My journey with the elder overtone flute

[Swedish_Chris]

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!

 

[blacktimberwolf]

Wow ! .....Those are pretty specialised questions, it will be interesting if anyone can answer them....

 

[Wayland]

I suspect most of our musical types are at the moot right now so it might be a while before you get a good reply.

I'll be interested in the answers myself although I'm no musician.

 

[Swedish_Chris]

I suspect most of our musical types are at the moot right now so it might be a while before you get a good reply.

I'll be interested in the answers myself although I'm no musician.

Oh, I see! Yes I've seen information here about the BushMoot. I guess that I'll just have to wait for the musical types to come back.

 

[Toddy]

I've just been listening to Ale Moller and others play these flutes and they're just brilliant
Thank you for the link

I've got dried elder stems in the shed, I think I'm going to have a play

cheers,
Toddy

 

[robin wood]

I don't have music knowledge but a little general wood knowledge. I would be surprised if you need to dry it at all before cutting fipple, the worst that could happen is that having fitter a tight head plug the hollow elder shrunk as it dried and you got a small split at it tried to tighten around the head plug. My experience of elder is that this is unlikely. Certainly 2 or 3 days indoors would see most of the shrinkage having taken place at the ends anyway.

I was shown these by a friend visiting from Hungary some years ago, the tradition is strong there with a wide range of instruments of similar form. He gave me a special blacksmith made augur designed for doing the drilling out, it looks like a very elongated spoon sharpened on the sides with the end twisted into a screw thread, the beauty of it is that it follows the grain and will drill down the centre of branches which are not straight.

Last thing the wind channel will decrease in size as the wood dries. All of the shrinkage in wood occurs around the grain, think of wet wood as being like an elastic band stretched out into a larger circle, it is trying to become a smaller circle, if you stop it contracting, eg by putting a plug in the middle then the only way it can become smaller is by splitting somewhere. That is the theory but in practice the diameter you are working with is small and elder is forgiving and shrinks less than many woods.

If it was me if the drilling was quick and easy I would make several and plug one immediately and start playing. another I would let dry 3 days before plugging, but these instruments I think were designed originally to be quick to make and quite ephemeral, especially the willow bark ones.