Flat low D

Irish Flute
1

I am guessing this issue has been discussed before, but I haven’t been able to find a thread on it quickly using the search function, so…

I seem to be blowing the low D on most flutes flat. Perhaps I have always done this, and didn’t know it until I tried playing with others. I am playing a Tipple for the moment and don’t have this problem on this flute, but I am thinking I’d like to try a good conical flute again. My fluter friends just tell me to keep practicing and that with a good embuchure, it will correct itself. I doubt it, since I don’t realize that I am playing the low D flat, until I try to play with others, then I notice I sound awful. This is disheartening after practicing alot and thinking I am sounding good.

Any advice for how to fix this or any advice on a maker of flute that tends to play a bit sharper on the bottom would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks in advance.

2

One possible difficulty is that some flutes, and some makers, deliberately make the low D flat, I think so that the flooter can rear back and get a piece of it. Rudall flutes often have a flat low D–though contemporary makers have often tweaked the note in tune. So the thing to do, IMO, is to view this as an opportunity to learn to blow the low D from Hell. That is, really attack the note. Also lift your chin and blow more across the embouchure hole–which lifts the tone. You can still blow down into the hole, or you can aim at the edge, but giving it a good deal of air is the way to go. Next, patience. Stay with it. After you get used to hearing the note in pitch, you will probably get better at telling when you’re blowing flat. You know, you have a good deal of control over the pitch of a note. Hope this helps!

3

My suggestion is to let the note reverberate, i.e. don’t try to blow the note through the end of the flute, but let the air/vibration go down then come back up the tube with the note sounding out of the embouchure hole. It’s more akin to the blasting sound of a brass instrument than the sonorous flow of air typical in a woodwind. It’s a tricky concept but has made a huge difference in how I play the conical simple system flute compared to the cylindrical Boehm system flute. Also, this does not require a ton of air per se, just a well directed, controlled flow of air. It’s more about the optimal amount of air for the note and the instrument as opposed to shear quantity of air.

4

“My fluter friends just tell me to keep practicing and that with a good embuchure, it will correct itself. I doubt it, since I don’t realize that I am playing the low D flat, until I try to play with others, then I notice I sound awful.”

You are correct: If you can’t tell you’re out of tune, improved embouchure technique alone won’t correct your problem. The solution is to work on your ear. There are many ways to do this, one of the best is to learn to sing, or at least hum, in-tune to reference pitches from a keyboard or other reliable source. When you work to repeatedly match the notes of a scale you are training your ear, and before long you’ll hear when and where you’re out of tune when playing solo flute. That is the point where working on your embouchure (how to get the out of tune notes in tune) comes into play.

The good news is that you can already hear when you’re out of tune relative to others on the D note, so your ear isn’t completely uncalibrated. If you don’t have a keyboard, there are apps you can get that will play the notes of a scale over repeatedly, which you could use to sing to and then play along with to match the pitch. The D scale might be a good place to start :wink:

If you work on the problem this way for 15 minutes a day, 5+ days a week, you’ll get great results.

5

I thought they make the low D flat on purpose because it’s a little flat on pipes. The goal is to make it honk.

I think the best way to train your ear is to learn to play by ear, especially if you can learn to play surrounded by fussy fiddlers.

6

I don’t think that’s the reason: the Rudall and Rose flutes, for example, were designed for classical music and weren’t made with the pipes in mind.

Is the flat low D on Rudall-style flutes a “bug” or a “feature?” I’ve seen many different opinions. Some people refer to it as the “free bottom D,” because to play it in tune you have to use the technique that Jim Stone described above: blowing more across the embouchure hole to sharpen the note, which also gives it a more open, full sound than you’d get otherwise. But maybe it’s just an artifact of the flute’s design and players have to learn how to play the flute in tune, it would be interesting to hear from flute makers in this regard.

7

When I was “field testing” my first Pratten prototypes, I was fortunate enough to get Kevin Crawford to play one for me and give me some feedback. I handed him what I thought was a well-tuned flute (for my embouchure) with all of the notes seemingly in a good balance. He played it (really, really well) and gave me some very helpful feedback regarding the tuning. He recommended tuning the D and E slightly more flat than they were. They were spot on for me, but at the time I didn’t realize that I couldn’t come close to blowing the flute like a seasoned ITM player. His embouchure was so powerful and focused that the slightly flat D and E were necessary to keep him from going way sharp.

These days I practice embouchure exercises for 30 to 60 minutes per day on the road to getting the sort of power and focus that is clearly needed :slight_smile:

8

There really is no such thing as a flute that is in tune. Certainly, flutes can be played in tune by good players, but even then, the optimal target tuning differs from one situation to another depending no a whole host of issues. One issue is whether one is playing with other instruments that can be played with just intonation (fiddle, say) or must be played with equal temperament (guitar, say). If you are playing with the former in the key of D and are “in tune” your notes will differ from equal temperament tuning (which is what your electronic tuner might be showing) roughly as follows (where the number indicates the number of cents sharp + or flat - compared to equal temperament):

D: 0
E: +4
F#: -14
G: -2
A: +2
B: -16
Cnat: -29
C#: -10

In the list above I normalized on D, but if you chose to tune your flute based on A you would have to subtract 2 from all the numbers above. If you tuned based on G you would have to add 2, etc. So this is part of the problem: we must chose some reference point, and once we do we may not align at other reference points.

On the other hand, if you are playing with others that are playing equal temperament tuning you do not want the above deviation. But who knows what tuning (equal, or just, or some other compromise) the maker of your flute originally chose as a target. There really is no “right” answer here, just compromises.

It is the player’s job to blow the flute in tune. This is easier in the lower octave than in the third octave, so early makers of antique flutes who expected their instruments to be played extensively in the third octave (because they were used for classical music) tended to make larger compromises in the tuning of first octave notes than higher octave notes. Also, the higher octave notes stand out more when they are not in tune. But this is just one contributing factor.

Now consider what happens if the humidity and temperature in your instrument rises, say as you warm up or the room warms up. Your tuning will get sharper. You could compensate for this by pulling out the tuning slide, but this will have more impact on the higher notes (C, B A etc) than on the foot notes. If the flute maker had originally designed your flute to play with the tuning slide extended a certain amount (i.e. the flute would be “in tune with itself” with the slide extended that amount), then as you close the tuning slide less than that the notes will become progressively flatter the nearer the foot they are. So, now if you find yourself playing in a cool room, and close your slide to keep your A at 440 hz, your D will be flat. This would be the case even if the flute was “perfectly in tune” with itself (what ever that means) at a warmer temperature.

Then of course you have to factor in that different players blow sharp or flat compared to one another, and so have the slide extended to different degrees. This means that a flute that is in tune for one player at a certain temperature and humidity will not be in tune for another.

So, to cut a really long post less long, its important to train your ear so that you can hear what it means to be in tune with whoever you are playing with, then you need to be able to lip the various notes on your flute into tune at various different tuning slide extensions depending on the atmospheric conditions. The amount of adaptation you need to apply to each note will vary from one setting to another regardless of the flute. So, that is the real challenge we all struggle with! :confused:

Jon

9

Well, at some point the body just does it. I don’t think there’s any other way.
Also I like to imagine when I play that I’m singing. The flute is me singing,
and I listen to myself sing and really try to sing in tune.

10

Thanks for all of the thoughtful replies. Certainly this is a complex topic. I was hoping someone might say, “Just buy a flute from so and so…” and all my troubles would be gone!

So, from reading and re-reading the posts, it sounds like that in some ways, my fluter friends were right: I need to practice more. It also seems from these posts that the only way to play with others, is to play with others, as although I can try to learn to listen better when playing alone, the true test will be my ability to make quick adjustments when I am playing with other instruments.

Thanks again!

11

I bought a new Tipple just last week and played it at the session for the first time on Sunday. Doug makes a good flute. I was able to play in tune so well I couldn’t even hear myself.

You might want to get a conical wooden flute someday anyway. They are so beautiful to look at, to touch, to play. Some even smell nice. I love my plastic PVC pipe flutes though because they sound great and are worry-free and it’s just so amazing such beautiful sound can come out of materials from the hardware store.