Hey, first time poster - long time lurker.
I dabble on the whistle, but mainly stroke the strings. :roll:
Saw this on ebay yesterday (no I am not the owner) and thought that it looks like the one Paddy Carty played.
My friend who does play flute wishes he had the disposable income, but wonders if it still plays well.
If anyone does get a hold of it, let me know as I would love to think that I assisted in helping get a good flute under competent fingers.
Be aware that this may be a high pitched flute, I used to own serial no. 4870, a standard Boehm system Rudall made in 1912 and it was almost exactly a half note higher pitched (fingering A produced an almost dead-on Bb). This one is likely made well before the turn of the century from it’s serial no. and I cannot guess at it’s pitch but many Rudall’s were made at different pitches, so it may not be generally usable in a group or whatever. Unless everybody is willing to tune up. The people who think that you can pull out the headjoint enough to lower the pitch may have been able to on the ones they owned but I could not on mine because it became too loose, the tenon was not long enough for this.
In my opinion a wood Boehm system does not match the sound of a proper simple system wood flute, not even reasonably close, the sound I produced was more that of a metal flute, this was the reason I bought the flute (to experiment and see how close I could get to a wood flute sound ) and also why I sold it as a metal flute is much less maintenance for virtually the same sound. Also it was substantially quieter than my metal flutes although it had a gorgeous top end (third octave) which is not generally used in Irish traditional music anyway, except for a few airs and I suspect we should transpose those.
I suspect there is no way to get the sound of a wood simple system flute other than to get a real one, and learn how to play it. Pity for us Boehm system players. I don’t have enough experience to comment on buying one made by the old masters or the modern makers.
