Note that I’m not asking for advice, I’m wondering how YOU approach tuning your flute.
I ask because I see many different approaches and I’m sometimes confused. One is the constant slide-fiddler. Some flute players I know seem to be constantly tugging at the slide one way or another, sometimes in the middle of tunes. I’ll admit that I’m not sure what exactly they’re doing; after adjusting the slide 20 times over the course of a session, you’d think you’d be in tune!
The flute I play on most has no tuning slide, so I don’t have anything to fiddle with! I adjust tuning with embouchure, rolling in and out. Every so often I need a bit more room and will pull the head out of the tenon a bit, but it’s very rare. I find this method easier to adjust mid-tune than adjusting the slide, and a more dynamic response to the constant warming up and cooling down of the instrument that happens over the course of a session.
Also, I’ve noticed a difference between those using a tuning app or digital tuner vs asking for a pitch from a fixed-pitch instrument like a concertina or accordion. I tend to go with the latter, figuring it’s better to be in tune with the person I’m playing with even if they’re somewhat north or south of A440. But I definitely get the impulse to check the tuner for precision.
So, what’s your strategy? And if there are slide-fiddlers among us, what exactly are you doing there?
We are always supposed to be at A=440. I do some practice playing with recordings and/or with RTTA running on a phone or tablet. So I know where my tuning slide should be for A440 at room temperature, roughly how much I can lip up or down and that this is less in the second octave.
Arriving in a comfortable-temperature room with a cold flute I expect to have to blow up into tune for a few minutes and I may move the tuning slide in for a while if the first tune is high in the range. I may revise the slide a bit during the evening depending on how things feel. If I miss a set or two I’ll expect to be lipping up or maybe nudging the slide in for a minute or so. I can normally tell from the way I am blowing if the slide needs adjusting due to temperature or whatever.
What I find tricky is when I can hear flutes and whistles are not in tune but I’m not sure if it’s me or not. I generally assume whistle players who play in bands or who also play recorders in consorts are correct.
I have a tuning slide, but like you Bigsciota I just roll in/out as needed to play in tune with the concertina players at our session. I fiddle with slide position when I get a new flute, but unless I’m playing outside in 104 F temperatures or outside near freezing - I just don’t adjust the slide. I can lip up/down and roll in/out to handle a cold flute or whatever. The fiddling with the slide just seems to cause more issues than adjusting on the fly yourself (that’s one of the blessings and curse of flute - you impact tuning much more than on just about any other instrument by how you play it).
Firstly, please take everything I say with a pinch of salt as I am no way good enough at flute to give advice!
When I started playing with others my tuning was bad and chaotic. I think that this is normal for beginners fluters. I bought myself a tuner to practice to - and this helped [[In solo practice]], but it could not extract my efforts from the mix [[when playing with others]], so told me nothing about how I was playing.
My solution was to buy a small radio microphone and receiver, then pipe the output of the receiver into my tuner. The microphone can attach magnetically, so I have created a band of ‘knicker elastic’ with a magnet in it. This band slips over the head of the [[flute!!]] and holds the microphone near the blow hole.
Now the tuner can be fed the sound from my playing and give me a fairly good indication of how well I am playing in real time. This has been really useful, and I am playing much more in tune these days - I occasionally glance at the tuner and mostly I am about right (‘close enough for folk’). My biggest discovery (and this should not be a surprise) is that I tune up when no one else is playing, then go out of tune when trying to hear myself in the mix.
I did try the microphone via a small amp and into an earpiece, but the latency was just too off-putting.
That’s got me worried. I had always thought that with me it was the other way round - on flute and when singing I think I usually ‘lock on’ to what I am hearing but wander off pitch when on my own. I had better dig out that old lavaliere microphone and some elastic.
I was once told “If you can’t hear yourself you are probably in tune”.
I guess we have to clarify and separate different things here. What I meant was that I tune when it is quiet and therefore blow more softly. That leads to a different tuning position to when I play - usually a lot noisier, so I blow harder and tend to go sharper in most of the range.
However, I hear you. When playing by myself my tuning has no reference other than the tuner itself, so I can drift (the opposite of perfect pitch). When there is an audible reference (backing track, other people) I find myself playing much closer to correct pitch. I am also improving at pitch matching, but still need the tuner as a crutch/confidence boost though I look at it less frequently unless I am '‘leading’. Last night I started Magh Seola and being the main player I watched the tuner assiduously.
‘if you can’t hear yourself you are in tune’? Maybe. ‘If no one else can hear you then does it matter?’
One of the commenters had it basically right.
It’s my experience over the years that some players have a tendency to do this when they don’t know the tune, is futzing with something and basically is covering. Just a bad habit is all, but a common one. It’s better than admitting you don’t know the tune, set your flute down and stare at the others playing it. So….make like your flute is out of tune and noodle with that.
My 2c.
If they played a metal whistle and didn’t know all the tunes being played, they’d need to retune. Once whistles get cold they go 15 – 20 cents flat, so the slide will need moving in a bit to compensate. It takes another set to warm it up again, at which point it has to be moved out again.
It only takes a second to two, but retuning is necessary in cold or hot weather if I’m not playing all the time. I can do some adjustment with breath pressure, but there are limits.
The other thing is that some people have flutes or whistles with slightly loose tuning slides. Not so loose you can wrap them, but loose enough that you occasionally push them slightly out of position. They’ll also be prone to mid-session retuning.
In general I use the g for tuning. Sometimes I ask a box or concertina player for reference. But I only do that when I want to start a set.
Mostly I just play a g (or sometimes an a (as a drone) while the session is playing a tune in g (or maybe in d…but rarely…)- and I just try to make out if that g drone sounds in harmony.
To be honest: The flute players that use tuners quite often tend to be those, that are not so good in tune. I think that just listening carefully and tuning by ear is the way to go.
That being said, especially really noisy and long sessions in winters are where my tuning can get bad, without me noticing for too long! Therefore I am now asking fixed pitched instruments players more often to give me a reference tone currently.
And I definitely notice even after a decade on the wooden flute and more years on the silver flute, that my tuning changes. Right now I have pull the flute out much less than I used to, like year ago or so. I guess that my playing style (and tone ideal that I strive toward ) that’s still changing back and forth might be the reason for that.
Well, with the things that have been written on this thread so far, you can bet there won’t be many who will fess up to adjusting their tuning slide now!
Beginner-intermediate amateur with a day job here, so what the heck, I’ve got nothing to lose…
I’ve heard that pilots push the stick forward to dive, and pull it back to climb. But if it requires constant stick forward or back to maintain level flight, then the plane is “out of trim” and the pitch trim needs to be adjusted. That’s kind of how I think about flute tuning. Rolling the flute in or out is sort of like using the stick – it’s what I do in the heat of the moment, while the tune is chugging away. But if I notice that I’m constantly having to roll in or out too much to where I’m missing my embouchure “happy place” and it’s affecting tone quality, then it’s time to adjust the slide (which is sort of like the trim control) so that I can be in tune and also keep my embouchure “in the zone.”
On a good night, when everything is locking in and my flute and I are friends, this looks like maybe pulling out a bit 3 or 4 times during the first half hour of session, as my flute warms up and drifts sharper. After that, usually everything stabilizes and I don’t have to mess with it much.
But I’ve also had nights (and I bet I’m not the only one) where I’m “riding the struggle bus” the entire evening or maybe the first half of it. Can’t get my d— face muscles to lock in right, sound isn’t what it ought to be, tuning is all over the place. And on those nights, yeah, I adjust the slide way more times than I’d like to. The more I practice and the longer I play the fewer days like this I have, but I do still have them.
I’d much rather play in a session with someone who’s adjusting their slide a lot, than someone blithely churning along 20c sharp or flat and not attempting to fix it! We’re all wherever we are on the learning curve, and taking the time to fix your tuning means you care. You’ll get no judgement from me.
