For you, we could just call it a neologism.
How’s that?
Stuart
Depending, of course, on who you’re ordering from, the Pratten will probably take more work, and therefore will probably get the boot by you before you actually make an informed decision. If you worked on the Pratten full time, you’d find it has some advantages over a Rudall. The final choice, of course, will always be a matter of personal tastes and style, but if you’ve developed a preference for smaller-holed flutes (which doesn’t include all Rudall’s), you’ll probably never aquire a taste for the heftier Pratten.
A keyed Pratten is excellent for classical music; it was not developed for ITM any more than a Rudal was. Both play ITM beautifully, assuming the player does, so the idea that Prattens are only good for ITM is misleading and wrong. Unkeyed flutes, of either type, are pretty much only good for ITM.
BTW, Stuart, I never felt my Hammy took “lots of air” either – most of what drives it is my own embouchure, with acknowledgement of Hammy’s embouchure cut, and then it plays with whatever volume of air I have in me at any given moment. Now, if I want to fill it with lots of air, it really lets me push it, and that, to me, defines a good Pratten.
Gordon
Just out of curiosity: Have keys always been on flutes? I’m guessing that playing classical on a keyless would be difficult because of half-holing, etc. But if keys did not always exist, how did they play it then?
Just curious since I had read somewhere that if you wanted to play more than just ITM try some Bach Jr. and was thinking about it…
Thanks,
Tony
The oldest flutes had no keys, then there was the D# key, then gradually all the others, leading to the 8-key flute. Try this site:
http://www.oldflutes.com
[quote="GrixxlyHave keys always been on flutes? I’m guessing that playing classical on a keyless would be difficult because of half-holing, etc. But if keys did not always exist, how did they play it then?[/quote] Usually not by half-holing so much as by cross-fingering. An instrument like a recorder can be fully chromatic with simple fingerings. Sometimes there are problems with getting cross-fingered D#/Eb to work, though, hence the need for the Eb key.
The keyed nature of these Nicholson-Rudall-Pratten designs might have weakened any desire on the part of the flutemakers to have an instrument which responded well to cross-fingerings, thence our quandary. The keyless flute that we know, the keyless Pratten or Rudall or whatever, is probably a pretty recent invention. You don’t see all that many 19th-century instruments of this ilk that are keyless, I don’t think. Actually, I’m not all that sure. Sure, Irish trad stuff doesn’t need keys very often, and keyless flutes are cheaper. . . someone else probably knows this better than I.
I’m also not all that sure about why (even though Glauber didn’t) we tend to call it an Eb key, and not a D# key.
More questions, few answers.
Stuart
Not really. The thing is, a flute is always a thing of compromises. Do you want it loud, in tune or chromatic? Pick any 2. 
Adding keys allowed the makers to concentrate on making the flutes loud and in tune, and the cross-fingerings suffered. The evolution culminated on the Boehm flute, which has large holes for all semitones, positioned more or less equidistant from one another. And every note is keyed.
I don’t know if anyone can explain how cross-fingerings work, but they certainly depend on the imperfect venting of small-holed flutes. The keys were introduced first to improve the accidentals on the first octave, which have always been harder to cross-finger, but gradually they caught. A well vented flute works better in the third octave too, and the fingerings there are more intuitive.
But old habits die hard, and French flutes, for example, continued to allow the forked fingering for F natural. You see the same desire to keep supporting the old cross-fingerings, in some of the alternative systems that competed with Boehm’s (and eventually lost).
The keyless Irish flute is an Irish invention of the 20th century.
Except for Quantz, who had an Eb and a D# key in his flutes, people just called it the key. It’s used not only to make the Eb/D# notes, but it’s also needed for many other notes, not all of them accidentals. If i remember right, i think Quantz called them the large key and the small key, or something of the sort. It’s confusing, because the large key has the smaller hole, and vice versa.
I think we call it Eb because you see Eb more often than you see D#, in Baroque music. For example, in the keys of Gm or Eb. You’d have to be playing on E or worse, to see a D#.
That’s my point, Glauber, so I think your “not really” is more of a “right on.” It’s not like the keys were added piecemeal; they came about whole-hog. The Nicholson simple-system flute is keyed. Once you have keys, as you say, the cross-fingerings suffered. I said they had no motivation to make the cross-fingerings work. All the same.
As for the Eb key, you are supposed (if you’re orthodox about the fingering) to keep it open for Eb and everything above. So it’s not per se involved in other fingerings, but it is/was necessary as a vent. Modern Boehm fingering requires that the Eb be open for all the notes above it.
For the spectators, I think it’s safe to say that Glauber and I agree on a lot of stuff, but never easily. Heh!
Stuart
Hehe, here comes more of the same, then! 
Maybe for the Classical flutes (Rudalls, Prattens, etc), but not for the traverso (the 1-key). In the traverso, you use “the key” for certain notes but not for others. For example, you use it for the F# but not for the E, F or G; they sound out of tune if you do. Other notes, for example, the 3rc octave C, don’t sound at all if the key is closed. The 3rd octave D sounds very sharp if the key is closed, you have to open it to bring the pitch down! And many other weirdnesses; for example, the fingering for first octave A# uses the key, but first octave Bb doesn’t. And it varies a little from flute to flute.
The modern Boehm is so well vented that it really doesn’t care if you have that key open or not (unless you’re playing an E or, of course, D), so it’s convenient to keep your pinky down there to help stabilize the flute.
g
The answer I think Grixxly is looking for is that what we call Irish flutes, the Prattens, Rudalls, and their ilk, were all keyed flutes originally, designed in the 19th century to play classical music. They were the end result of an evolution up from the one-key conical, but there were no keyless Rudalls or Prattens, nor one-key Rudalls or Prattens, made in the 19th century.
The keyless “folk” flute appeared, give or take a decade, in the 1960s or 70s during the folk revival, as modern conical flute makers first appeared and then realized that most ITM players plugged or ignored their keyed antique flute keys anyway, and that it was certainly easier, cheaper and in some ways advantageous to have a keyless flute over a keyed one.
I think it’s too complicated to explain modern keyless flutes by way of the baroque one-key, as the latter is made to be chromatic, and the keyless flute really isn’t, in spite of the many ways you can fudge a Fnat or G# on a keyless, long as you don’t linger there.
Gordon
For sure. But it’s fun to talk about flutes. We didn’t even get started on Renaissance flutes! No, not Ren Faire flutes. 
Here’s Hammy’s take on the keyless:
http://homepage.eircom.net/~hammie/KKless.htm
I change my opinion weekly. It’s nice to have keys and be able to play the 2 or 3 tchunes that need them, but is it worth the extra cost and the added fragility? A keyless flute in blackwood is one the toughest instruments there is (second only to an M&E or Seery), and will play 90% of the Irish Trad repertory anyway, at least for a few more years, until all the young hotshots fresh out of music school flood the scene with chromatic tunes! 
I am certainly planning on giving the Pratten (Actually it may be a Nicholson, I don’t have to make up my mind for some time) a year or so before making up my mind. An additional data point is that the wait for the Olwell is a year, while that for the Noy Rudall is 18 months. So for six months, the big-hole flute will be my only super high-ender. And next to the very pleasant but dainty sound of the Bleazey, it just might grow on me really quickly.
Also, I decided on an Olwell largely due to his reputation for making very versatile flutes. I also find it interesting that it seems like for every person who’s a Rudallite because of their versatility, there’s one who’s a Prattenite because of their versatility. As you said, it’s probably all a matter of personal preference.
So, is there anybody out there who switches back and forth between or among flutes with very different characteristics? How frequently, and how long does it take to make the adjustments?
I take it that the Copley is a hybrid,
and my impression is that it errs somewhat on the Prattenesque
side. It’s louder than the Seery, anyhow.
I know, I know, that doesn’t prove anything,
there are loud Rudalls.
but apparently there are Pratten-making
features and Rudall-making features.
As mentioned earlier, there are reasons
to divide the two hand-pieces, e.g.
avialiability of wood, minimizing loss
if something doesn’t work out while
your making the flute–so the two
central pieces instead of one,
while they make Copley’s less
Prattenesque, may not mean that
much. Dave says earlier that the
tone holes are smaller than on
original Prattens. I wonder how big
tone holes are on Olwells. Must buy
them all, it seems.
Again, Pratten holes are quite large, Rudalls can be as large. The first statement is pretty much without exception, the second with lots of them.
Volume, though, often has little to do with it; I’ve heard smallish holed Rudalls fill a pub, and – depending on the player, of course – heard, um, rather did not hear the Pratten at all. It’s not really a matter of decibels; a good tone can cut where a fuzzy one won’t. The real subjective coin toss between these two hard-to-define-exactly body and embouchure types belongs to the player’s comfort level. Both flutes, if made by a good maker, will fit whatever bill you’re looking for in a flute for ITM and other folk, classical, etc., if the flute feels right to you.
Sometimes it’s a matter of making it feel right; I don’t know, if I could go back in time, that I would have picked a Pratten-style. But Hammy made a great flute and now I’m playing it pretty well. Had I gone with a Rudall, well, I’d probably be playing that one pretty well by now.
Chas, I wish I was going to be deciding between an Olwell and a Noy sometime in the next year and a half; Olwells are not hard to play, and a bit thinner in the hand than a Hamilton, although in many ways they’re visually identical.
As for changing flutes, I swing mostly between a tiny-embouchured baroque flute and (mostly) the Hamilton. Strangely, I think playing baroque music on the baroque has been good for my Irish embouchure – all that 3rd octave fine-tuning and major attention given to rhythmic sharpness, I suppose. I also play a decent German flute, which is my only fully keyed instrument and the flute I learned (ITM) on. It’s much more demanding, in spite of it’s smaller bore and finger holes, to get a good sound from it, and that’s not always a bad thing; ease of play, I think, is highly overrated.
Gordon
For whatever it’s worth, if you want a flute that “barks” in the low octave, the Hamilton is excellent.
Lest we forget, Conal O Grada recorded his album “The Top of Coom”, one of the loudest, raunchiest sounding flute albums ever, on a Rudall and Rose flute.
Thanks for all this info. I would like to play a Hamilton,
for sure. I’ve reached the point where I’ve
basically decided that what I need to do is
learn to play what I have, which is probably
more than I can ever do justice to; and to
distrust the endless yearning for more hardware
as a diversion from practicing…
I learn a heck of a lot from you’all,
and it helps. Best
You are wise, my friend. May the Force be with you.