I’ve got a nice Copley ABW flute (attached pic). I’ve thinking of upgrading to either another Copley with tuning slide or a Sweet “Clare” flute. My current flute doesn’t have a tuning slide but I can still get some adjustment in the head joint. I’m wondering if I would see much improvement in performace by upgrading? I’ve been playing for about 2-1/2 years, so I’m still pretty green.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/TZcSgY27PaJXbbPUA
Copley makes a darn good flute that should carry you a long way.
As far as the tuning slide goes, well, that depends on a number of items: how much you can adjust the tuning by simply using the tenon, whether you naturally blow either significantly sharp or flat, and how often you play with others to whom you’d have to tune. I’ve played a number of Copleys without a tuning slide and had no difficulty matching the tuning of other players.
Things you might consider if’n you’re determined to get “a better flute”, if at all possible try playing a range of other flutes to see which ones fit you the best. Things you might consider include the ease of sounding (the embouchure cut), how easy it is to fill, the intonation, the weight (Delrin heavier than blackwood heavier than boxwood), finger hole spacing and size. The ideal flute for you is what’s comfortable and easy for you to play. That depends more on you and your interests than the flute maker.
And, both of the makers you mention produce very good flutes.
Best wishes.
Steve
My own view, playing a delrin Copley a fair amt, is that you won’t get much bang for your buck in switching to the alternatives you mention. Might start looking/saving for a six key.
Thanks for the replies. I have been thinking about getting a 6 key, any thoughts for someone who doesn’t have $2-3K to spend?
Just saw a post that M&E is selling a 6 key blackwood for 750 Euro. That is a killer deal. Not sure if M&E would be a tonal improvement over Copley, but it does give you keys. I’ve seen their Delrin 6-keys in the past and they sound decent and the post mounted keys work. I’m not a big fan of their keywork, but barring locating a damaged antique, and refurbishing same, I don’t think it will be easy to beat the price.
I’ve owned/played multiple examples of both Copley and M&E flutes: The M&E would definitely be a downgrade from the Copley in terms of fit, finish, and most importantly, playability.
The M&E keyed flutes offer good value for the money for those on a very limited budget. That said, all the M&E standard production flutes (keyed and Keyless) are a Tier below the more expensive “name” flutes.
In answer to the OP’s original question: You are unlikely to notice any significant (positive) difference by upgrading to a tuning slide or switching brands at this point. I’ve owned a ton of flutes, and few have much more to offer than what you already own, keys aside. I still own, play, and very much enjoy my Delrin Copley despite owning several other “best of the best” flutes.
My suggestion would be to play what you have and save up for a top tier keyed flute, if you think you’ll want keys in the future.
Thanks for the replies. I have been thinking about getting a 6 key, any thoughts for someone who doesn’t have $2-3K to spend?
Look for an antique 8-key flute that does not say Rudall & Rose.
These are readily available between perhaps $1,200 to $2,400. Ya get what ya pays for, but these antiques are ludicrously under-priced. Cocus on a modern flute is pretty much unobtanium.
Since you’re in the US look for anything by Firth, Pond or Hall (in various combinations). These 1850s +/- American flutes are consistently well-made with easier intonation than some of the the English flutes.
Very much depends on what you want to play. I’ve already posted my raves about Dave Copley’s blackwood six key. The IFS has the occasional good six key. Above all I think a good six key is an investment for the rest of your life, worth the money if you can get it. Also a good six key can itself be sold and you recover the money. But some things that cannot be done cheaply are worth the price. I’m branching into baroque and pop and blues and… All there on the six key, as well as Celtic. The flute will last indefinitely and there’s no telling what you will want to play in a decade.
A reminder that the OP described him/her self as “playing for about 2-1/2 years, so I’m still pretty green.” If the initial question was whether or not to get a tuning slide, going into a discussion about keyed instruments may be a bit early. A significant amount of Irish music is quite playable without keys. Perhaps learning on a keyless instrument would let you discover what you really want in a flute before you begin to “move up”. Just sayin’…
Best wishes.
Steve
I’m curious what you dislike about M&E flutes. It always seemed to me like the main reason they’re so inexpensive is because M&E doesn’t charge an absurd fortune for the keys. (I don’t know anything about flute-making, but I’ve never understood why 6 little spring-loaded keys have to cost $2000+, often more than the flute itself. It seems completely absurd - but I’m sure there’s some explanation.)
It’s extremely difficult to get a good sound out of my plastic M&E, but I always figured that was because it’s an R&R and has a very unforgiving embouchure hole, so I figured I’d eventually get good enough to play consistently well on it.
So what’s the issue with them? How are they different from most other flutes? Why are they inferior in terms of “playability,” and what’s better about “name brand” flutes? I’ve heard very conflicting things, with some people saying they’re amazing and others saying they’re terrible. Indeed, over the last couple of days, I’ve heard one person say they’re sub-par and another say they’re extremely good on this very forum! I don’t know how to sort all this out, or when/if I should “upgrade.” I’d love something that is less frustrating to play, but I don’t want to buy a new flute just because it’s more forgiving and easier to play with an imperfect embouchure.
I’ve never understood why 6 little spring-loaded keys have to cost $2000+, often more than the flute itself. It seems completely absurd -
The obvious suggestion would ofcourse be to think of the labour and skills involved in making a set of keys.
But ofcourse it isn’t just '6 spring loaded little keys" there’s holes to drill and tune/voice and finish, make block or pin mounts and install the lot in order to turn it into something working smoothly.
Cyberknight, I’ll attempt to give a more general answer to your questions, rather than specifically talking about M&E. I don’t have an M&E flute and have never played one.
First, I think it is important to realize that making a flute that plays really well (like an Olwell, say) requires a very high degree of precision and a lot of fine tuning. This is both time consuming and requires a certain mentality on the part of the maker.
For example, not every maker will feel justified in spending an extra 90% effort for a 1% gain in performance. But some will. Their main motivation generally isn’t financial. Some players will notice the difference and will value it highly. Other will not. Some may notice, but not value it highly enough to justify the cost.
For a maker to earn a reputation for consistently producing really good flutes they need to replicate this level of precision. Replicating it is much harder than achieving it once in a while. Again, it comes down to attention to detail, but this time not just in the flute itself, but also in the tools and methods used in the construction of the flute. Reworking your methods so that you can replicate a high level of precision is difficult, costly, and time consuming. Not every maker will feel justified in spending the extra time or money, but some will, and some players will notice.
All of that applies to keyed or keyless flutes, and much more broadly of course.
Keyed flutes are a lot harder to make than keyless flutes and require a substantial investment in new equipment. Regardless of whether you forge or cast keys, they are very time consuming to make. And the work is hard on the hands. They are also difficult and time consuming to fit. There are many things that can go wrong with a keyed flute, compared to a keyless one, and if any of them occur the flute doesn’t play well. So it is a risk-prone venture. When you really factor in the amount of work required to make a good keyed flute, they seem relatively inexpensive compared to keyless flutes. I say this as someone who has been making keyless flutes for a while now and who is just starting to experiment with forging and casting my own keys. Having gained some first hand experience with this I can honestly say that I am quite amazed that people can make a living making keyed flutes at today’s prices. It is much more a labor of love than a profitable financial venture. I would say that we still face the risk that the few remaining top makers retire, leaving us with no source of high end instruments. And it is far from likely that keyed Irish flute making becomes automated and production scaled to the point where prices plummet.
With a very high level of financial investment and engineering expertise I’m sure it would be possible to partially automate the production of keyed flutes, but the upfront cost would be enormous and would require a much larger market to justify it. As it stands, most high quality keyed flutes are made by hand by a very small number of highly skilled craftsmen (and women). Building them this way is extremely time consuming, and not very profitable at all. If it really was the case that keys cost an absurd fortune, someone would have stepped in with lower prices and cornered the market. We’ve seen attempts at this from makers in Pakistan, among others, but the challenge still remains far from met as far as I know.
Thank you for the explanation! That does put things in perspective a bit.
Yeah, and the Pakistan thing is part of what confuses me. Look, I get that Pakistani-made Irish flutes absolutely suck. But they have perfectly usable keywork on them, don’t they? Somehow, those Pakistani companies have figured out how to produce and mount functional keywork that doesn’t cost a fortune. Hakam Din makes 8-key flutes for only a few hundred dollars, and I’ve seen even cheaper ones out there.
If I were an Irish flute maker, I’d seriously consider buying Hakam Din flutes, ripping the keys off of them, and using them on my own flutes. Heck, maybe I’d even buy junk clarinets for $10 on eBay and rework their keywork for the flute. Okay, I’m half kidding. But in all honesty, either of these options might be easier and cheaper than making my own from scratch.
Or, better yet, I’d figure out what kind of witchcraft those Pakistani companies are up to, making and mounting metal keys in an affordable fashion. Whatever it is, Michael Cronnolly seems to have figured it out.
Please note that I mean no disrespect to the amazing flute-makers who painstakingly make their own keys from scratch and elegantly mount them on the flute’s body, which obviously has artistic value in and of itself. But personally, it still just doesn’t make sense to me that mounting a few custom-shaped pieces of metal on a wooden body in the 21st century has to cost weeks of labor and add $2,000+ to the price. I 100% believe what you say about how labor-intensive the process typically is - I just think there has to be an easier way to do it. Perhaps by ordering custom-machined parts from a machinist company, and maybe sticking to pin mounts instead of block mounts?
About the tuning slide question, for many years I played a c1860 Pratten model 8-key, but I had Casey Burns make an unlined simple blackwood headjoint for it.
He made it so that pulled out just a little gave A=440, and I don’t think in 30 years playing I ever needed to budge it from that spot.
But if I were to be in a situation where everybody was a bit sharp I could cope with it.
Personally I prefer unlined no-tuning-slide heads. For one thing they’re lighter, but I think they also give a bit “woodier” tone. So for me a metal-lined head with metal tuning slide mechanism does not constitute an upgrade.
Of course, but why do all flutemakers make their own keys to begin with? Why not get them custom-CNCed? I’d certainly imagine that would be cheaper and easier (but maybe I’m completely off-base here). Also, how do you think M&E and all the Pakistani companies are able to get their keys made so cheaply?
But ofcourse it isn’t just '6 spring loaded little keys" there’s holes to drill and tune/voice and finish, make block or pin mounts and install the lot in order to turn it into something working smoothly.
Certainly, but there’s no way drilling those extra holes is what’s costing flute-makers weeks of extra labor worth $2,000+. If you’ve already made a 6-hole flute, drilling 6 extra holes (each of which only affects one note at a time) isn’t going to come close to doubling the labor cost. I’m assuming that the lion’s share of extra labor that goes into making a 6-key flute consists of making and mounting the keys, not drilling the extra holes. Again, correct me if I’m wrong here.
If you’ve already made a 6-hole flute, drilling 6 extra holes (each of which only affects one note at a time)
Do they though? Are things really that simple?
Every change to the bore will affect everything else.
I mean, none of it is simple. I wasn’t trying to say it was. And I didn’t mean that the process of drilling extra holes doesn’t affect every note on the instrument - I’m sure it does, to some degree. I just meant that opening/closing the 6 extra holes only affects one note at a time, which (I presume) makes drilling them at least moderately easier than drilling the main 6.
But my main point was that the more-than-doubling of the cost is likely primarily due to making and mounting the keys, not drilling the extra holes. Do you disagree?
It’s worth noting that Jose Morneaux and Skip Healy both make 10-hole flutes, and they only seem to charge a relatively small additional fee for the extra holes. Whereas, I’m pretty sure a 6-key Healy flute costs 2 or 3 times the price of a keyless Healy flute.
No. Not in my experience. I’ve worked on a few of them and there were lots of problems, including lack of precision in sizing of pins and pin-holes, causing the key to wobble and leak; springs too stiff for proper functioning, misalignment errors that were almost impossible to fix, poor finish on tone hole rims, lack of precision in sizing of block slots to key shaft width, etc. Basically, lots of problems that take lots of time to put right, and often simply cannot be put right. It is actually easier and much more effective to make your own flute from raw materials, being careful not to introduce the problems in the first place.
A very simple example of this would be how to deal with an embouchure hole that is poorly cut and too large. Sure, you can drill it out larger, turn a bushing from a separate piece of wood on the lathe, glue it in place, re-ream the head, drill a new embouchure hole in the bushing etc. But you would spend hours of work trying to re-use a piece of wood that costs almost nothing. Basically, it doesn’t take much of an error to ruin a flute.
Also, in my opinion, the aesthetics of the keys used on Pakistani flutes are not very good. So I wouldn’t want to fit a set of keys like that on my own flutes. You want a nice set of keys in order to justify the work to fit them. And besides, they are unlikely to actually fit, in the sense that the location of the tone hole on your own flute depends on the bore profile you use, which is likely not the same as theirs. And the location of the key touch depends on ergonomics which need to be worked out for each flute.
The fundamental problem is that the flutes are cheaply made and that is why they are inexpensive. The cost of the materials generally does not contribute much to the cost of a high end flute. Most of the cost is in the labor, and most of the labor is concerned with dialing in the last few percent of performance, which is what discerning players care about. If you don’t care about that, then sure, you can make a cheaper flute, but they already exist, and have done for years.
It is only when you try to make something high quality yourself that you truly start to realize how difficult it is. If you really want to understand the answers to your questions, then try buying a junk clarinet off eBay and reworking its keywork for a flute. I expect you will quickly start to discover the tip of an iceberg of problems that need to be solved in order to make a decent keyed flute.
I’d say that is still an open question, at least until I play one myself or hear testimony from a lot of players I trust.
When I first saw the image of those flutes on your post about a 6-key for under $1000 my first thought was that the key work looked a lot like some of the keywork on some of the Pakistani flutes I’ve seen, so I did wonder if they were outsourced.
I think all these options have already been tried. Outsourcing specialty work like this to a machine shop or jeweler is expensive. Fitting post-mounted keys has its own challenges, and is at least as difficult as fitting block mounted ones.
Okay, point taken. But those are all problems with mounting the keys, not with making them, which you seemed to imply was half the battle. At the very least, they’ve found a way to make most of the components of the keys cheaply.
Also, in my opinion, the aesthetics of the keys used on Pakistani flutes are not very good.
Okay, but that would seem to be a very minor concern for most players. I mean, sure, I’ll pay more for aesthetics in some situations, but I’m not paying thousands of dollars for slightly more elegant looking keys. If you’re willing to pay that much just to support fine craftsmanship, more power to you.
I’d say that is still an open question, at least until I play one myself or hear testimony from a lot of players I trust.
When I first saw the image of those flutes on your post about a 6-key for under $1000 my first thought was that the key work looked a lot like some of the keywork on some of the Pakistani flutes I’ve seen, so I did wonder if they were outsourced.
Well, I play an M&E 6-key (polymer) flute myself. As I mentioned, I don’t play very well. But there certainly isn’t any problem with the keys, as far as I can tell - and I use all of them, because I like playing in unusual keys. All of them seal perfectly, and all of them are perfectly comfortable to use. Advanced players who have played my flute sometimes tell me they don’t like playing it very much, but they’ve never mentioned any problem with the keys, other than that they don’t like the finger stretch on a couple of them (this doesn’t bother me at all). And you can adjust the tension of every key yourself, if you don’t like any of them.
And the funny thing is, I meet flute players all the time who complain about the keys on their high-end flutes not functioning properly and needing servicing. (Granted, I’ve only played for two years, so maybe my flute will be in the same position eventually).
All this to say, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with M&E’s keys, and I would happily buy a much better flute with the exact same keys on it, if it meant saving thousands of dollars. I have a feeling many ITM musicians would agree.
Their keys are cheap because they are mass-produced in high numbers. Most high-end flute makers don’t make enough flutes to be able to benefit from economy of scale. Getting a small number of keys custom made by someone else is probably much more expensive than making them yourself. And when you make them yourself you can perfect the design, fit, aesthetics and ergonomics for your own flutes. Furthermore, to my knowledge, most makers of high-end flutes have no interest in getting into mass-production. They like using traditional methods to make their flutes precisely how they want them, and enjoy dealing with customers who appreciate a high quality, hand made instrument. They are not really competing with the Pakistani makers, and others, who are mass producing lower quality instruments at low cost.
I’d say that is still an open question, at least until I play one myself or hear testimony from a lot of players I trust.
When I first saw the image of those flutes on your post about a 6-key for under $1000 my first thought was that the key work looked a lot like some of the keywork on some of the Pakistani flutes I’ve seen, so I did wonder if they were outsourced.
Well, I play an M&E 6-key (polymer) flute myself. As I mentioned, I don’t play very well. But there certainly isn’t any problem with the keys, as far as I can tell. All of them seal perfectly, and all of them are perfectly comfortable to use. Advanced players who have played my flute sometimes tell me they don’t like playing it very much, but they’ve never mentioned any problem with the keys, other than that they don’t like the finger stretch on a couple of them (this doesn’t bother me at all). And you can adjust the tension of every key yourself, if you don’t like any of them.
All this to say, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with M&E’s keys, and I would happily buy a much better flute with the exact same keys on it, if it meant saving thousands of dollars.
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So advanced players don’t like playing your flute. Sounds like you are agreeing with me. 