I found a C Sweetheart flute today at
Music Folk. Don’t know what kind of
wood it’s made of, not rosewood, certainly,
or maple. Anyhow it’s easy to finger,
despite its size, it’s light, and
it has a sweet but quiet (so far)
tone. Pleasant. What I can’t figure out is
what one does with a C flute?
Other than play it by oneself,
I mean. I usually use a low
G instrument to play in C.
Any ideas?
Do Sweetheart flutes get loud
when one’s embouchure improves,
by the way? So far they’ve
mostly struck me as a bit
on the quiet side, the low
ones, I mean.
Assuming that it doesn’t have keys, F would be another good bet for keys. Just today I used my C (whistle) on an F tune at practice. It just depends upon which venue you’ll be playing in. I was playing in church, and there are a number of songs in F. Significantly less in C and F in the Irish tradition, though there are a few.
I would buy a keyed flute with a C foot before I would buy a keyless C flute.
Erik
[ This Message was edited by: ErikT on 2003-01-16 00:45 ]
On 2003-01-15 22:11, jim stone wrote:
What I can’t figure out is
what one does with a C flute?
Other than play it by oneself,
I mean. I usually use a low
G instrument to play in C.
Any ideas?
A C flute would be very useful for playing tunes in D minor, G minor, etc, which are keys that fiddlers like to play in that are rough on a D flute, even a keyed one. For example, consider the D minor tune Julia Delaney. It doesn’t lay very well on the flute in D minor. But pop it up a step to E minor and it just flows right out. Playing the tune with the E minor fingerings on a C flute will put you back in D minor, and then you can play along with all those fiddlers. This same process holds true for dozens of other tunes as well…
I wouldn’t recommend swapping flutes in the middle of sets to get round awkward keying.
Best thing to do is to find a piper with a flat set in C and arrange to have a few flat sessions with him or her. Make the fiddlers tune down a tone, it’s not too much of a bind for them.