Accidental flute modification

Not sure this is the place to put this, but this is my first post on here so bare with me 😉

I bought a cheap wooden Irish flute on Amazon (yeah I know that’s a bad idea), and I had a very
hard time getting the embouchure right to get a noise out of it. I asked about the flute on an other website
and they told me I had bought firewood and that it was useless. I then tried some experiments on it, I took off the flute head and cut a notch in the joint on the middle section that goes into the flute head. I did this because I was thinking maybe I could turn the flute into a quena, well that didn’t work, so I reassembled the flute and blew into it, and I managed to get sound!. Some how what I had done, modified the airflow so it actually played like a flute. Any flute player or maker in here have an deeper understanding of what I accidentally achieved? Here is the pic. https://imageshack.com/i/f04ZArm1j

I don’t know the intricacies of how flutes work, and why this notch in the tenon improved the performance of your flute. But it is quite clear to me that, if you were wanting it to work as a quena (for those that don’t know, a S. American end blown flute), the notch would be in completely the wrong place - if you could get a sound out of it at all, it would be wildly out of tune.

In theory, to convert a transerse flute into a quena, you would need to cut off the top of the head joint, cutting through the middle of the embouchure, in order to get the right speaking length (approximately - there are, no doubt various factors that make a quena behave differently from a flute). But, I hasten to add, I am not recommending this practice. Better just to buy a quena - or make a separate head joint, if you want to experiment.

You say it plays like a flute. How about posting a soundclip. I just cannot imagine cutting the tenon could possibly do any good for any kind of flute…

My guess is that it is far from satisfactory and that nothing substantial has changed, but that you have messed with it enough to adapt to the flute’s needs and can now get a sound. Why you would put a notch in the tenon is beyond me. If anything, I would have tried to re-work the embouchure hole, although I have no idea in what direction I would attempt to do that. I wouldn’t waste my time further. If you are interested in flute, get one from a reputable maker and learn how to play.

If you can’t play the flute, my guess is that the only reason you got a sound out of it after you cut the notch is that you blew it slightly differently to when you tried before. I think all you done by cutting a bit out of it is to slightly reduce the length of time it will burn for.

It is a crappy flute yes, it is basically just a piece of wood resembling a flute. I could post a clip I guess but I am a beginner so all I would be doing is embarrassing myself :P.

I have a few other smaller flutes that play better and that I can practice on, and I managed to find a serviceable Boehm flute online (which I will have soon) but as for low D Irish flutes, I think I will wait until I have a little more money and more wisdom before purchasing one again (maybe a 3 piece Dixon, if plastic is not too bad a material).

I just posted here because I thought the change in the flute was interesting in itself. Its possible I guess that the change wasn’t in the flute and that I actually had slightly improved in my playing and that it was basically psychological or muscle memory.

Fiddling around with making flutes myself, sometimes weird changes can make unexpected changes to the flute. Not sure what in the world that notch would do. A while back, there was a lady who handed me three “firewood” flutes to fix. Two of them turned out surprisingly wonderful, the other was mediocre. With a bit of work, some of them can be fixed.

“A while back, there was a lady who handed me three ”firewood“ flutes to fix. Two of them turned out surprisingly wonderful, the other was mediocre. With a bit of work, some of them can be fixed.”

There’s a fair bit of snobbery about these ‘Pakistani’ flutes. People seem to forget that traditional instruments like whistles and fifes were often crafted fairly crudely and yet still were capable of music in the hands of the person who made them.

I took some before and after video of me (badly) playing the flute. The 2nd half of the video is on the flute after I messed around with it. https://youtu.be/fEBwIOGNQ08

play video

To me the unmodified version sounds substantially better - the modified version doesn’t seem to know which octave it is supposed to be playing. But without seeing it in the hands of an expert it is very difficult to tell how much of that is down to the instrument and how much is playing technique.