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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelph" data-source="post: 2834022" data-attributes="member: 12212">That's just crazy talk. A bassoon is well over 6' long, as are a contrabass clarinet and a contrabassoon. Only the last of these is particularly low. IIRC, a french horn has 9' of tubing, so a tuba has considerably more--i have no idea what the longest functional length actually is. Moreover, pipe organ pipes operate on the same principle as flutes, and 6' isn't even particularly long for those. Some of them hit 16' or more. When i put together an improvised instrument, i used standard pipe organ lengths as my baseline, which means roughly 4' for a low C--you can easily hear 2 octaves lower than that C as a pitched note. Now, it is true that bass flutes are difficult to hear over an entire orchestra. But they're not all that much quieter than, say, a bass clarinet. And still louder than a similar-pitched recorder. Unfortunately, the total distance from mouth to furthest hole is the least of your problems. The holes need to remain proportionately spaced as the instrument gets larger, so the real problem becomes the distance between any two holes. I play the bass recorder, which is about 4' long, in part because nobody else has large enough hands to span the holes. And i have fairly long hands (i can comfortably span a 12th on the piano, and maybe stretch for more). Even with the advent of keys, to displace the actual holes from the fingers, not everyone can reach to play, say, a contrabass clarinet.Now, as for the flute-staff, as in Circle of Iron: you'll notice that the flute is of some reasonably normal length, and the staff extends not the foot (open end) of the flute, but the head (closed end). So the blow hole is roughly in the middle of the staff, with the finger holes working their way down one half of the staff, which is hollow, while the other half is solid. Or, perhaps also hollow, but separated from the flute half. Bamboo would be the obvious choice for such a weapon, since you could use a natural joint as the separater between the flute and not-flute parts, the flute part would be naturally hollow, and since the whole thing would be hollow, you wouldn't have balance issues. Of course, it wouldn't have the mass that is one of the usual traits of a quarterstaff.Oh, and bones are hollow like a sponge, not hollow like a bottle. Not that hollow tubes can't be quite strong, just that bones are a poor analogy.</blockquote>

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