The Final Batch of Irish Flutes

Somebody else can make these now. I'm done!

The image above is of the last 7 Irish flutes in my queue. The end caps are elsewhere. These will get assembled and inspected later this weekend.. A polyurethane sealer will be applied to the outsides tomorrow at the warmest part of the afternoon. On Monday I will be sending off three of these. A few “short F” keys will be added to the boxwood low combo on the left, and Eb keys added to the foot joints of the three blackwood flutes on the right. Cases will be sewn and these will be mailed off or picked up by the end of this week. I have no more pending flute orders or commitments in the instrument making world.

This will mark the point of my formal retirement, at least in terms of taking orders for instruments and having a queue, taking peoples’ money, and running a business. After 45 years of making mostly flutes and a few other instruments as well as tools for the lutherie trades I am ready to give my worn out hands a break. The younger generations of luthiers can take my place and are actually doing a fine job of it!

Immediately I actually have several long-delayed personal instrument projects to attend to. These include making a nice boxwood one keyed flute in F/G called a Requinta for Galician music. I have several bagpipes that need reeds and general maintenance that I want to play on. I have an antique Borel accordina to restore. At some point I want to make an Accordina using original Borel reeds featuring stainless steel blades from a Melodica-type instrument he once made. The biggest bucket-list project on the horizon is this Glass Flute project. I’ll bein working on that in the Fall.

Immediately though I will be giving the workshop a major cleaning and rearranging. Am doing the same thing to my office - actually moving it from one end of our house to the other end, and reclaiming the master bedroom for its original purpose in the process. The workshop rearrangement will happen over the summer and fall. The room swap in the house will be finished before our friend Cano visits just after Fiddle Tunes.

For now I have no immediate plans to downsize my workshop and supplies. Given the current regime the Dollar could evaporate overnight, and our Social Security and Medicare may disappear for more tax cuts. I may have to go back to earning a living then! Of course, nobody will be buying any flutes. However, we flutemakers have a large supply of heavy woods and the golden opportunity ability to turn these into nightsticks for the police forces needed to keep us rabble in-line.

There may be a booming business in such ordinance. I actually turned one out of blackwood once. It was needed as a prop for a play performed by a local theater group.

Eventually, I will want to find a new home for all of my tooling and supplies that will otherwise linger, maybe past the point where I can physically deal with it. Trying to monetize such things is a bit of an effort, though I suppose it could all be hauled down to Stokes Auction House in Port Orchard.

Instead, I wish to pass my wisdom - and the workshop itself - onto someone young who would be willing to learn. This would happen after I am finished with the glass flute project. My criteria for such a person or persons requires:

1: No Males. There are too many men making Irish flutes.
2: Experience in playing the flute, including Irish flute
3: Workshop experience, including wood turning

I would offer a one to two month internship or as much as needed per my availability. At the end, my intern would then collect the tools and supplies needed to set up her (or theys) workshop and start her (they) instrument making career.

One of the tools that would be added would be the website Folkflutes.com I will be retiring caseyburnsflutes.com at the end of this year - but plan to keep traditionalflutes.com and/or laurentflutes.com going for now. I will also keep this substack page and my as of yet to be used archive substack up and running.

Meanwhile, I will now have more time and energy to enjoy playing instruments and making music rather than making the hardware for others to do this. There are some instruments that I could make myself that I would rather simply source and acquire so that can get right to the music making. Am currently doing this with various smallpipes (Scottish and Northumbrian). I would like to have a functioning Baroque Musette and recently purchased an oder Addison musette to get up and running, as well as a potentially restorable original Ivory musette that was once owned by Mickie Zekley. I have a set of bellows on order with Eric Dubois in Belgium. Occasionally the musette makers there have an unclaimed newish instrument available. I would grab one in a minute!

Finally, I want to make myself a Limousin Chabrette bagpipe. I may end up making a pair of these. One of these would be for my friend The Horn Doctor and he would probably help me with making this. And then we would go to his workshop in Kansas City where he would make me one of his wonderful trombones, which I would help with.

Speaking of trombones, my entire life with the flute is an accidental comical tragedy. I was given my Civil War era ancestor’s fife at an early age and I could make sounds on it. In 5th grade it was time to select an instrument in Mr. Huffman’s band. I really wanted to play Trombone way back then but was resigned to the reality of having to play flute since I already had a flute (the fife) and there was no way my parents could go out and get me a trombone. So the first day I presented my flute for examination.

Mr. Huffman said “that isn’t a flute!” Instead he showed me a crappy but functional Grassi Boehm flute. When I said there was no way for my parents to afford one he said “No problem! You can borrow this one.”

It seemed really bad form to blurt out “Actually, do you have any Trombones I could borrow instead?” Thus I had to live up to his amazing generosity, despite my inner shame. So for the next 4 years I struggled with this instrument (I actally have a recording of a band concert somewhere that I’ll post on YouTube). High school was no better initially. However, I started taking lessons which helped my tone. My teacher taught band at another high scholl but he also did instrument repair which whetted my appetite. I actually kept my high school algebra and trig notebooks and inone of these are occasional sketches and ideas jotted down about flute making, using Tungsten embedded in resin or sintered into some metal for the flute body.

Flute playing in the Portland area schools seemed to be a largely female activity. In the wrestling jock-dominated Lord of the Flies social scene, a boy playing flute was a target for bullying. I started playing some guitar after my first summer at Camp Hancock which helped. But then Jethro Tull hit the popular music scene and if one could play any Ian Andersen-ish sounding riffs on a flute (flutter tounging was all that was required, really), one was suddenly hot stuff, if you were male. My social life improved dramatically.

In College I postponed music for a year so I could take music theory 101 with Tomas Svoboda. My advisor in the Geology program said that my echinoderm paleontology was worthless. Flute playing as a career was a dead end given the number of much better flute players (mostly female) pursuing this with their high end flutes so I gave up the flute etirely. Eventually I dropped out of college and out of classical music and even composing. But then I started hanging out with folk musicians, and eventually luthiers. One of these, bless her heart Suzy Norris nudged me into making a violin soundpost setter for her (my dad taught me how to work metal).

Suddenly I was making these for violin makers all over the continent and hanging out in various lutherie workshops as a wanted guest. It was in one of these that I encountered the oboe maker Douglas Steinke, who set me to work making keys for his Baroque oboes. Eventually I stayed for a few days and he gave me a workshop on making flutes. After a few stumbles I found myself making fllutes for Jan Deweese and his students. And then I went up to Folklife Festival with an initial pile, and met Mickie Zekley of Lark in the Morning.

Mickie cam up to my booth, played every single flute, and declared “These flutes play like Crap!” I replied that I had only been at it really for about 3-4 months. Mickie then said - well in that context, they are actually promising. He took me under his wing and this led to Lark Camp in 1985 (you can see 29 year old me playing the glass harmonica, making bagpipe reeds and dancing in the video below) which led to going again in 1987 which is when I met a symphonic flute player named Nancy who was interesting in my flutes, and shortly after interested in me (this amazes me to this very moment). We got married on the Mendoocino Headlands the following April, with the great flutemaker Mail-Order Reverend Rod Cameron presiding over the ceremony. We’ve gone to Lark Camp almost every year since.

Mickie and I are playing a “courting flute” in the picture below. These are two Folk Flutes joined that the bottom. There are no vent holes except for the fingerholes on the adjacent flute. This picture perfectly caught by our daughter Lila captures the moment immediately after Mickie and I simultaneously attempted to play the bottom “hard” D. I will leave it to your imagination as to the actual physical and hilariously disgusting experience of that moment…

I miss Mickie!

So I really don’t have too many complaints due to my unfortunate selection of the flute versus trombone. I am happy to have provided the world probably over 4000 instruments - and people in generations yet to be conceived will get to enjoy them or complain about them and certainly talk about them for the next 2+ centuries. This was a good gig and I have saved some of the most interesting stuff for the end.

However, I do have a recurring nightmare that all of my clients start sending my flutes back to replace cracked head joints or deal with other problems. I’ll honor a small bit of warranty period for the few that have been shipped in the last year (another reason to keep the wortkshop functional) but everyone else will have to consult another repair person or attempt to fix things themselves. Eventually I will stop responding to repair inquiries.

Will I be seen out there playing Irish flute in sessions? No. I actually never did this much and can barely play enough of that music to show that I have any bit of potential. Irish sessions used to be hazardous to one’s lungs. One of my oldest friends from SE Portland who played one of my flutes complained about the tobacco smoke when she lived in Olympia and was banned from the tavern where these sessions took place after months of complaining to the tavern owner, and finally assaulting him by literally biting him on his arm, enough to draw blood. She was nicknamed “Fang” and laughed out of town.

I simply avoided sessions, except for the ones at Lark Camp which were usually a bit over my skill level (these still are) although I seemed to play better whenever Dave Cory was playing his tenor banjo (his sister Sarah spent some time in my workshop as an assistant, after her apprenticeshi with Uilleann pipe maker John Pedersen. Sarah is amazing). The result was that I kept my embouchure on the weak side. A former partner once castigated me for being a weak player and insisted that I should practice as much as she did on her primary instrument, and go out and play at sessions at every opportunity - or my craft would suffer!

I felt bad about this for years - until it dawned on my that this forced my iterative core flute design to do all the heavy lifting for me - and for other players, especially beginning players. I was never a stickler for the orthodxy approach and copying the 19th century orchestral flutes that were stumbled upon and adopted for Irish music. a little over a century ago. This heavy lifting by the flute itself, as well as my focus on flutes for smaller-handed players (Mickie orginally requested this), has been the major trade secret and backbone behind a successful career.

I may end up playing some Irish music eventually, but on a set of pipes in C by Michael Hubbert and Denny Hall. I do work harder at Galician music and this summer hope to be in top form on the Gaita when Suso teaches at Lark Camp. Requinta is my fallback and that instrument I can pick up and play well with moments notice. Last year I was too busy helping Beth Zekley with her instrument sale to get my pipes adjusted for the locality, and only managed to play Conchas (shells).

Other instruments. I just got a new and lovely Selmac -style guitar for Django-style jazz. This one is one of Altamira’s travel guitars sold by DjangoBooks.com and is 3/4 sized which is ergonomically perfect for me and my worn out hands. I play this and my Shelley Park guitar equally time-wise. I am also on Shelley’s queue for a D-holed version of the fantastic guitar she made me a few years back that features the “secret sauce”. I’ve been remiss with the Accordina but want to wait until I have the Borel up and running. Functionally and ergonomically it will be better than my newer Dreux “Beier design” accordina. Its a bit lighter in weight and the plungers have no side to size wobble which is a problem for me.

I did have ideas of maybe continuing some flute production in 3D-printed versions of my small-handed Folk Flutes, just to have something available for this need. However, I am simply telling people to The urge to pursue this has passed. I will probably update and post my STL files for that, as well as drawings on my archive pages. The data are out there in the flutes themselves and if anyone wants to start copying my work, be my guest! Its time for me to be done with this!