It's common knowledge that different types of embouchure,( and here I refer to the embouchure on the flute, that you blow into...or across, or into and across...that's a discussion for a different day)
suit different players, but if you're looking at a flute from this point of view and then comparing it with another, the problem is that you can't isolate just the embouchure. For example if you tried to compare embouchures across series of flutes, even those by the same maker, many other factors apart from the embouchure are changing, making comparisons of little value.
So the idea was to have a head which could stay on the same flute, but which would have interchangeable embouchures. Simpler to explain in pictures......
So essentially I took a length of head tubing, and milled a large squarish hole in it, centred on where the embouchure would normally be drilled.
Next I prepared three tubes of delrin, as you can see above. You might think that the upper and lower ones are superfluous, and in fact the head would work fine without them, but what you'd have then would be essentially a thinned head, and would give a different sound, not attributable to the different embouchures. It's the middle piece that's the crux of the thing, and I'll have to explain a bit about that since it's impossible to show it effectively in one photo.
What I did was to carefully machine this section so that it could rotate on the tube. I then cut three different embouchures separated at 120 degrees.
When the whole thing is assembled, it looks just like a normal head.
It also plays like a normal head...to a great extent. The fact that delrin is denser than blackwood, that the head is essentially lined as opposed to unlined, and that there is a very minimal bore distortion, due to the inner edge of the tube not meeting the inner edge of the embouchure, will have a minor effect.
Here's a close up of the three embouchures on this particular middle section.
I've put a piece of white paper in the bore to make them easier to see.
In fact, although these might not seem so different when looked at from this point of view, what you can't see is the undercut on each embouchure which is where a lot of the significant difference lies.
Of course, because the middle section can be replaced with others, the amount of options open for testing a particular embouchure against a particular bore is almost unlimited.
By the way, the reason for the title of this blog is that in Dante's inferno, satan has a head with three mouths. He might have found this head handy...
