at the end of the headjoint, none of which were provided by the bamboo plant, but all of which turn out to be useful in clever ways.
I guess I'm just a natural engineer, rather than a natural musician. Already, I'm thinking about what I would do to make a better flute, and what I would do to make a better bamboo one.
