Compact Rackett-like Flute (Rev 1) by MintyFries

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

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This is my first edition of a recorder-like flute instrument which features a bored, coiling sound chamber to achieve a lower register in a small form factor. It's sized like an ocarina, but sounds more like a recorder (the acoustic reasons for which are pretty complicated, but suffice it to say that it has a long chamber which coils around rather than an large hollow chamber like an ocarina). Its closest relative would seem to be the Renaissance Rackett instrument (the sausage bassoon), which is a double reed wind instrument featuring coiled tubing bored into wood. I tried to make one of these with wood using a dremel tool a few years ago but didn't get very far. 3D printing makes experimenting with the design far easier.
This is just my first attempt at making something like this--I'll make better versions soon. Please stand by for improvements (like a dual-chamber duet flute) as I intend to make this an ongoing project! I didn't bother with figuring out a tuning for it, and in a 5x2" version I printed it sounds rather like an Indonesian scale. And the fingering is killer on your fingers--I intended to play it by laying my entire fingers across the rows of holes kind of like how people play the mijwiz instrument. But it doesn't work that great.
If you print and it doesn't work, try using an x-acto knife to shave away imperfections. The slightest protrusion in the wind chamber or on the labium (yes, that's what it's called) can throw the sound off or make it entirely soundless.
Please feel free to take the design concept and run with it--I'd really like to see innovation in the field of compact coiled wind instruments. The concept is laughably under-explored. It would work with double-reed (like the oboe or shawm), single-reed (like the clarinet or mijwiz), and free reed (like the hulusi--although in my experiments so far I've been unable to get PLA to work as a free reed. Maybe ABS would work?) sound sources as well. And it doesn't have to be a recorder fipple at the end--it could be a notched groove like the shakuhachi or an open hole like the fife if that's what you're more comfortable with.