just after some advice on the sound and tone of french flutes in particular 8 keyed Godfroy types, small holed unlined head joint, the seller of this particular flute is a non flute player so cant really comment on any similarities to the usual rudall or pratten tonal qualities, if there are any???
so if yo have one drop us a line by e-mail or Pm, or just reply to the post as I am sure we have all seen the small holed french flutes come up for sale from time to time, I was always concerned as the holes are usually very small.
Always hard to talk about sound - our words are so limited. But let me try…
French style flutes have a very narrow bore. This promotes good harmonic content but not as strong development of the fundamental. So the flute has a “lighter” tone than a large bore flute. So, I’d expect to find Prattens to have a deep or full-bodied tone, Rudalls less so, and French flutes the lightest.
French flutes also have small holes. On a Prattens or Rudall, these would give a dull tone (smooth, if you were looking for a positive index word). Similar to English flutes before Nicholson did the hole-enlarging trick that lead to the Improved style of flute. Fortunately, because the bore is also small, this doesn’t make 5-key French flutes too dull (venting is the proportion between hole and bore size). Indeed, they are very lively and fun to play. My feeling is though that adding the C extension (taking them to the 8-key stage) robs some of that liveliness.
Tuning can be a bit of an issue, the F# being particulalry flat (not being enlarged as on Improved-era English flutes). They are not hard to retune though and this is worth doing unless you want it to remain authentic. The process of retuning also makes the flute even livelier.
In theory French flutes are tuned to A 435, but this is rarely a problem, as there is usually enough room on the slide to make 440.
A note on the head lining. French flutes have partial liners (the male slide extends only far enough into the head to secure it). Unfortunately, this does not rule out splitting due to wood shrinkage, although it usually limits the splitting to around the bottom of the head. The barrel is lined like an English barrel, and so liable to splitting. In addition, the French often lined thier sockets, which is very pretty, but can often be the cause of splitting at the sockets too.
Mark, I sold a nice anonymousFrench 8-key back in the early summer. It went to a McGee keyless owner living in the Far East! He wanted something different for purposes of his own. It was by no means a quiet flute! There is a description and links to pictures and some sound samples here. I’m afraid the transfer level of the recordings was too high and they distort rather. (I know better now what I’m doing with the technology, but I’m stuck with these as they are because I deleted the original minidisc recordings after transfer to my computer, and I can’t re-do them because the flute is half a world away!) I subsequently did a couple more for the eventual purchaser which are still set a bit too high, but not as badly:
