This is my day for asking questions about technique.
Here’s some more.
Doing finger vibrato on the B note, I find it very
hard to tap fast with L3. Much prefer to tap with
my right hand, indeed, I find that I use R1 and R2
in unison, depending on the flute.
What do you’all do?
Also how do you do vibrato on the second
octave B. Tapping with L3 sounds like
a Wah-wah peddle.
Generally how do you’all treat second octave
vibrato? I suppose a good deal of half-hole
tapping is in order.
Trying to integrate this effect more into my playing.
It’s all very flute-dependent. I was taught to try out all the various possibilities and figure out what works in different tunes. Thing is, you’re not always looking for a modulation in pitch, sometimes a modulation in timbre works as well or better – you’re looking for subtlety for the most part. For the B’s I use RH1 mostly, but I tend to play small-holes flutes. You could probably get away with leaving RH2 down and just vibrating with RH1 on a large-holed flute.
On baroque flutes when doing the equivalent “flattement”, it’s not necessary to actually tap the wood, just flapping the finger over the hole to bring it very close gives you the variation in tone. This way you can use stronger fingers close to the note. Otherwise you can use fingers further from the note as the effect is less wah-wah like the further you are away.Since flattments aren’t particularly fast, no great dexterity is required to flap the finger over the hole without touching it.