1933 Silver haynes flute for sale

[BillG]

I put my Armstrong on the shelf a few years ago to concentrate on the wooden flute. I'm getting back to the silver for the chromatic flavor and for different genres. A friend plays both every day (professional and flute teacher at a college) and claims there is no difference in the embouchure requirements. There are any number of challenges to this statement. Any comments here?

BillG

[Cathy Wilde]

I've just started back playing a Mateki silver flute, and although no one's ever quibbled with the sound I get out of my wooden flute, the silver flute quickly told me how lazy my lip had gotten! Anyway, the comparisons -- and contrasts -- have been interesting.

[bang]

[...], the silver flute quickly told me how lazy my lip had gotten!

how so Cathy? in what way "lazy"? what did you need to do differently for Boehm flute?

i just speculated in the "good tone" thread that classical flute technique may be quite different from some forms of "Irish" blowing. Robert Dick is quoted on a Larry Krantz webpage saying that reed players moving to classical flute must change from blowing at the center of resistance to the center of maximal airflow. i wonder if some "Irish" styles (Rudally?) may be working w/ the wooden flute's center of resistance, more like reeds perhaps?

enjoy! /dan

[Cathy Wilde]

Hey, bang --

I keep writing these long and wandering treatise-type responses to your question that unfortunately make no sense the next day. This one may not either, but here we go: The main reason I know I'm out of shape is that my mouth hurts after playing the silver flute for even just 20 minutes!

Basically, I think what's happening is that the kind of tone & sound I want out of the silver flute requires a more variable, "athletic" embouchure than my wooden flute does. And since I rarely feel compelled to leap about above E3 on the wooden flute (and thus don't have to worry about making that sound good thank-you-Lord), I've been skating -- hanging out in a two-octave range, taking life easy.

But ultimately, I think some of this has to do with the particular tone qualities I want and shoot for on each kind of flute -- I played classical stuff pretty seriously for quite a while, so I just plain expect more out of the silver, and thus demand more from myself. (Incidentally, it's really depressing to see how much one loses in 20 years :roll:)

Finally, I personally think there's more resistance with a silver flute because hey, it's got a raised lip plate and thus a big old chimney. In part, I think this is what gives it such a nice range of tone -- from dark and threatening to achingly sweet and pure, often within several measures.

Interestingly, while I can create a subsonic boom quite easily with the low D on two of my wooden flutes, I can push the silver flute even farther ... but it is a somewhat different sound, with even more of an edge to it.

Uh-oh, there I go, rambling again. Anyway, off to muck stalls in the glorious mud, so enough of these lofty pursuits!

cat.

[bang]

thanks cat. your take on the tonal possibilities of the silver flute has me wondering... maybe when i run out of things to do on the wooden flute... :-)

enjoy! /dan

[jim stone]

Yes, it's odd. I think of silver flute as
sounding airy fairy, OK for classical,
but noway I'd play blues on it.
Wood sounds more gutsy and
earthy, folksy,
playable in pubs, and so on.
A more interesting sound,
of course relative to my ear, anyhow.

Is this a mistake?
I'm glad
if it is. What gives?

[Denny]

The silver flute is still my preference for blues. (33 years of silver, 10 years bamboo, 1 year of wood)

Denny

[mcdafydd]

thanks cat. your take on the tonal possibilities of the silver flute has me wondering... maybe when i run out of things to do on the wooden flute...

enjoy! /dan

Part of the reason I decided to get a silver flute months back was because I wanted a flute with keys. And, thanks to all those messages on places like woodenflute.com questioning a player's true motives for keys, I decided that I was not ready to commit to A) a wooden instrument and taking care of it and B) spending $2000+ if I wasn't sure I needed them or would use them much. A good silver flute worked for me as a compromise to test my use of such mechanisms. Anyway, I now see that probably some day I'll have many flutes for all my sonorous desires, and that some passages will be better facilitated on one or another. And, I've definitely been able to apply a lot of what I've learned in my classically oriented lessons to my self-made embouchure on the conical flute, making a big difference in my tone/volume.

[Doug_Tipple]

I am not an accomplished player on the silver flute, or on the Irish flute, but here are my thoughts as to what has been said on this thread.

Most folk music doesn't require a lot of tonal range or skill, for that matter, that is, unless you play fast. We all know that Irish reels at tempo are quite challenging. But two octaves is usually sufficient for most folk tunes. However, tonight I have been listening to Susan Milan playing from the virtuoso French Flute repertoire. My favorite is "Morceau de Concours" by Gabriel Faure. As has been said, playing in the third octave takes a much better developed embouchure. I wish that I could make my student Yamaha flute sound like her professional French flute.

[Cathy Wilde]

Yes, it's funny, because I finally hit on what I really wanted to say (last night while mucking out the stalls, in fact!) -- my goal is to make the silver flute sound as silvery as possible, and the wooden flute as wooden as possible.

In each case, it's to get the most of out an instrument's inherent qualities.

That said, oh yeah, Jim, you can wail on the blues with a silver flute; jazz too. It's the flexibility and athleticism and responsiveness that I think silver offers. And once again, I'll categorically state that I can give you a low D on a silver flute that will cut a board in half, and it seems my wooden flute just can't quite go that far (that's where I think the raised lip plate and chimney come in; in fact, when my flute teacher had his Olwell made, Patrick specifically did some things to deepen the chimney because John's low register is so honking to begin with and they wanted to make it even more so).

Not to say you can't be flexible and athletic and all that on a wooden one (back to Niall Keegan again!), but being as I'm most interested in pretty straight-ahead, even old-fashioned traditional style, I find myself working more on lift and life and rhythmic nuance than tone in that category. But I love the warmth and roundness and chocolately tone you can get on a wooden flute (I can approximate it on silver, but it's still not quite the same). So when it's brilliance and range I want, it's silver. When it's warmth and a certain simple sweetness, it's gotta be wood.



So has anyone bought the flute this thread is dedicated to yet? Wish I had the money; my experience with the Hayneses and Powells from the 1920s and 30s is that they are AWESOME!