Flute

Yes, the fingering doesn’t change except for some harmonic notes and cross-fingerings which are not essential.

I’d say that 90% of Irish music doesn’t need keys to play. Most of the tunes are in G Major, A Mixolydian, A Dorian, E minor, D Major, B Minor. For the occasional A Major tune or D minor (Us flute players tend to avoid these anyways), half holing is an option.

However, if you really want to get keys – here is the order you should get them in – from most used to least used:

Long F natural
Short F natural
C natural (although there is a crossed finger version of this. The keyed version is a bit better intonation)
G sharp
B flat
E flat

Two F natural keys are necessary – depending on the musical passage, for example if the next note after the F natural is a D, it’s impossible to use the short one first.

Kirsten

Wooden flutes are very susceptible to changing temperatures (especially extreme heat and cold). As such, they need to be treated regularly in the early years with oils (linseed, almond). As the wood matures, there is less regular maintenance required but oiling should always be a routine measure. This keeps the wood in good condition to avoid cracking but, in any case, caution should always be taken when travelling to very hot or very cold climates.

Please don’t. In their endearing ignorance those musicians would spill Guinness into the instrument and, yes, it would seal the crack temporarily. However, once the Guinness had dried out of it, the crack would reappear even bigger. They would continue to use the same remedy without realising that, gradually, they were destroying their instrument beyond repair. The same applies for putting the flute into a sink of water.

The flute is a particularly demotivating instrument because if you can’t get a tone from it, you can’t play music in any capacity whatsoever. But fear not. It has taken some of our tutors at OAIM weeks on end trying to get a tone before ever succeeding and our tutors will share their varied methods on how to approach your embouchure. The flute is a very personal instrument as it is connected directly to your face muscles and breath. As such, everybody has a unique way of finding the tone. If you persevere, you WILL succeed.

Technically, yes but, ideally, no. The tone of a silver Boehm flute that one finds in classical music is not suited to the timbre of Irish traditional music. There have been a handful of practictioners who use a silver flute (best known in, perhaps, Joannie Madden of Cherish the Ladies) but she grew up in a household steeped in the Irish tradition which paved a pathway for her endeavours. Most people are not so fortunate. Other musicians like East Galway’s Paddy Carty and Peter Broderick utilised the Radcliffe system which had Boehm-like keys fitted to a wooden bore. This allowed the musician to play in the many unusual, un-flutelike keys while still producing a pleasing tone (albeit still different to a simple-system flute). There’s really no point in short-cutting, learning the Irish flute demands that you do so on a simple-system instrument (i.e. open holes). If you would like to play chromatically, you can always get a fully-keyed, simple-system instrument (i.e. open holes with added levers for chromatic notes).

This is a common misnomer. A concert flute, in the context of Irish traditional music, refers to concert pitch i.e. 440hz. This simply means that the flute is in the key of D. However, the term has widened it’s usage to refer to an Irish, open-holed, simple-system flute. It has nothing to do with a reference to classical concerts.