Native American Flute - Perfecting the Block and Track for Optimal Sound

Hi, this is Charlie Montatuiello with another video on Native American flute making. This is just kind of a quick little tip video on, not really a repair, but more of something where you can go a step further, I might want to say. So any of you flute makers out there that are interested in making your flute sound just a little bit better, this might be the video for you. So, first we're going to start off with one piece of wood block here, and I'm going to let you hear what it sounds like. Bear with me. So you can hear it's actually getting some kind of harmonics going on with a couple of the notes, and the bottom note tends to want to overblow. And simply changing this block out with another one, same piece of wood, we can even take it a step further than that. So why don't you come over and take a look at what we're doing here. So we have two different blocks, one of them has just a straight edge on it, and when it sits here on this flute, you might can see that it comes right to the back edge of the hole like that. It's a nice straight line. That's the one that causes the flute to overblow and causes those intonations to be kind of out of whack. This one has a slant on it, and if you look really close, you can see that it still comes to the back of the line of the sound hole there, as a matter of fact it comes right to the sound hole, and that's the one that sounds good. Now the reason that there's a difference between the two is one of them has an abrupt stop that allows the air out immediately, in which case once it gets out of there, out of the air escape from the track, it just goes chaotic all over the place. The other one is somewhat pushing the air down, it's giving it direction. It causes it to move in a certain direction on a regular basis, and what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go one step further, and on this flute, I'm going to use my file, let me see if I can get it here, and I'm going to file this edge just a little bit. Now my track area is about the depth I normally like to keep it, maybe twice as thick as a piece of paper, roughly a millimeter, you know it's trial and error to get your track the way you want it, the way that works best for you. But what I did just now was I caused a bevel on the inside of the lip going from the track into the sound hole, and what this does is it gives the wind coming through your track more direction, and that direction is downward into the flute. Now let's put that together with the tool here that we use, a little squeezy clamp. Let's put together the block and that bevel and see what it sounds like now. That made the world of difference, and I can even see a big gap under there too, which isn't too bad, but it made the world of difference whenever you have a bevel that goes down into the flute and one that comes up out of the flute. It makes the air split exactly the way you want it to, a lot more clearly and a lot better I believe than just a flat block there. So you can get kind of an idea, if you just imagine how the air is coming out of there and it tends to want to go like that, you know that's pretty much what we've done. So just a real quick little trip, you know, a quick little trip, haha, a real quick little tip to help you guys out in case you're having a flute that's not producing the tone quality you want. You know, I might even take it a step further and let you know that this bevel that we just made may have dropped the tone of the flute a quarter of a step. I know this from experience, and maybe one day we'll make a video specifically on how to change the tone, which would be a good video, but like I say, when you make that bevel there, if you had a flute that was an A, it's now going to be a flat A. So there's a tonal change when you bevel the track going into the flute, and a minor change when you bevel the block coming up above here, but a major one when you change that track. So that's pretty much it. I mean, you can see and hear the difference between the two, and this guy here sounds really good now. It's a really nice sounding flute, and I hope you guys have enjoyed this quick little tips video on Native American flute making. Once again, my name is Charlie Montatuiello from BlueBearFlutes.com. You can visit us on our website, and also of course on our Facebook page, which is BlueBear Arts or BlueBear Flutes. You can find us there under both ways. So BlueBearFlutes.com on the web, and BlueBear Arts or BlueBear Flutes on Facebook, and we definitely look forward to hearing from you and seeing you again very soon. Take care.