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Wood is a material that needs regular gentle care and maintenance, especially if it’s a musical instrument. This wooden flute care tutorial will provide you with 5 steps on how to care for your wooden instrument.
Humidity & Temperature
Avoid sudden temperature and humidity changes. Prevent your instrument from getting wet.
Don’t keep a wooden instrument in the sun or close to heating appliences and in very dry/wet/cold/hot environment. Optimal conditions for a flute are 20-22 degrees Celsius, 40-60% relative humidity. It is recommended to keep a flute in a special bag (but don’t put it in the bag right after playing, let it dry first) The material of the bag in which you store the instrument should breathe. If you live in climate conditions with too low or high relative humidity, it might be a good idea to purchase a special air humidifyer/dryer to keep your flutes safe.
You should also keep in mind that wooden instruments are afraid of the cold and the hot temperatures. If you bring the instrument with you outside and it’s cold or hot, the flute might get out of tune. It should get back its tuning when you bring it back home and leave for a while. However frequent strong temperature changes are harmful for the instrument and can cause cracks.
If you decide to play outdoors, try to avoid doing that in temperatures that differ too much from the optimal (18-25 degress Celcius). Especially in the cold, the strong condensate coming into the flute with your breath in the cold air might seriously damage your instrument and lead to instant cracks.
It’s better to protect your instrument by carrying it out with you in a speciaal bag made of non-thermal conductive fabric. If it’s cold outside and you bring it back home from the outside, don’t take it out of the bag immediately, but leave for at least an hour or two, so that the temperature change wouldn’t be so rapid for the wood.
Playing-in
Wood needs time to adapt to new conditions and a new wooden flute needs more gentle care during the first few months in new home.
When you get your new instrument at the post office, don’t hurry to play it right away, just leave it for a bit in the room and let it get accustomed to the new environment climate. Then slowly start warming it up with your breath and play. You should do it gradually, letting the wood to get accustomed to the constant use.
Here’s how approximately playing-in should look like: first day play it just for a few minutes straight (no more than 10 minutes). Then play the flute every day gradually increasing the playing time to 30 minutes by the end of the first week. By the end of the second week you can increase the playing time up to 45 minutes.
The following few weeks you should continue playing your flute regularly (at least a few times a week) and then you can consider your flute as “played-in” and be able to play it ap to a few hours a day, but I would not recommend playing it more than 2 hours.
Condensate
After each time you’ve played your flute, remove condensate from it by covering the sound hole in front of the block and quickly and heavily blowing into the mouthpiece. You can repeat the procedure during playing, if you feel like the windway has been clogged with condensate and the flute started to sound poor.
Next step to do after playing – remove the block and wipe the windway with a piece of lint-free cloth (with ocarinas and forest flutes/whistles where block is glued to the body, just blow hard into the instrument a few times covering the sound hole, then wipe the windway with a thin flat piece of lint-free cloth or paper, pushing it accurately under the block), then heavily and rapidly shake the flute to remove moisture, and wipe the windway and mouthpiece again.
After playing a flute it’s also important to dry it. For that use a rod with a piece of dry cloth attached to it and accurately wipe the inside of the flute. Be careful not to scratch the inside of the flute.
For more protection against mold appearing, use a dryer to ventilate the inside of the flute, slow air chamber and windway (with normal/cool air). After that leave your flute for a few hours or overnight to dry completely before attaching the block back to the flute and putting it into a bag.
Leather Cords
If your flute has leather cords they need care too. Oil them regularly with natural oils such as coconut oil, neatsfoot oil, lanolin, almond oil, or mink oil. To prevent leather from drying out and getting brittle, and maintain its fresh new look, oil it a few times a month. If your cords get hard, soak them into oil for a few hours every now and then to soften them.
But don’t oil suede cords. Just prevent them from getting wet (water can make suede stiff).
Wood Finish Maintenance
My flutes are treated with mixture of oils and wax for solid moisture protection and wood strengthening. On top of that they are top-coated with shellac which results in little to no maintenance of the flute finish along with better sound quality and moisture protection (you don’t need to oil your flute regularly, just make sure to keep it dry after each playing session).
However, if you accidentaly scratched your flute or just would like to bring its fresh new glossy look back, with shellac it’s extremely easy to do. All you have to do is to get shellac mixture (10-25%)(dewaxed is better), slightly soak a piece of lint-free cloth in it and accurately in one thin layer wipe the whole flute or the place where you need to remove the scrath from the finish. Let it dry for 5-10 minutes and check result. You might be satisfied with just one thin coat, or try adding a few more thin coats for desired look. The more coats you put, the more glossy it gets. The same procedure can be applied to all wooden details of the flute: block, beads and carved figurines.
Additionally, every year or once a few years (depending on how often you play the flute), you can treat the inside of the flute with shellac as well to renew the protective qualities of the coating. This will extend the life of the instrument and it will delight you with its beautiful sound for a long time.
