Fluteland.com Flute Message Board

IMO, it's best if the flautist can get both the "dark" and "bright" tone to colour the music. A potential problem is that the "dark" tone requires much much more air to play and can be rather tiring.

So develop a dark tone, but keep your bright one.

It's a wonderful concerto! Other than some strange drags here and there. However a problem with playing it on flute is the choice of the arrangement. The Rampal one is known to be a little impractical because of the low range, so the Galway one tries to remedy it by flinging it octaves up. IMHO, nei...

Wow, how ignorant can anybody get! *looks around * hmmm, I wonder who...

Whoah some administrator should look into that random account. One reason, definitely, that these high notes don't come out is because of condensation (and saliva?) in the bore of the instrument. There was this while I was wondering why I could not scream out an altissimo D. (In Whitacre's "Gawd$ill...

fluteguy18, I understand what you're trying to get at. You are looking at it from a performers' point of view: duh, who would like a stuffy tone with poor intonation. But there are more things than just the amount of embouchure hole covering that affects your intonation and tone: vocal tract resonan...

I'm a lefty too! LEFTIES UNITE.

fluteguy18, try playing your flute with your hand wrapped around the headjoint. Note, the headjoint has a hole too! I said "whatever hole", not "whatever tone hole". The embouchure hole is also considered a hole, and a large portion of the sound is radiated from there. Try extending your lip beyond ...

"wall losses" meaning make the surface of the head joint wall so rough that the turbulence will just eat off the sound energy. Membranes for radiating energy away as well, but with the possibility of muting the membranes. The "wall" would not flatten the pitch too badly, since it is quite a distance...

You'll have to source for vintage ones. Nobody makes such things nowadays: no market, no go.

But they do exist, in case you were getting skeptical.

IMO, the only way to build a real "flute mute" is to have it integrated into the headjoint. For example, the flute maker Kotato has a headjoint design with a membrane that can be muted (muting the membrane, not the flute!) so as to be able to produce sounds akin to the Chinese DiZi at will. These he...

The UNSW Acoustics website suggest putting a piece of modelling clay on the blow edge. That helps, I tried it with a small piece of card. But sometimes the high notes aren't damped that well.

Someone should invent a REAL flute mute... like a thermoviscosity enhancer or something.

A technician told me that durability is one thing you might want to look at. Backpacking, for example. Of course, it'd be nice if he incorporated super-hard plastics to replace the metal parts to make it corrosion-resistant. Playing-wise, I find it more resistant. Headjoint cut, perhaps? I find the ...

Hey first post! IMHO, what the Foster Extensions do is to alter the available resonances of the flute body. If you're a mad flautist who loves screaming those altissimos (like me), and you fiddle around with the foot, you'll know that adding a bit of tubing, or closing some random tonehole, would ca...