Geoffrey Ellis "Selkie" vertically held flute

Irish Flute
21

Now if only that would have an Irish flute or Irish Low D whistle hole layout it would be perfect for me.

We’re so similar in this. I had a combination of wrist and hand pain, with a touch of shoulder pain thrown in for fun, that ended my transverse Irish flute days.

But luckily anything vertical, like bagpipe chanters and whistles, are fine.

There is/was a maker in France (as I recall) making “Irish Kenas” out of aluminium. It ought to have been perfect for me, I got my hands on one, and unfortunately the Kena voicing wasn’t optimal IMHO, probably something to do with the cut of the notch.

Getting the “cut” of the Kena notch just right is so tricky! I played through piles of Kenas until I found one with super easy high notes. Even when out of practice I could pick it up and play up to the highest note effortlessly. I never found another Kena that played that well.

My Quenacho wasn’t as good as that amazing Kena, but it was pretty good, So that was my model for my attempts and my own PVC “Irish Kena”. I made a few of them and never got the notch quite right.

Interestingly, North American Native flutes originally had no notch, but were simple open tubes quite like the Kaval.

I’ve told the story of walking around in the reconstructed Miwok village in Yosemite valley, and finding several Miwok flutes for sale in the gift shop afterwards. Picking one up, I saw it was like Kaval, and began playing it.

A Native American guy ran up and said “you’re the only white guy who has ever been able to play that!” Turned out he was the maker.

I explained that I played Bulgarian Kaval, that it was similar. He’d never heard of Kavals.

Anyhow this led to more experiments with PVC flutes, and I made a pretty good Kaval with a Native American hole layout.

22

Speaking of strange hybrids, years ago at the NAMM Show there was a guy with a small booth selling upright headjoints for Boehm flute that he designed and made himself.

I should have bought one! They were only $100 and played pretty good. My plan was to stick it on a Low D Whistle body.

Over the years I’ve looked for him at the NAMM Show and he’s never been back.

Googling hasn’t turned him up. As you guys probably know vertical Boehm headjoints are quite expensive.

So I tried making my own, using a plastic (!) Boehm headjoint and a goofy PVC contraption I made. It didn’t work.

23

I’m dead excited now about the possibility of finally learning to play flute! :laughing:

24

If you are curious about the tone hole layout of the Quimera flute Geoffrey just mentioned, here is a photo of three flutes, all of which are in the key of D.

The Quimera prototype is the light colored one in the middle. The black flute on the left is a Bulgarian Kaval, and the reddish brown flute on the right is a traditional Xiao (also by Geoffrey).

You can see that the lower/right hand tone holes are aligned and hence produce the same notes on all three. The upper/left hand tone holes are quite different though, and the thumb hole (not shown) is also higher up the bore on the Xiao and Quimera than the Kaval.

But also notice that the tone hole size on the Quimera is quite similar to the Kaval.

So, if you play Kaval, your lower/right hand might know what it is doing, but the upper/left hand will still need training.

I don’t really play Kaval or Xiao, so neither of my hands really know what they are doing on these flutes right now.

25

Thanks for that!

I played Kaval for several years in an “international folk dance” band which primarily played Bulgarian and Macedonian music.

I’ve often thought that the Kaval lower-hand layout would be great for Irish music.

For one thing it eliminates the big Low Whistle finger-spread between Hole 5 and Hole 6 by using the little finger for the latter.

My concept is to then keep the lower-hand ring finger on its hole as your “anchor finger” (Hole 5 would have to be a bit bigger because it wouldn’t be as well vented) and continue playing Irish music as six-finger music, just shifting the sixth finger from the lower-hand ring finger to the lower-hand little finger.

xxx|xxxx D
xxx|xxxo E
xxx|xoxo F#
xxx|ooxo G
xxo|ooxo A

etc. (Having a lower-hand ring-finger anchor is the older Spanish Gaita way, and often used on Bulgarian Gaida and who knows what else.)

Then whenever you need it you have F natural right under your fingers xxx|xxoo

I’ve tried playing my ordinary Irish Low Whistle that way (the lower-hand ring finger just resting on the body, no hole for it) and I quickly adapted to it.

What I couldn’t handle is changing the Irish upper-hand hole layout. It’s cool with Kaval having a built-in Bb and Bnat but it’s too foreign for me for Irish music (obviously not foreign for Bulgarian music).

26

Richard, that fingering is exactly the same as the xiao–very interesting! So if you are accustomed to that layout, you’d adapt pretty easily to the xiao/Quimera. Here is the entire first octave xiao scale (thumb hole on the left). Second octave is the same with the exception of Cnat, which requires you to cover and extra hole.

X | X X X | X X X X | D
X | X X X | X X X O | E
X | X X X | X X O O | F
X | X X X | X O X O | F#
X |X X X | O O X O | G
X | X X O | O O X O | A
X | X O O | O X O O | Bb (This is the typical fingering for play Fmaj, but Bb can be played with the second hole covered instead)
X | O X O | O O X O | B
O | O X O | O O X O | C#
O | X X X | X O X O| Cnat

27

Hi Richard…you and I are so similar in this. :slight_smile: This exact idea was my gateway drug, so to speak. Years ago, I built myself a 7-hole flute just as you describe. I loved it–improved ergonomics, a better size and location for the E hole, and a perfect Fnat whenever I wanted it. I’ve been kind of amazed that there aren’t lots of makers of low whistles and keyless Irish flutes advertising this as an option. (Geoffrey, I see a real opportunity for you here!)

After a while, I got quite comfortable with this design…and then I decided that I’d prefer to treat the Fnat hole as a regular hole, keeping it open for everything above Fnat as well. This was a bit of an adjustment, but it made playing in scales involving Fnat a whole lot more intuitive, at least to me. (And it did also require a much smaller F# hole, while at the same time giving greater and more even venting.)

I only learned later, to my sheepish amusement, that I had inadvertently copied first the xiao’s and then the kaval’s lower hand tone hole layouts. Perhaps there really is nothing new under the sun…

I ended up going through this exact same process with the upper hand as well. I wanted the hole for A to move down the tube and get larger–the larger E hole had convinced me of the benefits! So I switched to using my upper pinky to open the larger hole for A. Once I got comfortable with this, I decided to give my upper ring finger a job again, and it got a hole for Bb. This was, again, a relearning process, but I’m so glad I did it.

28

There really isn’t anything new under the sun when it comes to flute design :slight_smile:. The alternate scale you and Richard are speaking about (for Irish flute) already exists in some of the Taiwanese dizi. The Chinese dizi are six hole instruments, but a friend of mine who has worked with some Taiwanese musicians (and who is himself a dizi player) told me had encountered these eight hole versions. They were basically the xiao scale on a transverse flute. This would still be a bit different than an Irish version because they still had a thumb hole for the C#.

And the Quimera itself is only “new” in the sense that I haven’t been able to find its equivalent being commercially produced. But given that the history of the xiao goes back centuries (millennia, really), my guess is that somewhere in the last few centuries, when the eight hole scale became common, some maker experimented with a big bore bamboo version with a generous blowing notch, effectively achieving the same result as the Quimera. There have been generations of clever flute makers in the past, so I never kid myself that I’m being genuinely original :wink:. In the same way the Selkie is just a six-hole bei xiao with a couple of modifications to give it more of that robust, honking voice.

29

One thing I found conspicuous in the tone hole layout comparison above was the support for G#, which has a hole of its own on the Kaval, but not on the Xiao.
I’m assuming that it is just half-holed on the xiao?

G# is quite an important note in our genre, with a lot of tunes in the key of A, particularly of Scottish origin. If you are going to try to come up with a more fully chromatic fingering system, targeted primarily at celtic trad music, it would seem important to both pin down the anchor fingering, which obviously influence both tuning and ornament execution, and to ensure that the most commonly needed notes are easily accessible at speed, with ornaments. These kind of design choices are non-trivial and often end up being informed by genre-specific trade-offs.

30

Yes, xiao players half-hole the G#, though I have made a nine-hole xiao with the G#. You play it with the little finger of your left hand, so it feels a bit odd if you are unaccustomed to it, but it definitely provides a much stronger G# than the half-hole method.

And it was mentioned earlier, but I’m guessing that even if an ITM player got more accustomed to a xiao scale there are probably some ornaments that would be extra challenging with a thumb hole. I tried some crans and rolls using my thumb and it was weird, for sure. I’m not great at them in ordinary circumstances :wink:

31

All the really cool Xiao and Kaval stuff aside, what I’m after at this point in life (I just turned 68) is a vertical flute that uses ordinary Irish D Flute/Low D Whistle fingering.

I have that fingering too ingrained for Irish music to switch this late in life.

32

I’d buy one of these. Maybe more than one.

33

Yes, for anyone immersed in ITM who isn’t “world curious” (flute-wise), sticking with the tried and true six hole tuning would be the way to go, which is why the Selkie was born. But paddler has been doing some more testing and has confirmed that he can anchor the flute reliably during play, so that’s encouraging. I’ve got a last session of prototype refinement, just to settle on some details and then they will officially “launch”.

34

The anchoring that Geoffrey is referring to is the approach pancelticpiper alluded to earlier in this thread, i.e., keeping the lower hand ring finger anchored on the bottom hole to stabilize the flute as other fingers are lifted, particularly the note C#, where if you don’t have some kind of anchor finger the flute just drops to the floor. Rather than just leave it up to the player to figure out, it makes sense to try to anticipate an anchoring approach that works and base the fine-tuning of the flute around it, for example to compensate for the slightly reduced venting of some notes.

So I’ve been experimenting with consistently following the following pattern:

XXX XXX = D
XXX XX0 = E
XXX X00 = F#
XXX 00X = G
XX0 00X = A
X00 00X = B
0XX 00X = C
000 00X = C#

This seems to provided enough stability to control the embouchure, while also not interfering much at all with tuning.

Anchoring with the lower hand middle finger provides more stability, but it really affects the tuning a lot more and would probably take more adaptation.

I’m definitely in the camp where my Irish flute/whistle fingering is just too ingrained to allow me to switch to something radically different … when playing this genre of music.
But I think this kind of flute can work extremely well for ITM with conventional fingering, so long as you adopt some kind of lower hand anchor finger to stabilize it.

35

I did a YouTube video a while back about both anchor fingers and alternative fingerings

(I receive no money from YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ_ypnajB44&t=2s

36

That was a fabulous video, Richard! I’ve bookmarked that and when my Selkie page goes up on my site I’m going to have to include that as a resource for players to experiment with. Holding the Selkie will probably be a shade more challenging than a whistle, simply because whistle players can use the beak of the mouthpiece to stabilize the instrument (in degree), whereas the Selkie won’t have that. But the chord-shaping approach you demonstrated looks like a method that would (potentially) allow for a better grip. However, what I don’t yet know is whether that approach would work in terms of tuning with the Selkie, which may not behave like a whistle.

Regardless, anchoring the flute with the lowest hole as you and paddler have mentioned is already a useful approach. If there are more anchoring options, so much the better.

37

Maybe you could introduce a thumb rest? I used them on low whistles when I first started. I got to a point where I didn’t need them any more, but they helped whilst I got accustomed to the feel and weight of the instrument and learned how best to balance it during awkward transitions.

I found, though, that the support that goes over the thumb was far longer than necessary, to the point where it got uncomfortable. What I really wanted was something that had a curved lip rather than a centimetre-long prong, just to provide a bit of resistance against gravity.

Part of the reason I needed a thumb rest was that it often felt as if the body was slipping even when it wasn’t. That’s quite disruptive concentration-wise, but a lip would have provided enough feedback to tell my brain that I wasn’t about to drop it. I made one out of air-drying modelling clay to test the theory, and it would have been perfect if it hadn’t fallen off every five minutes because it was stuck on with Blu Tack. :laughing:

38

I’m actually looking into this, but it’s a surprisingly tricky business. Coming up with something that can be deployed at player discretion, that is stable and that doesn’t mess up the finish of the flute…it’s a tall order. And it has to fit different sized instruments.

I’ve been researching the various professionally made thumb rests as well as those that are improvised by the player, and I don’t feel like I’m any nearer to a solution yet. But I intend to keep at it. What I really wanted to find out during this prototyping phase was whether the Selkie could be effectively played without any type of extra support, and it seems that it can be. Going forward, any add-on will just (hopefully) make it that much easier for players who need/want it.

39

Excellent video Richard! I think this allows us to be a bit more specific about the ergonomic issue and solutions.

Take for example, the Boehm style anchoring approach you discuss early in the video, where the lower pinky finger is used as the anchor. This is effective on a whistle due to opposing forces that involve that finger, the thumb on the upper hand (acting as a pivot point) and some top lip pressure on the beak. It is this top lip pressure that is completely absent with an embouchure flute such as the Selkie. This means that this approach does not work on the Selkie as it would on a whistle.

Contrast that with the D chord shaped approach you discuss later in the video, where the lower index finger is used as anchor. This is more stable on the Selkie because the stability comes from opposing pressure between that finger and the thumb on the lower hand, which is closer to being opposite it, although still not directly opposite it.

Now we can try to take a similar approach, using opposing pressure between thumb and lower hand fingers and explore the effectiveness of leaving different fingers down. It works when using the lower ring finger, as I described, but it is not as secure as it is with the index, or both index and middle fingers, because that ring finger is quite far from being opposite the contact point of the lower hand thumb, whereas the index and middle finger are more directly opposite the thumb.

But I feel that using the ring finger is something that can be learned, at least on this F Selkie. By the time you get to the pinky finger though, it is so far from the thumb’s contact point that any opposing pressure between the two of them just pushes the mouthpiece off the lip.
As we go to Selkies in lower keys, though, the distance between the lower thumb contact point and that bottom tone hole grows. Maybe in this case the same anchor finger can be use, but just above the hole on the body of the flute.

The challenge with alternating between the G-chord and D-chord shapes for anchoring, will be the tuning, since the impact on venting is quite different. It is on a whistle though, and as you say, a lot of older instruments have a sharp A, which means that the third tone hole is larger than it needs to be for open fingering, so losing venting by using index and middle finger anchors flattens it into tune. It makes one wonder whether this tuning anomaly was intentional. Of course, when you use the G-chord anchoring it is not in tune. But then it begs the question of what constitutes being in tune in the different modes in which these chord shapes are used.

There is also the observation that while tuning is important, rhythm is even more important, especially in dance tunes, so a fingering approach that enables you to hit the timing better can be worth sacrificing some tuning, especially when the out of tune notes are played for such short duration.

40

If there’s a call for them (there might not be), 3D printing would probably be the best bet. I used recorder thumb rests on my low whistles, lined with a strip of silicone to make them fit. But as recorder players presumably also want to look after the finish of their instruments, perhaps this kind of clip doesn’t cause damage even without the silicone? I’m not really sure – all my instruments are metal!

Anyway, the clips are made of plastic with a slight give to it, and if something like that’s available for 3D printers, it’d probably work fine. The advantage of printing them would be that if they had to be positioned where they’d risk partly obstructing a tone hole, they could be shaped to avoid it.