this is my first post here, so please say hooray, yell, pat my shoulders and what you have
Ok, silly enough. My name is Guido, I’ve played the tin whistle for two years and I recently got my first Irish flute, a Dixon three-piece polymer. I’ve also played the silver flute for 20+ years, and I find that the transition to the Dixon is rather hard. I mean, I can get a wonderful sound out of my silver-plated Jupiter, but I can’t avoid some hiss and buzz when I turn to the Dixon.
It seems to me that the embouchure should be tighter on the Dixon. Besides, the tuning is far from perfect, but I assume it’s a feature of the Irish flute rather than a bug.
Has anybody experienced the same problems? Any suggestions?
The big question here is how are you blowing into the Dixon? Are you blowing across like you do (I assume) on the silver flute, or down into the embouchure hole?
Ok, silly enough. My name is Guido, I’ve played the tin whistle for two years and I recently got my first Irish flute, a Dixon three-piece polymer. I’ve also played the silver flute for 20+ years, and I find that the transition to the Dixon is rather hard. I mean, I can get a wonderful sound out of my silver-plated Jupiter, but I can’t avoid some hiss and buzz when I turn to the Dixon.
Hiss and buzz!
What you have, sir, is an unpolished diamond of a sound.
I’d say you need to do three things:
Before you change anything, listen to some recordings of Danu. In particular, listen to the flute playing of Tom Doorley. Listen to the tone, and in particular, note how some hiss and buzz, used in a controlled way, can put a lovely glisten on the sound of the flute.
Experiment with your embouchure a bit. Try covering about a third of the embouchure with your lower lip and blowing more into than across, as Jayhawk was asking.
Experiment with the force of the airstream. For a lot of trad players, the goal is an extremely muscular embouchure with a tiny hole and a very powerful jetstream of air, making the sound of the flute very driven and almost brittle sounding, always right on the edge of jumping the octave.
Good luck! If you can tame that hiss and buzz, you can use it with your sound to great effect!
The embouchure hole on an Irish flute needs to be turned further toward the player than on a silver flute. Try aligning the far edge of the embouchure hole with the center of the tone holes.
You may find this approach helpful (thanks to Nanohedron):
If it’s a dark, reedy “Irish” tone you’re after, there’s a particular way to form the embouchure that is very effective for tonal consistency and is the bee’s knees for a hard, low D that doesn’t easily break:
Rather than stretching the corners of the mouth or turning them up as if in a sort of smile, keep the corners of the mouth turned down and tucked inward so that the upper lip forms a “canopy” over the embouchure hole (blowing more downwardly into the aperture, of course, so turning the headjoint in is helpful). Drop the jaw, keep the tongue away from the lower lip, and “blowing” becomes more of a sense of “breathing”, and a lot of volume can be got from a surprisingly gentle breath and good abdominal support. For me there isn’t so much a sense of lip aperture compression, now, as there is one of easy positioning instead. It took me a long while to get this form down, and I’m glad I tried. Some may get it more easily than I did.
I have a couple of wooden flutes - both very nice. I have a good Yamaha silver flute, but I never use it now. I also have a Dixon polymer flute which I take wherever I go, just in case I get a chance to play. Tone is a tad thin on some notes but overall its not at all bad. Good advice above - but the best advice is to keep trying. You will find the right embouchure.
