Over the last two years I have become very fond of flutes and I have even started to try and make some out of bamboo. For example I made a small quena style minor flute in the key of C# that I like very much. The overtone flute, how ever, is a flute that does not contain any fingerholes. Therefor you can "only" play notes from a sort of natural scale by increasing and decreasing your airflow.
The overtone flute comes in different sizes and varietys and has a history in both Russian, Ukrainian, Scandinavian and Slovakian folk music. Here in Sweden we mostly call it a "sälgflöjt" (willow flute) and we have a folk musician whose name is Ale Möller. He is some kind of wizard when it comes to the overtone flute: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43eGgGyquSc
When my interrest in flutes began, I bought two hand drills, determined to make flutes, but I chose wood with to hard pith. This made the drilling and hollowing almost impossible to complete so efter some cursing I put my solid wood flute making, along with the drills, on the shelf.
Until recently I did not know about the soft pith in elder, but with that knowledge everything changes.
The other day my fiancee was out of town so I was what people call a "grass widower" for the evening. My plan was to cook something nice for myself, take a walk in the forest and play videogames. I cooked, went to the forest and came across an elder bush with some torn branches. So I took a few branches, went home, skipped the videogaming and started to hollow the wood. It was easy to drill out the pith and I used a 10 mm thick hand drill since the branches were to thin for my 15 mm drill. After that I removed the bark. Now the flute material has been laid to dry.
What I have now is four essential questions:
1. How long does the flute material have to dry before I can start to carve the fipple and insert the head plug?
2. Since the wind channel is 10 mm in diameter, how wide can the tone hole be?
3. How far from the top should the tone hole be if the flute is 500-550 mm long?
4. Does the wind channel increase its diameter much when the wood dries or can I use a 10 mm plug if the drilling was 10 mm when I made it?
Thank you for reading!
The overtone flute comes in different sizes and varietys and has a history in both Russian, Ukrainian, Scandinavian and Slovakian folk music. Here in Sweden we mostly call it a "sälgflöjt" (willow flute) and we have a folk musician whose name is Ale Möller. He is some kind of wizard when it comes to the overtone flute: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43eGgGyquSc
When my interrest in flutes began, I bought two hand drills, determined to make flutes, but I chose wood with to hard pith. This made the drilling and hollowing almost impossible to complete so efter some cursing I put my solid wood flute making, along with the drills, on the shelf.
Until recently I did not know about the soft pith in elder, but with that knowledge everything changes.
The other day my fiancee was out of town so I was what people call a "grass widower" for the evening. My plan was to cook something nice for myself, take a walk in the forest and play videogames. I cooked, went to the forest and came across an elder bush with some torn branches. So I took a few branches, went home, skipped the videogaming and started to hollow the wood. It was easy to drill out the pith and I used a 10 mm thick hand drill since the branches were to thin for my 15 mm drill. After that I removed the bark. Now the flute material has been laid to dry.
What I have now is four essential questions:
1. How long does the flute material have to dry before I can start to carve the fipple and insert the head plug?
2. Since the wind channel is 10 mm in diameter, how wide can the tone hole be?
3. How far from the top should the tone hole be if the flute is 500-550 mm long?
4. Does the wind channel increase its diameter much when the wood dries or can I use a 10 mm plug if the drilling was 10 mm when I made it?
Thank you for reading!