I’m wondering if it is much better to keep fingers pretty low. It makes sense to me to have less movement all around. But when I want to play a roll I’ve been in the habit for years to raise up the fingers high and strike hard. Does the finger to flute clearance really make a huge difference?
I suspect this is fairly controversial, which usually means that there isn’t one truly correct answer.
In the bagpipe world, it’s a common fallacy that one should keep their fingers close, with small movements, so one can play faster. In actuality, the practice and teaching of most high level players is to lift the fingers quite high, even exaggerating the movement a bit when learning. This tends to keep the movements clear and crisp, whereas practicing minimal movements often ends in muddy sounding movements and unintentional slurs.
I’m self-taught, so take this with a grain of salt. I keep my fingers fairly close to the tone holes when playing normal un-accented notes, but they can fly pretty high when they’re part of an articulation like a roll, or a fast double or triple “tap” below a target note.
There is some force to that motion with ornaments, enough that I can hear the sound of my finger hitting the flute over the tone hole with those low taps. I’ve even come to prefer single piece middle sections with all six tone holes like the Pratten/Nicholson style over Rudall style flutes with two center sections, so I don’t worry about stressing the middle tenon joint if I get a little enthusiastic with finger hits on the flute body. I feel that I need that high flappin’ finger action to get the sound I’m looking for on certain ornaments. But again I’m not an expert, so look for more opinions on this.
Over the years, I’ve asked a couple of my instructors about whether keeping fingers low would have any effect on either speed of play or crispness of play. They, independently, fell into two divergent, firmly-held positions. One group, “Yes, definitely”, the other “No way”. And I just got confused looking at how high or low my fingers were moving and decided to go to the bar.
Best wishes.
Steve
Seems to me that so long as the timing’s spot-on, you do you.
If you hold your fingers close over a tone hole it can lower the pitch of the note vented by that hole. If this is done intentionally it can have a desirable effect. If not, then it can mess with the intonation of your flute.
If your finger starts its downward movement from far above a tone hole, and travels fast, it can produce a percussive effect. Sometimes this is desirable, but perhaps not always.
You have to get the timing right regardless of where your fingers start their descent. Large finger movements either start earlier or travel faster, but the timing of the arrival at the flute is what matters most.
So, I’d say how to do it really depends on your style and the effects you want to produce.
Watch some guitar masters and their fingers moving through the neck. It seems that they don´t play the instrument at all .
Just play a lot, always relaxed, and economy of movement will come.
Yes, I think relaxation is the key. If you play relaxed the fingers will naturally tend to the right distance from the hole. Yes, it’s fine to raise fingers for strikes/rolls.
For sure that’s a Boehm flute thing, keeping the fingers in what they call in “guide position”, very close to, if not in contact with, the plateau keys at all times.
This is done to avoid the dreaded “key noise”.
Yes if you watch good trad players of flute, whistle, or uilleann pipes a finger doing a “pat” will rise to a couple inches or so a split-second before the “pat” is executed. The same is true with fiddlers doing gracenotes.
It’s not about striking hard, it’s about achieving the necessary velocity to execute a “pat” quickly enough to sound right.
I’ve had numerous Irish flute beginners coming from Boehm backgrounds who would try to execute their “pats” from the quite low “guide position” and the result is an unacceptably slow clumsy-sounding “pat”. They sometimes have difficulty raising their patting finger high enough to get sufficient velocity.
Yes if you watch good trad players of flute, whistle, or uilleann pipes a finger doing a “pat” will rise to a couple inches or so a split-second before the “pat” is executed.
In all fairness, some do and some do not. There are a lot of players, especially uilleann pipers, who have highly efficient finger movements, to an extend you barely see what fingers they are lifting. Some players do lift fingers quite a bit. But I wouldn’t go so far as to equate good players with extensive movement, quite the contrary. Efficiency and economy of movement makes perfect sense.
Agree with Mr G. above. There is no right or wrong in this - you need to find whatever works for you personally - as said above - to achieve the sound you yourself want to make. 2 of the players I have most closely observed - both from the North of Ireland - keep their fingers fairly close to the holes, not even raising them all that much to make strikes, but at the other extreme you have Seamus Tansey [ RIP ]- fingers all over the place, but no-one can deny his ability as a traditional Irish flute player see here :
https://youtu.be/CTmhMzl-9K0
PS - compare with this from Roger Sherlock, another Sligo player :
https://youtu.be/ZdfU2Gc1ZlE
Yet another comparison, here’s Conal O’Grada in the high fingers camp:
Looking at a Boehm flute with closed keys, the keys don’t open all that far. I don’t know if there’s a standard distance, but it looks like less than 5 mm. Of course a Boehm flute has huge holes.
I’ve experimented with the question of how close you can hold your finger without affecting the pitch, and the result I get is “pretty close”. I didn’t try to measure it, but again 5 mm is an approximation. You could try the same experiment on our own instrument.
All I know is that in my 30 years of teaching Boehm flutists to play Irish flute and/or whistle I’ve found that if they keep their fingers in their accustomed “guide position” of around 5-7mm above the holes they’ve not been able to get that crisp “pat” sound that trad players get.
You can try it. Get out your flute and play a reel with plenty of rolls and see if your fingers stay no more than 7mm above the holes the entire time. I know if I do it I get sluggish pats, the same as the beginners did.
With cuts, beginners usually have a hard time getting them quick enough to sound crisp. Some beginners, in an effort to make their cuts more brief, will try “pinching” them by only partially lifting the finger, resulting in a muddy indistinct blob of sound. For the crisp “pop” that’s needed the cutting finger has to raise high enough to produce a clear note.
He’s raising them higher than one might think, a split-second prior to the pat, I would guess around 20mm on the 2nd octave pats on G.
That’s around four times higher than the “guide position” I was mentioning.
I’d like to second pancelticpiper’s observations regarding finger height and speed for effective pats/taps and rolls. My playing really improved once I started to think of the Irish flute as being as much a percussion instrument as a woodwind. Some of the sound effects we strive for really depend a lot on the attack speed of the finger as it closes the hole. I imagine the impact of the finger on the open tone hole sending a shock wave through the air column in the bore, similar to how a drum stick strikes the head. Think of the problems you would encounter if you tried playing a drum without allowing the sticks to get far from the head. This is not to say that your fingers should always be far from the flute, but I think it is critical for those ornaments in which you need to quickly and cleanly strike the tone hole.
He’s raising them higher than one might think, a split-second prior to the pat, I would guess around 20mm on the 2nd octave pats on G.
20mm sounds like a reasonable lift, I seem to lift fingers about that much going into rolls etc, at a maximum, when playing the whistle (I just checked).
When posting earlier about economy of movement, I was really thinking about some players who seem to lift fingers excessively, pipers like Robbie Hannon perhaps, it seems inefficient and I think best avoid that if you can. But then again, if you can make it work, work away.
" if you can make it work, work away." There you have it. End of.