Pitch, and simple keyless flutes

Irish Flute
1

To put the following query in context: I’ve been playing the flute, on and off - sometimes more off than on - for 50 years, but always a concert Boehm-pattern instrument. I was classically trained, and played from the classical repertoire. In the last month or so however, I’ve begun playing Irish traditional music on a simple open-hole wooden flute.

Not having played this kind of flute before, I didn’t know whether I’d get along with one, or would be happy to play it in the longer-term, so I wasn’t going to spend a large sum on a first instrument. I therefore bought a second-hand McNeela African blackwood flute on eBay. I know, having looked as some posts on here, that a number of people don’t rate them. But I felt it would have been foolish to lay down a large sum at first.

I’m managing to develop a decent embouchure, even though it’s significantly different to the silver concert flutes I’m familiar with. But my problem is with the instrument’s internal tuning.

The first-register C sharp is flat. And not just a bit flat: having tuned the A to concert pitch, the C sharp was off-the-scale flat - I mean, really dead-bunny-on-the-road flat. It’s more than a quarter-tone out. That would be very bad in itself, although I’m long enough in the tooth as a flute player to bend a note up a bit if it needs it. But the D immediately above is almost a quarter tone sharp, meaning the two adjacent notes are about a semitone out of whack, and what’s supposed to be a semitone interval between them is near enough a tone. Combine the flat C sharp, and the sharp D, and playing any tune with the two notes adjacent - which is pretty common in the key of D - is enough to make your ears bleed!

Now I’m aware, from a little reading I’ve done around the subject, that I shouldn’t judge simple wooden flutes by the standards of a modern Boehm-pattern concert flute when it comes to pitch and temper. And after all, even a very good concert flute tends to have one or two notes of the scale which can be slightly out in order to accommodate tuning of others. An experienced flautist can take account of this, and bend the notes up or down accordingly.

But a whole semitone of error between two adjacent notes? Is that usual, or acceptable, on a simple wooden flute like this? Were it just one note, or the other, I could go some way to correcting it by adjusting my embouchure and bending the pitch a bit. I don’t think I’m a particularly unskilled flautist; but two adjacent tuning pulling a semitone in different directions is beyond my abilities to remedy.

Basically I’d like to know whether this kind of problem, and to this extent, is common to simple wooden flutes in general - in which case I’d likely be wasting my money replacing my McNeela with a better instrument from a respected maker. Or does it sound as if I’ve simply been sold a lemon? Or is this a known problem with McNeela flutes more widely?

I’d welcome your thoughts…

2

First, I would check the position of the cork. Octaves should line up.
Second, I would think about how much of the embouchure is being covered, related perhaps to the first comment.

It is common on wooden flutes, especially those with large holes, to require a compromise in tuning for the middle C and C#; C can be sharp, C# can be flat. The flute maker can fix one at the cost of the other…

I have only played keyed wooden flutes except for at my very beginning.

If your flute has a C-key, you have options. On my historic R&R flute, I find that the key helps both C and C# into tune, the whistler’s favorite OXX OOO has poor tonality, and my favorite OXO XXX k is just a good as XkOO OOO k. (For completeness, I have good middle C/C# notes using the foot keys).

I have a couple of other slight compromises on other notes, but they are easy to correct.

3

I also play both silver Boehm (Muramatsu) as well as simple system- currently a Burns Folk Flute while I eagerly await my turn to come up on the Olwell keyless list. I’m puzzled by the D being so sharp, and wondering how the rest of the scale is. Are the E and F# also noticeably sharp? How are the octaves throughout the flute?

4

C# is flat on most keyless flutes made for Irish music. It’s a compromise to bring the C natural crossfingering down to an acceptable pitch. It varies by maker how much they shade it, but it’s hard to get both the C# and Cnat exactly on-pitch.

However, it’s not normally that far off. And the second octave D should be pretty decently tuned, given its importance. Unfortunately, McNeela doesn’t have a particularly great name for flutemaking, and I’d suspect that’s where your problem lies. I don’t know if he’s changed his methods recently, but he generally buys his flutes pre-made from mass-producers in Asia (Pakistan is usually the source for these kinds of flutes), and then supposedly “finishes” them in his shop. I don’t know what kind of finishing he does, but these kinds of flutes are just not made well. The business model is quantity, rather than quality, and generally looks/sales rather than actual playing characteristics. McNeela does a whole bunch of advertising online to get his name out there, but honestly, I have rarely seen or heard his flutes played at sessions, and never by a player who was particularly strong.

That’s not to say yours is definitely a badly-made flute, I don’t have it in front of me. Sometimes you get a sort of “luck of the draw” situation and get a decent player. But if you know flutes and you think this flute isn’t up to snuff, you’re probably right.

There are many good makers that you can get at a lower price range. Copley, Forbes, M&E, Baubet, Di Mauro, and Thompson will all make you a decent flute for under or around $500, new. There are plenty of other makers out there, those are just ones I can think of that I’ve played myself and thought were decent. Or, you can wait on a used one to pop up and save a few bucks. Others will no doubt add names to the list here, although take any given recommendation with a grain of salt (including mine!). Best way of doing it is to go to local sessions and learn what other players are playing, maybe ask if you can try out their flute or get a recommendation from a player you really like. Boehm flutes can play Irish music just fine, so it’s a good chance to learn a few tunes and get into the music before you get your simple-system flute!

5

First, I’d suggest tuning to the G rather than the A. The A is one of the notes that’s sometimes compromised, basically due to the size of the human hand (the tone hole has to be very small).

Have you checked whether the second-octave d is closer to in-tune if you don’t vent the top hole? I’ve had flutes where the note is horribly sharp if it’s vented, and others where it’s noticeably flat if it’s not vented.

As mentioned above, checking the head cork is another thing to check. You can check the relative tuning of the G or B in the two octaves. They’ll be much more sensitive than the D.

6

Pretty sure that level of error is quite atypical. Every Irish flute I’ve played has had a slightly flat C sharp, but it’s normally nowhere close that bad. The one I own has a C sharp that’s only a tiny bit flat, and a slight embouchure change can correct for it.

7

When the Boehm was introduced a common criticism was that C# was sharp.

I started out on a keyless “Irish flute” but soon acquired a top-end orchestral flute- a Rudall & Rose made around 1830.

In university I studied Baroque flute for a time.

With this background, when I got my first Boehm flute I found, like the 19th century professional orchestral flutists had found, that C# was quite sharp.

Moral to the story: it’s the habits of the flutist, not the fault of the instrument.

On any Irish flute Bottom D, middle D, and G in both the low and middle register should be bang-on.

The key of G is the wheelhouse of the D Irish flute, whistle, and uilleann pipes (the pipes’ regulators are in G, not D) so the cork should be placed so that both D’s and both G’s are right in tune with each other.

We might keep in mind that until fairly recently Irish flutists played concert flutes- flutes made in the c1830-c1860 period for orchestral use.

These were designed and built to play perfectly in tune- they had to be. The flute I played for decades was built around 1830 for professional orchestral use and I was able to play in in perfect Equal Temperament with no trouble. That’s what it was designed and built to do. Would a flutist in the 1830 London Philharmonic play a bad flute? It’s preposterous.

What I can’t comment on or vouch for are the new flutes built specifically for Irish music, because I’ve not played one at length. After years on a c1830 orchestra flute I switched to a c1860 Pratten model flute.

I have given quick blows on a few modern “Irish flutes” which were superb players and right in tune. Just yesterday a friend let me try his two Olwell flutes and they were great.

No, it’s not acceptable. But without me trying the flute in question I can’t know whether it’s the flute itself (either how it was made, or the cork placement) or how you’re playing it.

Because if you’re blowing it like a Boehm flute you’re going to experience, in reverse, all the tuning criticism heaped on the Boehm when it was tried out by professional flutists who had spent their careers playing old-system flutes, in the second half of the 19th century.

Without playing that flute we who are experienced old-system flutists can’t know if your flute does indeed have a problem.

About C#, as Boehm himself stated that hole is an outlier because one hole has to serve a number of contrary functions. He admitted that his size and placement of that hole wasn’t perfect, but a compromise.

I hate neo-Irish flutes where the maker has made the C# hole too high and too big in order to get C# in tune using normal blowing. On every flute like that I tried the crossfingered C natural was too sharp. In some cases Middle D couldn’t be vented with that hole either, thus spoiling two notes to try to fix one.

On good mid-19th century orchestral Old System flutes open C# is just a hair flat, in fact it’s often around its Just Intonation location, which for Irish music many would prefer.

So if you want a good Equal Temperament C# you just need to give a slight boost to that note.

The reward is a great crossfingered C natural and great vented Middle D.

8

I agree with virtually everything pancelticpiper wrote above, but I have to question the statement that an 1830 Rudall & Rose was designed and built to play in perfect Equal Temperament. I’d question this statement based on the fact that equal temperament tuning was not adopted until late 1800s in Europe and early 1900s in Britain, almost 100 years after that flute was made. I don’t doubt that you could play it in tune with ET though!

Tuning depends, to a large degree, on the way a flute is played. The original makers certainly went to great lengths to design a flute that plays in tune with itself and with whatever the pitch standard of the day was. But that was often not A=440 hz in those days, and for a period there was not a single designated pitch standard (such as A=440 hz today), but rather a number of different pitch standards being used by different orchestras, sometimes in the same country at the same time. So flute makers often attempted to design their flutes as a compromise between several pitch standards. Often this meant anticipating that the flute might be played with various different tuning slide extensions and basically leaving it up to the player to make the necessary corrections to get the notes in tune. It is not possible to achieve a single specific tuning temperament at multiple different pitch targets / slide extensions. So the flute design was a compromise. Sometimes this works out fine for modern ITM players, but that is really more down to chance than by design. The huge influence of the player on tuning can cover for many of the smaller deviations in the original design.

I’ve looked closely at a lot of historic instruments, and my impression is that there is always some tuning slide extension at which a flute seems to be best in tune with itself. This may not agree with A=440 hz, and it may require an unexpectedly large amount of tuning slide extension, implying that the maker expected the flute to be used at several pitch standards, but emphasized one in the tuning of the tone holes.

Having said that, it is also very common to find that C# is flat, compared to pretty much any tuning temperament you throw at the flute. This enables a cross fingered C nat to be played in tune, albeit often still slightly sharp, unless the flute’s keys are used. Pretty much everyone who plays ITM (often not using keys) seems to prefer it this way, and it is likely one of those things that we have grown accustomed to, both in our playing and our listening.

You also tend to find that F# is virtually always flat too, and by quite a bit. Again, we have grown accustomed to this. Most modern makers seem to tune their F#'s a bit flatter than ET, and it doesn’t quite sound right to many people if you don’t do this. When you look closely at the patterns of tuning deviations among other notes (compared to ET) you tend to find that the tuning of flutes usually falls somewhere between Just Intonation and ET, and doesn’t exactly match any of the common temperaments. In my opinion, the target temperament for tuning of these early flutes was also a compromise among many factors. Prior to the adoption of ET as a standard, various temperaments were used, including numerous different mean tone temperaments and Just Intonation in various contexts. The differences among these are often of a scale that a player can easily play the same flute in whatever temperament (ET or JI, say) they target and practice in, so long as the original target pitch of the flute was not too far off.

9

My experience too, Paddler, and I’ve repaired/restored hundreds of 19th century flutes. We know that they were made in a period where pitch was making it’s way north from around 430Hz or below, beckoned by the Philharmonic movement advocating 452-455 Hz. And complicated by wild stabs-in-the-dark such as Nicholson Senior opening up the holes on his Astor but not apparently doing anything about the foot notes, going a long way to explaining Flat Foot Sydrome. Some of the flutes I have dealt with have foot notes 40 to 60 cents flat of A! These are probably flutes that follow the Nicholson Improved mandate but still retained the very long scale of a 430Hz flute. We can see why Mr Prattens mid-century decided to take advantage of Siccama’s 10 key (which had largely sorted out the mess left by Nicholson), revert it back into an 8-key, and term it “Perfected”. It wasn’t of course, but it was an awful lot better.

Going back to pancelticpiper’s hypothesis that: “These were designed and built to play perfectly in tune- they had to be. The flute I played for decades was built around 1830 for professional orchestral use and I was able to play in in perfect Equal Temperament with no trouble. That’s what it was designed and built to do. Would a flutist in the 1830 London Philharmonic play a bad flute? It’s preposterous.”, I agree, it seems unlikely that professional musicians would have struggled with what was tumbling off the streets from the hundreds of makers that infested London. If you had a gig at Lady Wyndamere’s in the afternoon, playing against her Broadwood piano tuned to 430, and then another gig at the Albert Hall that night playing 452-5 with the Philo, would you use the same flute? Especially if its body scale suited the lower pitch but its very long slide allowed you to get A sharp enough to tune to the oboe. Not if I had any choice!

But it seems flat low notes isn’t GarethW’s concerning issue, it’s the too-wide gap between a quite flat C5# and a quite sharp D5, which I agree would be very disturbing. It’s not common to find D5 sharp, whereas it is fairly common to find C5# flat. I’d be interested to know GarethW if the low D (D4) is also sharp. If so, can you get any temporary relief by pulling out the foot a few mm from the RH section to increase the apparent scale length. And perhaps even pulling out the RH section from the LH section, or does that make the RH notes too flat?

You can sharpen the C5# a fair bit by undercutting it upwards towards the head, but that assumes you have some appropriate tools and the willingness to risk your investment! But it’s sounding to me like if you are confident that you want to continue with wooden flute, it’s time to consider a better made instrument.

10

By way of an update…

Many thanks for all the advice and discussion on this. After a lot of head-scratching I think I’ve finally improved the situation, if not entirely solved the problem. I eventually noticed that the cork in the head was set a long, long way from the embouchure for some reason. I suspect perhaps McN sets it that way because it gives the flue a ‘growly’ - what I like to think of as a ‘honking’ - low end. So I removed the head cork and end cap, then repositioned the cork considerably closer to the embouchure. It’s not only made it easier to play, but the internal tuning seems far better. The second register D is still pretty sharp - though not as bad as it was - but the C sharp is much closer to what it should be, and it’s now reasonably playable.

I have however entirely circumvented the problem by treating myself to a Tony Millyard flute, a thing of beauty which plays with remarkable ease and is well-tuned indeed. Many thanks to Tony for all his advice, and for making such lovely instruments.

G