To everyone:
I recently sent a very flipant, and not well thought out comment concerning
Monty's high-end flutes. (The quote can be found below.)
Monty, justifiably so, sent me a personal note letting me know that I am
more than just a bit misinformed about his flutes. I would like to extend
my apologies to him for speaking with authority on a topic I know very
little about. I also owe an apology to this forum for spreading
misinformation. And, furthermore, I would like to express my gratitude for
the gracefulness of his response.
An old yiddish saying tells that there is a reason God put lips and teeth to
guard one's tongue: so that you would think twice before speaking. Let's
just say I now have a finer appreciation for this pearl of wisdom.
Stav
My original quote: "Because Monty uses a system to mass produce flutes, the
insides are pretty much all the same. So the rootend or non-rootend debate
for a Monty flute is all about appearance."
>From Monty:
Hi Stav,
The above mentioned statements about the shakuhachi I make are
erroneous and far from the truth.
First off, it is impossible to mass-produce a quality shakuhachi. I
would consider a plastic PVC or wooden lathe-turned shakuhachi
"mass-produced" because no adjustments made to the bore in the
manufacturing process. Each of the student and professional root-end
shakuhachi I make with precision cast bores are carefully fine tuned
inside the bore with particular attention to each note of each
individual instrument. Without doing this, none of them would play
acceptably at all.
More significantly, the student and root-end shakuhachi I make differ
in more ways than just "appearance" or bamboo aesthetics. The fine
tuning process used on the professional instruments is far more time
consuming and meticulous than the work I put into the student flutes.
The insides are not nearly the same as you state. The precision cast
bore process I developed is a method used to articulate and enhance
the acoustics of the shakuhachi with the same goals and similar
strategy used by traditional makers. The focus is on resonance and
timbre or tone color. We both attempt to fabricate a precision bore
profile inside the bamboo toward these ends based on analyses of very
high-quality gauge flutes. The traditional maker puts all of his work
into fashioning a bore from tonoko and urushi. I put all my work into
fashioning a master form and fine tuning each instrument. This
technique still requires fine tuning by hand, but has certain other
advantages which is why a number of craftsmen in Japan are now using
it.
All the best.
Monty
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