hey folks: i’m a curious kind of person. how and why did you all start playing the flute? i’d like to see how diverse we all are? mutepointe
It all started with whistle. A friend of mine who was playing accordion (Finnish style trad) and I got the idea that we should start playing Irish stuff after a trip to a folk festival in Spain where we saw many Irish groups. I bought a couple of whistles and started tooting. A few years later I became really inspired by Matt Molloys playing on some of the Chieftain records. So I bought myself a Dixon, then a M&E.
I also started on whistle, with the eventual goal of playing pipes. My wife is a lifelong Boehm fluter, and a few years ago I got her a Schultz flute for Christmas. After awhile she decided she couldn’t live without keys, so it became mine. It was probably a year later that I really took it up, when I got a Bleazey, a much easier flute for a beginner. Over the following year I really got bit by the bug, and now never plan on taking up the pipes. I’m looking at the flute as a lifelong project.
I started on a diatonic harmonica somewhere in the 6th or 7th grade, took clarinet lessons but drove my mother crazy (squeek! Blurp!) She suggested the piano but that didn’t go for long. I picked up chromatic harmonica in high school, improved in college. Grade 9 a Boy Scout Fife, Drum and Bugle Corps with me on the fife. Loved it! A simple stick of wood with 7 holes did all that. Taught myself the Boehm silver flute during grad school and some more later on.
As my family grew we determined that the fife was not a parlor instrument but the Irish flute was similar in musical approach and style. That was that in 1999.
And here I are - flute and chromatic harmonica usually.
BillG
Started recorder for fun, then added whistle cause recorder only was boring, then heard a flute, liked the sound and finally built one with guidance of Andreas Rogge. Now ordered a Jon C. delrin flute and am on my way making it to my main instrument beneath the pipes. 
I initially wanted to play trumpet, but I had braces and didn’t want to lacerate my lips! My aunt had a student flute, so I was steered in that direction. When I was quite little, I though the piccolo was really cool…I’m less certain now!
I started playing Boehm flute in school in 1988 and studied privately through high school and part of college. I primarily played classical music but also made some forays into jazz and rock along the way. I didn’t play much flute during the later years of college, but I got back into lessons and playing classical music rather seriously after graduating. But during college, a friend brought a whistle back from Galway, which planted the seed for playing Irish music. I really started playing Irish music (on the whistle) nearly four years ago. Two years ago I made the switch to simple system flute, focusing exclusively on Irish music, and haven’t looked back.
I wanted to play the flute from quite young, so when at twelve my school was given a fair number of musical instruments, I put my name down for a flute. In due course I was brought into the presence off a lady who was to teach us, she asked me to purse my lips, after peering closely at my mouth she shook her head and said that I would never be able to play a flute as my emboucher formed a way to one side.
About 20 years later I looked into a window in a music shop in Munich and looked longingly at the flutes, but remembering what I had been told I purchased a recorder. I then played the recorder for 18 years.
A few days before I was 50 I was in a folk instrument store and there was a very beautiful wooden keyed flute, so instead of buying a sports car as middle-aged men are meant to, I bought a flute.
I discovered in due course that the lady was wrong, which even after all that time made me quite cross…
A couple years ago (2003 and 2004) I went through a phase of playing any instrument I could get my hands on. As it turned out Whsitle was probably the first one I taught myself. Then I went to Mandolin and stuck to that for a while until Carpal Tunnel happened. So for a while I tryed really hard to play Fiddle and GHBs and had bought a PVC Flute just because I thought it would be a good secondary instrument after Whsitle. Well after a while I bought a Tipple Flute and then took a brake from FLute and stuck mostly to GH Pipes and Whsitles. Then around the end of 2004/ begining of 2005 I started listening to Danu and Lunasa and I loved teh playing of Kevin Crawford so mucht that I pulled out the Flute and realized that it was the instrument I was meant to play after getting my Lejeune Flute in August. That is my story, I have chosen to stick to Flute and probably take up Octave Mandolin to do chords when I don’t know the tune.
Because my mother wouldn’t let me play drums.
I picked up one of those innocuous looking Waltons – Guinness Irish Whistle packs at the bookstore. At the time I had nothing more than a casual curiosity. I picked up the excellent Waltons book and perused it and thought, “I can do that!” So the set was acquired and I occasionally practiced for about a year. But the pitch was just to high and shrill.
So eventually I worked my way around to Irish flute and I’m now fully obsessed with them and their playing. I will claim to be a Scientist not a Collector. I obtain flutes to try them out and conduct my experiments. Then after I’ve gotten to know the flute, I pass it along to the next player (but not my Copley). 
There is nothing quite so lovely as simply messing about with Irish flutes!
Jordan
For me it was this board that inspired the addition of flute. I had begun to do lots of practicing on whistle, and my dear spouse tactfully suggested that he couldn’t sleep when I was playing. I mistakenly thought that flute, being an octave lower, would ease his discomfort.
Now I have a Casey Burns, I love it, and it is way louder than most of my whistles!
And I’ve fallen in love with the sound of the flute in Irish music. Don’t ask me why it never struck me so during my years of classical music training.
Jennie
Well I was born and raised a Catholic and although I rid myself of that curse many years ago I still have a tendancy toward doing penance for sins of thought word and deed 
Take care
Tom
This is exactly why my flute playing sucks, my mother DID let me play the drums! 
I tried to learn to play the silver flute when I was in junior high school. However, when I looked around the room in band class, it became apparent to me that real men didn’t play flutes. Flutes were for girls, I firmly believed. Besides, the used flute that I was trying to play was so hard to play that I was constantly out of breath. I don’t know now whether it was me or the flute. So I gave up the flute, not knowing that I would come back to it years later.
Most of my life I have been a player of stringed instruments. For some reason, besides a little harmonica now and then, I started playing recorders. I remember looking at an expensive wooden recorder that I was considering buying. I told the sales person that I was not satisfied with the way that it sounded. Actually, I realize now that the sound that I was looking for was a flute sound and not the sound of a recorder. The salesperson assured me that the recorder sounded the way recorders are supposed to sound. But I didn’t buy it.
I started making simple system pvc flutes about ten years ago. I don’t remember what my motivation was, other than I like instruments, and a pvc flute looked like an easy thing to make, after having tried unsuccessfully to make guitars years previously. I think my introduction to the internet in 1999 was what opened my eyes to what was possible. I remember that I had a big laugh when I first learned that there was a website called Chiff & Fipple. Who was this guy, Wisely, and why did he have a website about whistles, I pondered? I still am not sure of the answer to my original query.
I played a lot of instruments back when I was in school - recorder, saxophone, oboe, and guitar. And messed around a bit with piano and clarinet. Over the years, I dropped them all except recorder (guitar most reluctantly). Even recorder wasn’t a regular thing - I practiced enough to keep up certain low level of competence, but most of the available music didn’t grab me.
Then a few years ago I found the C & F site - it got me interested enough to pick up some whistles when I was visiting Ireland, and started to listen to IrTrad. I still play whistle, too, but the more IrTrad I listened to the more the flute pulled me. Dunno if I’ll ever be a really good player, but I’m having a good time along the way.
I played saxophone in junior high school and then spent the next twenty years subconsciously flicking my fingers a’ la saxophone keying while litening to music. Always liked Irish music so my wife gave me a Clark Meg for Christmas 2 years ago, and suddenly my finger flicking produced actual sounds again. Discovered Tom Doorley and asked an ITM-obsessed friend where I might pick up a beginner’s flute locally. He lent me his Casey Burns blackwood flute, introduced me to all sorts of great recordings, tunes, and started dragging me to sessions when I scarcely had a dozen tunes. It was (still is) a kind of apprenticeship, really.
I now play a fantastic large-holed Rudall-derived flute made by Jon C.
But the Meg has gone missing.
Mike
have always loved the sound of the (silver) flutes.
in 2004 I started on whistle, and got to meet one of our german forum members…he had quite a nice collection of whistles but when he started to play the irish flute, it struck me like lightning and I fell in love…
with the flute, that is !!!
so I bought a dixon 3 piece from another forum member and have worked hard since that summer but have not been lucky as I got problems along the way which limited the flute playing…
because of these problems I had to really FIGHT keep playing and fulfill the deep longing for this instrument, keep myself going.
last year january I got a flute on loan from that same member, and I liked how it felt in my hands and the sound of it on the cd’s of kevin crawford…
it has inspired me to keep going, the flute has gone back since, and I have mainly stuck to the dixon and the whistles.
meanwhile have worked hard last year on tone, embouchure which all has improved…still a long way to go after playing one full year intensively…
still having that challenge so still have to fight…
have an aebi keyless on order now, and can’t wait for it to come, knowing I will love it to bits and grow some further into the passion that the irish traditional music has become.
cheers
berti
Some one here wanted to be rid of their Tipple flute. I arranged a trade and that was how it happened. The flute is a different experience. I am practicing almost every day. However, progress at times seems to come in small granules.
Like other members on this board, I started with the recorder then grew tired of it and decided to try the traverso. That was about one year ago. It is much more fun in my opinion and I am not going back to the recorder anytime soon! 
At 9, I wanted to play the trumpet - but my older sister played the flute and my parents wouldn’t buy another instrument. I changed to the oboe and cor anglais in junior high school, and then gave up playing anything for a couple of decades.
Then I missed the music and played the piano for years, but it was always so lonely… when I wanted to join the session, it seemed like the instrument that would suit me best was the wooden flute, and it has!
I have a theory that some people are natural wind players, and some natural string players but few are good at both - Clare Mann is one exception.