You don't see these every day... now you can play just like Paddy Carty!

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Antique-wood-fl ... 2320c8824c

Here's the man. Damn is he good or what

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m724W5vDiQ

That flute IS NOT a Radcliff system. It is a "covered" hole Siccama-esque verrsion of an 8-key simple system. PHI is ill-informed as usual. Oh, and it is seriously HP - sounding length of 575mm and a cylinder body. And seems, as usual with PHI to be rather overpriced!!!

You're also pointing out there isn't an 'e', right?

Didn't bother. There's only one r in "version" too, but it was late and I was tired and falling asleep while trying to post from my mobile..... which is also why I didn't try to link or post supporting pictures. Easily found, anyway.

Rick Wilson is brilliant on this, as ever.

That's spot on. This is actually a A=452Hz unnamed Siccama flute.

I so want that Long F key!!!
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Overpriced? Lol. Almost 4x the price for an unbranded unnamed pre-war pitch flute :/

Here, for example, is another, very similar, eBay Siccama-type flute which sold for a reasonable price - and it is (allegedly) "low pitch" (presumably meaning c A=440 in this case????).

No matter how good its condition, even restored and proven to be an excellent player, the PHI one would not be worth more than £100-120, IMO. Maybe, just maybe, if it will play at CP Eb (which it might) it might have a smidgen more desirability, but not much. These HP hybrid post-Bohm flutes are very common and of little interest to collectors and of virtually no use to players. For this flute in its current state, I would put a sensible value of at most £80-100 for DIY restoration only and only for curiosity's sake to have one of the type.

A genuine HP Radcliff went not so long back on eBay for £467.00. My own CP Radcliff I only paid £750 for, although its sale value was affected by the fact it needs/ed fairly significant and expensive restoration (currently with CW!!! ) It will be worth considerably more in fully restored playing condition. ("Watch this space!")

There's another repeatedly listed genuine HP Radcliff from a London flute specialist (allegedly!!!!) store. Their statement about tuning it down to A=440 is, to say the least, disingenuous! Their price, even for a clearly lovely flute in playable condition, is way over the top for an HP instrument - which is presumably why it isn't shifting - until some poor mug with FAD who doesn't understand about tuning/scaling gets suckered. I know from experience as well as theory that an HP RC&Co Bohm-type flute can perhaps get a 440 A without the head falling off, but as Ben could confirm (my first wooden flute was a doctored HP Bohm system RC, back in our Cardiff days, when I lacked the knowledge & experience and got mugged by an unscrupulous seller!), the scale will be very noticeably distorted. Ronnie can also confirm that with his experience of an HP cylindrical 8-keyer.

I have purchased Boehm flutes from the London flute ebay sellers, and spoken with him on the phone, he is a pro orchestral player and really does know his stuff, i'm pretty sure if his info on the HP model he has for sale was incorrect, he would correct it very quickly as he has a very good reputation as a seller, and being a pro player as well i would be surprised if he didn't know a lot about tuning on new and old flutes.

Yvie

Not according to the seller ... The final bid must have pleased the seller.
It'd be incredible if it plays A=440Hz without the head being chopped off.

Maybe just a 'cheap' tenon graft would resolve the issue with the trade off being a weakened fundamental.

The £100 ones are still one of the best value introductions to the fully keyed simple system flute before moving onto a proper pitch. They can be sold on - maybe someone else will pay this much for one. The Siccama finger spacing is something I really like. The standard 6 hole +/- key simple system flutes like the Peter Worrell flute are completely beyond my finger stretch and seal ability.

While accepting your personal experience and the spirit of what you write, Yvie, and that it may well be true in general of this seller, I'm afraid that while he might believe it, it really cannot be true that a flute with the specified sounding length will play at CP with internal scale intonation acceptable even to amateur standards. The physics of the matter are immutable, as can be the need to redeem the value one may have in an item one has lavished a good deal of specialist work on and is trying to sell. That so desirable thing (in limited circles, but they are a rare commodity) as a CP-playable and ready-to-play Radcliff has not been snapped up in several months on offer and at least 3 eBay re-listings at what would be a pretty reasonable price for a good CP one speaks volumes. Those in the know...... well, they know.

To clarify, to get a low C in tune for CP, the sounding length needs to be in the range 598-603mm. This flute's SL is 576mm according to the vendor. That would require a slide extension of c24mm - almost an inch. Rudall Carte flutes of this type/era have an upper tenon c 27-30mm long. The maximum feasibly playable slide extension (and with the head wobbly!) is 20mm - insufficient to get the C down to CP. But even if the C could be got down to CP, then the whole rest of the scale would be flat - progressively more so going up to the top of each octave. Extension to CP tune the A would be about the maximum truly secure position, leaving no real scope for further flattening in hot & humid conditions. Extend the slide to get the A (or any other given note) in tune at CP and the notes below the reference note will be sharp and those above it will be flat, more noticeably so the further away from the reference note.

It may be feasible for slow demonstration purposes to lip individual notes in and one's way through a scale, but the embouchure gymnastics required, even with much practice, preclude this being a satisfactory playing strategy. Like I said, I've been there of old with an HP Bohm system which had had the upper body extended, and I have both CP and HP RC&Co flutes currently. The doctored Bohm one played beautifully in terms of tone and response, but due to the extension the L hand notes were flat and the foot end sharp. It got very frustrating. I have a lovely HP 1867 system which I can, in like fashion, coax and push to kinda play at CP with the kind of head extension our Radcliff seller is suggesting and with a very downward, flat-blowing embouchure approach; but start trying to play along with a recording or a fixed pitch instrument like a piano and the discrepancies show, quite obviously, even to my not especially discerning ear.

Ah, you enquired for the measurement and it was for diapason normal? Made for the American market....... figures.

I had thought I might go the $25 mark just for the long F key. Unfortunately the lowest bid was about 10x that after the seller confirmed that it was not CP or HP. It was WP (wrong pitch)

This seller reported that he doesn't play flute, not even with three fingers to sound the note A to check against a pitch tuner. He does sell a lot of saxaphone equipment though.

I started experimenting on doing a tenon graft with a Siccama just like this one (rather than the one like PHI's). Oddly, a Boehm headjoint (single tube) can work better than the original head (double tube), since the head can be inserted to bring the sounding length to 600mm. There are tuning problems of course.

The PHI Siccama flute is different Phil. You are right that the PHI Siccama cannot play at A=440Hz from its native A=452Hz. Even virtuoso lipping cannot rescue this flute.

I think there might be a way other than a proper tenon graft, for anyone interested in rescuing one of these orphan flutes from the dog kennels.

It's tenon adjustment is a mere 5mm maximum. To permit a 580mm sounding length requires at least an 8mm extension of the headjoint along the tenon. Using PTFE tape, a 10mm extension enables A=440Hz to be played, however this exposes the cork, and introduces headjoint instability with the headjoint dropping off. It has to be bound by PTFE tape tightly just to experiment with.

In order to play A=440Hz, the cork headjoint (spanning 17mm of tenon) needs to be resected by 5mm, and then filled or welded with a metal ring and reconstructed as 17mm at the very height of the body column.

This will enable the PHI flute to play fairly in tune at A=440Hz, however it is a substantial amount of work for a not very accurate instrument.

Just to add a brief comment on the tuning issue discussed above: back in January Jem and I had a fairly lengthy exchange about the tuning of my RR&Co Radcliffe flute, which has a sounding length of 580 mm. According to Jem, that should make it targeted at HP (A=452). At the time I spent quite a bit of time in front of a tuner trying to determine the actual target pitch experimentally (adjusting the tuning slide such that I had even tuning across the full range of notes). These experiments showed the target pitch to be somewhere in the range between A=439 to A=446, and definitely lower than HP which is A=452. This left me in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with Jem on the theory, but having an instrument in hand whose tuning didn't seem to agree with the theory.

Since then I have realized that we did not take into account the room temperature, which, it turns out has a very significant effect. For every 1 degree C change in temperature there is a .175% change in frequency (which is a 3 cent pitch change per degree C.). This means that if the temperature in my house back in January was 10 degrees C colder than it is today (which I estimate it was), the target pitch for the flute, when measured in front of a tuner today, should be almost 8 hz higher today than it was then!

So, I just did the same experiments again, and this estimate seems to be more or less right. Today, my flute seems to be targeted somewhere in the range A=446 to A=453. So now this does seem to agree with Jem's expectations from the measurements.

BUT ... it raises the interesting question of what temperature we are supposed to be using in order to make these statements about a flute's tuning! I seem to remember reading somewhere that the standard was 20 degrees C. That would be right in the middle between my room temp in January and the temperature today. This would adjust the target tuning to the range A=442-449. Does this make it HP? I'd say probably yes, even though to get HP the tuning slide would have to be compressed to the point that the tuning was not perfectly balanced across the range of notes.

Anyhow, not to make excuses for anyone (except perhaps myself), but its easy to fall into the trap of making statements about the tuning of instruments based on playing in front of a tuner, but without taking room temperature into account.

Jon

True enough, Jon, and relative humidity is also a factor. I played at a festival this weekend where it was very hot by GB standards and very humid. We (9 fluters) had to tune our flutes, including modern metal Bohms, much further out than usual - about 10-12 mm for most of the Bohms. That is, of course, enough to start distorting the scale intonation, but circumstantially that was a far lesser evil than being way sharp of the fiddlers and harps. Certainly ambient temperature and humidity make a difference, but remember that in cold conditions and also low humidity at any temperature, things inside the flute will change somewhat as the air column warms and moistens and vondensation developers in the tube. Moreover, the player's embouchure technique makes a huge difference. A Nicholsonian player who blows flat will need to set the slide and stopper differently to a French School player who blows relatively sharp, and in a hyper-finicky ideal world might well need a differently scaled flute.