Trying to learn some English Country Dance tunes and am having a devil of a time trying to deal with D# on my keyless flute (and whistle), both in D (the tune is in Em). The particular tune I’m learning is the Female Saylor, in Em, and a phrase is (in abc, eight notes):
|g2 f e2 ^d|e3 B3|
I cannot half-hole the d and get anything good, so the question is – what’s the workaround? Change the D# to an E? I guess my general question is, when faced with a half-holed pitch on a simple instrument, are there “rules” to work around it?
Get a flute with an Eb key. Make no bones about it, that is the only good solution.
Otherwise, you are faced, as you realise, with a very awkward half-hole job (not impossible if you practice it enough, I suppose, but never easy) or finding a harmonically acceptable substitute - in this case either the F# above or the B below (but absolutely not an E!) might serve without excessive distortion of the melody, I think - though someone with better music theory than I possess will doubtless correct that.
The abc you quote is an example of about the easiest context for getting that half-holed D# that there could be. It’s between 2, relatively speaking, longer Es. You just need to practise it - it’s difficult (partly because the bottom hole is small) but not impossible. The trick, IMO, is to make sure that the five fingers that stay on the holes are securely in the right place and stay there while you put B3 down half over the bottom hole. If you’re squeaking, it may be that one of those other fingers (likely culprit is B2) is leaking slightly and not covering the hole properly.
Workarounds, such as Jem suggests, may be OK too, depending on context.
I agree with the above posts. There’s no way to cleanly play an Eb on a D flute - only to leave it out, but in Female Saylor the note is significant and would leave a noticable hole.
For that tune, I’d transpose it to Am and play a C whistle. It would be a lot more fun than fussing with a bunch of half-holing/cross fingering F, Bb, and Eb. (You’d still have to half-hole/cross finger the G#, but that’s much easier to do cleanly) http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/tmp/Tune7482.pdf
If it doesn’t bother the folks you’re playing with, you could play an f# instead. Or a B if you want to get fancy (though I tend toward the smaller intervals in the chord; whatever blends better).
So I’d probably do a quickie e bounce/short roll kind of thing and/or the f# as a variation depending on what else was happening.
FWIW, the best piece of half-holing advice I ever heard was from Kevin Crawford, who said that it’s different for everyone, and it’s different on different notes. Find what works for you. Have you tried just hovering your e finger above the hole or approaching the tonehole from a different side? For d# I hit it from the front; i.e., the side closest to me – that’s what I find easiest. But some people will cover the left side or even the right half. Whatever works for your hands, the passage, the flute, and the tune!
Quite right the only solution on the flute is a key or another note. But for whistles I don’t so much half-hole it as shade the hole with my finger held straight on the right side at the edge of the hole. Works quite well for most of my whistles.
Clark
