Well,Tonehole, I certainly think I prefer Pratten type flutes from the little experience I have of owning them, but perhaps this quest is my destiny leading me to a new flute experience? Certainly the steady, loud, clear sound coming from the removed headjoint and the enthusiastic, expert advice I’m getting hurries me on. I’ll let you know where the adventure leads. Onwards and upwards, ey?
Best wishes,
Keith.
Hi Keith,
are you referring to the loud grunty first octave volume sound from the Pratten?
I was surprised when I heard one played in front of me. Most of the sound clips really compress the sound and make flute music sound very unappealing compared to the live music.
It’s great discovering another flute with its own sound character. I’ve been working on restoring my wooden relic of a baroque traverso (boxwood! 440Hz pitch!) for a few months now. Just had the silver key hot soldered and it’s looking splendid. There are two more cracks to seal, after remoisturising the whole flute slowly for months.
I posted about marine epoxy a while back - essentially, I gave up with it, and decided to go for plain liquid wood/rot remover/sealant. For an amateur, all you have to do is dilute it and rake it into the crevice until it fills, and then pare off the excess before it sets. Ronseal is quite good too, but perhaps I have my sights set on standards lower than the angels 
Tonehole: I was referring to the sounds of my Tipple D’s (one of which has an embouchure shape I don’t use and is with a new owner in Australia now), and my African blackwood Brent Santin D. The Tipple A’s tone is even darker.
The Tipples’ wedge and cylinderical bodies give me an immediate, responsive tone that someone else who played my D the other day called “reedy”. It’s undeniably loud yet can be as soft as you like. A friend gave an involuntary “Oh yes …” when he heard the Tipple’s throaty low D that I feel in my fingers. The conoid Santin’s notes are easy but need to be pushed out as compared to the Tipple’s notes that just drop out. (I think that’s someone else’s description about the difference between cylinderical and conoid flutes). The Santin makes itself felt through my fingers too, but on the whole it’s is not as Prattenish as the Tipple, though it’s sweeter and more complex. Both the Tipples and Santins are larger holed and bigger bored than the one I’m wanting to restore, so this restored flute will be very different for me. We’ll see if I like it.
Best,
Keith.
Pictures of the restored “No name, no number” old wooden flute are on the yellow cloth background. The pre-restored photos are on a green cloth background.
http://photoshare.shaw.ca/view/25223629650-1350941949-23175/
The restorer is Gregory Brown of Victoria, BC, a flute player since childhood. His flute collection includes an original fully silver keyed RnR Boehm of black cocus and an 18 carat gold Boehm.
He made a new end cap, cleaned the bores, then sandpapered them lightly with a very fine sandpaper, polished all the German silver, repadded the key, fixed two cracks inside and out without having to cut and replace, rewound the tenons with 100% red Chinese “Xnonok” thread. He only gave the flute a quick wipe with a dry cloth as he says Cocus is very greasy and doesn’t need oiling. The restored flute was shown to the head of the flute department of the music college at the University of Victoria who thinks it’s C1850, probably later than that. The sliding tuner partially lines the head joint, an indication it could be French. The round embouchure sound hole is unusually large, giving the flute good volume without losing any of it’s sweetness. It’s very easy to play, strikingly better looking than the photos show and already feels like a daily go-to flute, a real keeper.
Best wishes,
Keith.
Lovely flute. Lovely cocus wood. One way to tell if it came through French workshops from the last half of the 19th Century would be a close examination of the tuning against a program such as Flutini. One artifact which may show up will be a flat low F#. I have several flutes, a six keyed flute, and an eight keyed flute which are of apparently French make. Both are from the late 1800’s, possibly as late as 1880, with the flat F#, and an only moderately to negligible flat foot. Overall good flutes, very responsive and nimble, playing well at A=440 Hz. They all have very similar cocus. The French seem to have had a connection, possibly through Spanish Cuba, for this tonewood.
Congrats 
Thanks! The Flutini does show a flat F# but a dead-on Low D with only slightly sharp G, so it looks and sounds great to me. But I have to inspect the Flutini and what I’m supposed to do with it more closely. Hopefully I’ll find someone who knows exactly what it’s trying to tell me … I’ve had no technical training, just taught myself to read music and wrestle with any notes printed way above and below the lines …
As you say, this flute is very respnsive and nimble. It has an authoritatively sweet tone, too. I played it the first day I got it at a dinner party and got the impression the enthusiastic response was more to do with this tone than my fumbling about with finger memory from my other, comparitively cruder flutes. It has a nice, assertive volume too, though I don’t know how well it would do in a session. Going by looks, care in design and manufacture, tone and tuning, audience response, as well as feel, this is one very classy flute, very cultured, very French … Magnifique!
Best wishes,
Keith.
Hi Keith,
It sounds like you managed to get yourself a great session flute there! You might want to explore some typical traverso cross fingerings for some of the accidentials. A few thoughts:
For the slightly flat F#, are you playing it with the Eb key depressed? As this is a classical era flute, it is probably (Jem?) designed to have this key open for most of the notes other than D. If this is the case, then having the Eb key open should really open up the sometimes stuffy E as well. I would be interested in seing how hard it is for you to play an Fnat with the XXX XOX fingering, likely with some lipping down as well.
For the sharp G, you might try experimenting with some variation of XXX OOX or XXX OXO (with or without the Eb key) and see if that brings it down a smidgen without killing the tone too much. Or just learn to lip it a bit!
(slight thread hijack). Does anyone else find that they play/finger some notes differently depending on which key they are playing in, and what other instruments they are playing with?
Clinton
Does anyone else find that they play/finger some notes differently depending on which key they are playing in, and what other instruments they are playing with?
Sometimes I use the Eb key on tunes in E, just to give the note some extra power.
Clinton said: " I would be interested in seing how hard it is for you to play an Fnat with the XXX XOX fingering, likely with some lipping down as well."
The Fnat with XXX X0X fingering is off the Korg for sharpness. I usually use XXX X%0. On this flute that’s loud and clear, and only about two cents sharp. I can’t remember many tunes calling for Fnat anyway. Maybe I just fudge them when they appear and don’t notice the difference unless there’s an F# and an Fnat close enough to notice the difference?
OTHANEN: I can’t remember EVER playing in E. Am I missing something?
Anyway, keeping the single key open while I play tunes with all the other notes would be an agonisingly off-putting imposition when the flute plays so magnificently in the usual keys.
By the way, does anyone know how to delete PHOTOS NOW POSTED in the subject heading and insert RESTORATION PIX POSTED. I can’t see how I made the change in the first place …
Best wishes,
Keith.
Think you get three days edit time and after that you have to ask a Mod.
Thanx Peter! NANOHEDRON came to the rescue …
K.
Pshaw, 'twas nothing.
Don’t remember exactly why the 72-hour limit was instituted, but as with most of these things, the exception tends to lead the way. It would have been some manner of editing abuses (Yeah, I know. A frightful thing to contemplate in a world such as this) that would have been the deciding factor; otherwise, with the way the rest of you fine folks operate in such reasonable fashion, it’s safe to say that we really wouldn’t have even thought of bothering.
Every once in a while a person would become annoyed with a policy and leave deleting several of their past posts. One person took this to an extreme deleting all of their own posts rendering some threads difficult to read. Overall, it helps preserve the integrity of past threads with little inconvenience.
Oh yeah, I remember that now. That definitely would have been a major factor.
I can’t remember EVER playing in E. Am I missing something?
E minor or dorian is a common key in ITM. Some are very very famous tunes, like Morrison’s jig, the kid on the mountain, ships are sailing…
When someone says E, I think Emajor.
I can think of only three tunes in Emajor
one of the Fahey tunes though it is mixolydian in the second part
one of Tommy Peoples tunes
and the Calliope
Add “Andy de Jarlis’ (jig)” to that. Mind you, I (/“we” locally/most folk) don’t play Calliope House in the original E. Likewise many of the relatively few who play Andy de Jarlis’ take that down a tone too, though I don’t. 
But I knew what both Lorenzo and you meant.
Just out of curiosity, how well does it cross finger the accidentals?
Bnat, Cnat, G# are the only ones out of the 14 or so (?) I seem to come across most of the time. the D# and Eb are looked after by the single key I suppose, but I haven’t had to try that yet and I can’t recall anything I play with D# or Eb anyway. I did note however that the G# is very satisfying to play as I kind of slurred the hole to find out where the note is and got it straight off. Easy to find again, too. I was surprised because after the large holed Tipple, for instance, that makes halfholing easy, I thought the really small holes on this sweet French beauty were going to be a problem. So far though, all indications are that the accidentals on this classy lass are going to be more seductive than challenging …
Gary Larsen notes how his small toneholed flute has unique agility and playability especially on ornamentations, so I suppose that would apply to half holing, though I can’t remember whether he plays keyed or keyless.
All the best,
Keith.