Tuning slides on a flute . . . why???

Can anyone please tell me the significance of a tuning slide on a flute. I know what a tuning slide is, it lets you tune you flute to any key but other than that what other use does a slide have??? I have a magnificent two piece Martin Doyle flute. Its fantastic and I love it. It doesn’t have a foot long because it doesn’t need one, it has no keys because I don’t need keys on it, it has no adjustable cork because that’s just too complicated and it doesn’t have a tuning slide because I don’t want one on it and I don’t really need it. Last night I was at a session in the Leitrim Fleadh and this Bodhran player comes up to me and says that hasn’t got a tuning slide has it? and I said no because it’s a concert pitch and then he tutted and huffed and fecked out the door. now do I really need a tuning slide on my flute or was that Bodhran player(as well as other people) being an arsehole

It may have been his unsubtle way of saying that you were out of tune. The purpose of a tuning slide is to let you adjust the pitch to match different conditions. If the temperature is very warm, then you’ll need to adjust the flute to play flatter. Humidity can affect tuning as well. Some pubs are very dry, which seems to push the pitch upwards, so in a hot, dry pub you might need to make a big adjustment to tuning. Also, in some sessions the rest of the musicians may be either sharper or flatter than concert pitch.

In short, it’s useful to have a tuning slide on a flute.

just chek your pitch here :
http://www.novasession.org/Flutini/

Yes, but bobmarlec - that won’t help if the conditions change. If it’s hotter, drier, wetter, colder or the other musicians are playing at non-concert pitch, just checking the playing in the house won’t help with that. In fact, comparing one’s own pitch to that of other musicians isn’t going to helped at all by flutini or any other pitch-checker.

It’s fairly easy to play a flute quite a long way either side of ‘in tune’ just by the way one blows. I find it useful, when practicing, to check now and then that I really am playing at concert pitch. Otherwise, to be in tune, I have to play differently to how I practice when I then try to play with other people - if I notice that I am off.

Practicing in a colder room a typical pub causes smilar problems.

While it might be useful, as Ben said, there is no absolute need for a tuning slide. Martin Doyle, Ronan Browne, and Catherine McEvoy, to mention three great players, each play a flute without a tuning slide. Most players can compensate for pitch changes without recourse to a tuning slide, by adjusting their embouchure or rolling the flute in or out. If necessary you can always pull the head out a bit to flatten the pitch. It might have some effect on the tone but it will be minimal and in a large session you would not notice a loss of tonal quality.
When you are playing on your own or with one or two players, with some exceptions (box and concertina), players will tune to you if you are a few cents sharp. If you need to flatten the pitch so much that the tone really suffers then you might have the wrong instrument for that session. But if you are playing sharp in the upper octave then the slide won’t help you at all and it could make things worse. Doyle flutes like to be played hard but over-blowing in the high octave can make you uncomfortably sharp. It’s good to listen carefully and to back off in the high octave if you are sharp.

Does Catherine McEvoy play a flute without a slide? When I’ve seen her she’s been with what looks like an old flute (Rudall?) that does have one. She has certainly tuned her flute with a slide when I’ve seen her in the Cobblestone. Still, she’s probably got other flutes. It doesn’t alter your point.

On videos I have noticed that Catherine McEvoy usually plays a few notes before starting a tune with others, but I don’t recall her adjusting anything. I assumed that it was along the lines of what David Levine said - checking that this was how she needed to blow in that context.

I have an Olwelll with a slide …and hardly ever move it, but it’s noce to know that I could if I wanted to

Of course there’s no ‘need’ for a slide; but if they weren’t useful, they wouldn’t exist. I have a flute without a slide or an adjustable cork, which mercifully is usually spot on in tune, with itself and at A=440. But if I’m playing with my friend whose box is a tad flat, I can’t use it.
I consider them so useful, in fact, that I actually made one myself for a low-D whistle that didn’t have one. I am now much happier with it.

When I got my first flute a couple of years ago, I wanted one with a tuning slide and I’m glad I made that decision.

In addition to sessions, I play music at home with my wife, a fiddler with very good intonation and something of a hair-trigger for noticing when notes are sour. So that was one reason. 🙂

Our practice room at home usually starts out cold for 3/4 of the year, then we light the fireplace and the room warms up over the course of an hour or two as we play together. Both of us have to adjust tuning during that time as the instruments warm up and the humidity changes. I notice this whether I’m playing flute, mandolin, or guitar. It’s just easier to deal with when you have a tuning slide. Same thing can happen at the pub session, but our rehearsal room is probably a more extreme case.

Another reason for the slide is that one local session always has one or two pipers who set the group’s reference pitch, and it’s always a bit north of A440. With a tuning slide, the flute’s target pitch for average conditions is usually with the slide pulled out a bit, so there is plenty of room to push it in and go sharp. That might not be possible on a slide-less flute where your only ability to adjust pitch (other than with embouchure) is pulling out the headjoint.

And yes, it’s possible to lip notes into pitch, but that’s easier when you have years of experience. A tuning slide makes this much easier for a beginner, I think. You learn to make subtle pitch adjustments with embouchure from a neutral (in-tune) starting point. Why make it harder than it has to be? Learning to lip notes into pitch will happen regardless, over time.

“….if they weren’t useful, they wouldn’t exist….” I never said they weren’t useful. What I said was: “While it might be useful.. there is no absolute need for a tuning slide.” What about this did you find confusing or poorly stated?
Tuning slides were developed when tuning to A=440 was not as common as it is today. The slide was of much greater utility 150 years ago. The question isn’t about whether or not the slide is useful. I don’t see why you -- gam -- couldn’t pull your headjoint out a bit or adjust your embouchure if your pal is just “a tad flat.” Perhaps your embouchure is not fully developed. Or, more likely, you might be blowing a tad sharp. Have you tested your pal’s box with a trusted tuner?
Ben, this is from Brad Hurley’s site: “Her going away present… was the Rudall and Rose flute which she had been playing and still plays to the present day. The flute is a rare Rudall and Rose from the early 19th century which has no tuning slide.” I have played this flute. The tenon on the heart joint was paper thin but it has probably been repaired since then. Catherine is always in tune and could probably play a garden hose in concert pitch. She does have other flutes and they might have slides. But back then this was her Flute.

Fair enough David. You’re right about her being always spot on in tune. I swear I’ve seen her adjusting something to do with tuning though, before starting playing … maybe pulling the headjoint a bit …

I agree with the advice above--look into your pitch as you play. If people are asking you about your tuning slide, it is probably not a sign that they are interested in flute construction--instead, it probably means that you are playing out of tune. Like folks say, a tuning slide is not the only way to control your pitch, but I bet this is something you should be aware of. (Especially if this is a case where your pitch is off to the point that even a drummer can tell it is off. 😉 )

About the third time I played with other people, at a non-pub gathering set up for beginners, one of the leaders (flute player and piper) asked to look at the flute and - peering into the head - asked if the cork was adjustable.

Driving home it occured to me what that might have been about. The next week after struggling with the B part of The Rights of Man I asked if I was out of tune on that. “Yes” he said with a smile. I neglected to ask him in which direction. The cork position was as the maker intended.

Cork position (mutatis mutandi) doesn’t have a profound effect on the flute’s intonation. Cork position is mainly to do with the upper octave. A player’s embouchure is the really critical factor. All simple system flutes are out of tune to some degree, unlike the Boehm system flute. The great maker’s flutes can easily be blown into tune. One of my favorite flutes is a Patrick Olwell flute, without a slide, that he made from an old blackwood (rather than the more common hard rock maple) pool cue. For the first few years that I had it the flute always seemed a little bit sharp. If I don’t pay attention to it these days it is still sharp… but it would be more accurate to say that I am not paying the attention to it that I should.
On the other hand somebody I know sold a flute in “D” tuning to somebody who was pretty much a beginner. It seems the flute is in an old tuning and is really closer to “Eb.” When the player asked the “dealer” for a refund, the seller told him that he himself could play it in tune in D, and he refused to take it back. Nobody’s embouchure could deal with that much variance, nor would a tuning slide or a change of cork position be of much help either.

“What about this did you find confusing or poorly stated?”
None of it -- I wasn’t addressing the remarks to you.
“I don’t see why you — gam — couldn’t pull your headjoint out a bit”
It doesn’t have one.
The ‘tad’ is more than I could manage by changing my embouchure.

David, I was following AlBrown’s post. The mention of the cork was that the person who noticed I was out of tune found a way to get me thinking about it without bluntly telling a newbie who he didn’t really know that he was playing out of tune.

One reason I remember it is that at about that time our Mr Hall made posts about out of tune flute players.

Take a look on YouTube and you will be hard pressed to find someone playing a flute with a tuning slide where the headjoint is pushed all the way in. In most cases, the head is pulled out a fair amount. Of course, because of the tuning of antique flutes being generally high, being pulled out is to be expected, but newer keyed flutes and keyless flutes are also often seen pulled out. My Casey Burns flute needs to be out, also. I would feel very insecure going to a session or playing a gig with a flute that could not be tuned. Why avoid a tuning slide - to save money?

blue.claire.bear wrote - 5 months ago - “I’m looking for a 3 part tunable flute blackwood, preferably, and the only one that I can find(thats affordable-ish) are the flutes made by Richard Cox and Glenn Wray in canada, so I’m wondering if anybody has bought one of their flutes and how does it sound. ”

It occurs to me that you’re fairly new to playing the flute and perhaps your ears haven’t become accustomed to the tuning minutia that is “the flute”. While it may seem that an instrument sounds in tune when you’re playing solo, once the flute player begins playing with other instruments the tuning issues become apparent - but not, necessarily, to the untrained/unexperienced ear. A tuning slide, while not perfect, will help balance the problem frequencies into tune, giving the player a fighting chance to not be glaringly out of tune. The best modern flute makers recognize that the instrument is imperfect and have adjusted their building methods to accommodate most tunings.

I have played many flutes, and to my ears Hammy Hamilton has come closest to making a flute that is true in the lower octaves and the higher octaves - both in sounded note and in internal/harmonic resonance.

That said, it is important for a flute player to be able to recognize when they are not in tune, and adjust accordingly. Because of the way flutes are played, atmospheric conditions, emotions, room acoustics, and ego can all cause cacophony - so, that leaves the lonely flute player with a tuning slide to bring it all to right - a few cents this way or that can make for a great session - or disaster…..

Anybody who has played with Ronan Browne, Catherine McEvoy, or Martin Doyle can testify to the fact that tuning slides are not essential. Yet tuning-slides can be useful, as I have said. They can add a bit of clarity and brightness to the tone. Olwell calls it “focus.” They do add to the cost of the flute: from $200-$500 depending on the maker and the material. And they increase the odds of cracking if neglected, since the metal expands faster than the wood under hot and dry conditions.
There is also a huge difference between having the flute in tune and being able consistently to play it in tune. One of our great local concertina players once said to me, from a position of arrogance and pride, that he has only ever played with one fluter who was consistently in tune: Tara Diamond.
There is no question in my mind that if offered a flute without a slide made by Wilkes, Olwell, Hammy, Baubet, or Doyle, rather than a flute with a slide made by some other makers mentioned here, I would chose the flute without a slide.
Dear blue.claire.bear (check your messages) -- Keep your Doyle. It would be hard to find a better flute. Meanwhile, get a tuner for $10 (or for free on the net http://www.seventhstring.com/tuner/tuner.html) and blow into your flute hard (as you would in a loud session) in the upper octave. Check your tuning on the high A and B. Adjust your embouchure or roll the flute towards you to bring the pitch down a bit. Practice doing that and you should be fine.
A tuning slide might give you a leg up initially but you still have to blow any simple-system flute into internal tune with itself, tuning slide or no slide. Listen carefully when you’re playing in sessions to make sure that you’re not sharp in the second octave and the next time somebody asks you about the slide, thank them for their concern and tell them that you don’t need one.

Tuning slides do more than “add a bit of brightness to the tone”. On stage, in a concert situation, it is likely that the pitch will be at A = 440, so there’s less need for a slide. There will be issues to do with temperature, which can be dealt with more easily by using a tuning slide than having to change the way you play, but still, you can play in tune without adjusting a tuning slide, or even having one on the flute, assuming that the flute in question is designed to play at A=440. But the range of pitches in many sessions, unlike most gigs, means that it can be just too much to deal with the gap in pitch without a slide.

Also, great players of course have more ability to vary the *whole* pitch of the flute just by blowing than do average session players for whom a tuning slide can be a godsend. Internal tuning of the flute (as opposed to the overall pitch) always has to be dealt with by adjustment of embouchure etc, whoever you are, if you want to play flute.

“I know what a tuning slide is, it let’s you tune your flute to any key.”

Clearly you don’t.

Tuning slides were invented to deal with playing at a variety of pitch standards. Less necessary now that a standard has been decided on.

Fecking about with the slide is a beginners folly.

I played a slideless Olwell for many years. No issues.

In a way a slideless flute will help develop your embouchure by forcing you to learn to play in tune rather than compensate with the slide. Your embouchure should be flexible enough to deal with the minor sharpness or flatness of a session. You may need to warm up a flute first which you should do anyway.

Also antiques can be pitched both low and high of 440 depending on age and country of origin. There is no “ generally” about it.

“I know what a tuning slide is, it let’s you tune your flute to any key.”

If it was that simple, I’d be able to play all those tunes in B flat and G minor!

There seems to me to be some confusion about what a tuning slide is for among modern players.

The first tuning slides appear on flutes like Potters. The slide was sheathed with wood. There were number markings and lines incised in the wood. These were different pitch standards the player might be asked to play in. This idea eventually replaced the corps de rechange which was how they dealt with playing in different pitch standards before the slide came about.

While it has the added benefit that once can micro tune around a pitch standard. This was not the original purpose.

My Blackman flute plays in 440 with the slide shut and down to about 420 with 430 probably being where it sits best.

I don’t think there’s any confusion. They’re for what they’ve always been for: tuning the overall pitch of the instrument to be in tune with others, given different circumstances. Why else would even modern, metal Boehm flutes, designed only to play at A=440, still have a tuning slide?

Sure, there was even greater need when pitches were all over the place, but still, that’s what they’re for. I know a top class, professional Baroque flute player. He adjusts tuning by means of pulling out the headjoint a bit, and fiddling with the foot register adjuster (or whatever it’s called) and the cork. But more modern flutes (relatively speaking 😉 ) can be played pretty easily and tuning adjusted with the tuning slide (adjust the cork if you really are playing in a different pitch standard). Internal tuning is, of course, a different proposition, and is more or less totally dependent on the player, assuming the flute’s set up right and is decent in the first place.

Having said all that, I find that I tend to keep my tuning slide in more or less the same place. 🙂

The added benefit of micro adjustment was enough to keep it. It was part of Boehms design and aside from scaling and the closed G# the flute has changed relatively little

Potter flutes ( the first slides?) numbers’ on the slide correspond to numbered corps de rechange that preceded them. The individual bodies were often similarly numbered.

I am not saying a slide is not useful. I just see beginners messing about with slide position rather than learning to develop their embouchure. I was guilty myself of being a slide fiddler. As you say once you get on with it the slide moves very little.

A tuning slide allows the player to practice playing high (e.g., at 15 ft (3m) above the ground) or right at the surface. If the slide is long and steep enough, the player can also simulate playing in a brisk headwind.

I live near the beach and like Ben, keep the tuning slide in approximately the same place when I am at home. However, I get together regularly with a group of friends that live in a valley further inland. During the summer, I have to pull out further to be in tune with the group because the temperature is warmer and the humidity is less.

Not appropriate here of course, but the succinct smart-alec reply would be “because you had to ask!”

Why does a dry environment make a flute sharper ?

Lighter air? Quicker wave transmission, perhaps? I dunno, but it does seem to.

When you pull out the barrel of a flute with no tuning slide,
it disrupts the bore profile and makes the tone a little more
fuzzy than it would be otherwise. Also it takes more effort
to move a barrel than a slide and is less precise. You certainly
don’t need a tuning slide to tune though. Clarinets don’t have one.

Dry air is denser than humid air.

Dry air is *less* dense -- there are no water molecules, so less mass to move about. Warm air is less dense because the molecules are moving about more, so it also goes sharper as it gets warmer. It’s like the effect helium has on the vocal cords.

😀

Well, in fact, most air is less dense than dry air. In vapor form - water is lighter than the air around it. If it weren’t, it would condense and fall to earth - which it regularly does when energy, in the form of heat, is removed.

Wooden flutes absorb moisture from breath and surrounding air. I would suppose that moisture affects the dimensions of the flute to a small degree, but more so the tonal properties of the wood. I would guess a moist flute is more resistant to going sharp when played aggressively.

Excessively low atmospheric pressure can also result in an instrument of any kind apparently going flat. This is due to wider spacing of air molecules at high altitude and resultant slowing of sound wave propagation in the thinner air.

I stand corrected. Strange what you can learn on these pages 🙂

Yes, *increasing* humidity should make a flute sharper. However, ‘dry’ heat is more comfortabe that humid heat (persperation evaporates better) so I wonder if Ben’s dry pub is warmer than it feels. Temperature has a bigger effect than humidity.

“The addition of water vapor to air (making the air humid) reduces the density of the air, which may at first appear counter-intuitive.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Density_of_air). If you folk don’t like Wikipedia try any secondary school physics text.

Nothing wrong with Wikipedia --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia

I know little about this topic but I always remember seeing Finbar Furey on stage in Townsville (Aust) and he kept his whistles in a bucket of ice. Is this usual? (excluding wooden ones, of course)

Have we had a “reliability of the mustard board” Discussion ? 😉

I saw July Fowlis on stage in NW England and she had her whistles in a basket on a stand that I think had a power lead. I wondered if it was an adapted heated towel rail.

Julie of course.

For many years I played a c1860 flute which as usual had the metal-lined head and barrel and typical tuning slide arrangement. I rarely moved the slide, because the people I was playing with always tuned their instruments. I can’t remember ever having to change that ideal position in order to play with somebody who was out of tune, though it might have happened.

Then I had Casey Burns make me a new head for that flute, unlined, no tuning slide. It was made so that to play at Concert Pitch the head was pulled out just a tad. If needed I could push the head in a bit to sharpen myself, I can’t remember having to do that.

The flute played much better with this new head, and was overall a terrific flute. No ‘fuzzy tone’ or any other ill effects of having the head pulled out a tiny bit.

BTW on Highland pipes’ drones the cavity created by having the slide pulled out has a very good effect on tone, and this cavity is called the “tone chamber”. On many pipes the ideal tone happens with the drone top section is very far out on the tuning pin, with the largest possible tone chamber.

On my flute having a small (around 1/8") cavity didn’t seem to have any effect at all, good or ill.

I was just rereading Quantz. He seems to support my theory that tuning slides were orginally designed and thought of as a means to reach other pitch centres rather than to tune around an established pitch.

He starts by describing how the “thrifty” fluter rather than having two flutes both low and high had a foot register and corps de rechange. He goes on to describe the issues with using this set up. He describes the new “invention” as a more positive solution.

He doesn’t mention ambient conditions or vagaries of individual embouchure.

As things progressed tuning slides became shorter. Look at later high pitch cylindrical flutes. The slide became very short. Many flutes continued to be made without a slide. Especially lower cost band flutes. Surely they needed to be in tune with each other in the band and in adverse weather conditions as well.

All of this is not an argument against having a slide which is of course useful.

Just observations.

I gave my copy back ( 😉 ) to its owner. He probably would say something like that. I wasn’t really arguing with those original tuning slide things and why someone thought it might have been a good idea. But it’s still to tune to people playing at a different pitch, whether by accident or design.

Out of interest, and this is something that’s puzzled me a bit, how did they know that they were tuning to, say, A=405 or 383 or 421 or whatever? If someone knows, I’d be interested …

@ Ben Hall -- I don’t think they did know. Given that Hertz lived in the second half of the 19th century, they couldn’t have used that system before then anyway. I always thought that not knowing the exact pitch was the reason for the gradual shift over the years. Maybe they had some system I don’t know about? Tuning forks, perhaps?

I know … it confuses me. According to Wiki, Sauveur had measured various As in cycles per second by the end of the 17c. How?

I think it involved points on the vibrating thing making marks on moving smoked glass. Though I am not sure how far back that went.

Second sentence here is “Previously, tracings had been obtained of the sound-producing vibratory motions of tuning forks and other objects by physical contact” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonautograph

17c is a lot more “previously” than this; http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01875/hi-tuning-fork-190_1875938c.jpg but I have a vague memory of reading about something along those lines.

Something involving wheels and cogs invented by Huygens comes into it as well. And pendulums.

Page 10 of this: “Sounds of Our Times: Two Hundred Years of Acoustics” (Google eBook) by Robert T. Beyer (can see it on Google books) gives a description of Sauveur (who was deaf !) counting beats betwen two low pitched organ pipes that he knew the pitch ratio for, and calculating his way up the scale from there. But it suggests he was only within a few percent.

Yes, I got that he knew the pitch *ratio* of something which he used as a reference … but how did he know the absolute pitch in terms of cycles per second?

How did they measure a second?

Decent pendulum clocks had been invented by then (have as look at the Huygens wikepedia page). I am not convinced by the bit on the page in the Beyer book about 6 beats being 5.5-6.5 beats per second. I would have thought Sauveur would have counted for longer than one second and have been aware if the beats where staying in sync with a pendulum. Or adjusted a pendulum until it was exactly 6 beats and then measured the time of the pendulum.

Just to clarify about Sauvers’ pitch measurements…

By the time Sauveur did his measurements they knew about whole number ratios etc. He had two organ pipes that had pitches that he knew had the ratio 15 to 16. He counted the beats between them at 6. So we have 15x=16y and x-y=6 giving the pitches of 90 and 96. That gives the absolute frequency. The rest of any scale was done by ratios.

As gam says, the problem is getting the second but by then they had pendulum clocks that could be calibrated with a sundial at noon on consecutive days. Counting 6 per second is tricky but Sauvers was a clever guy and did other stuff to do with vibrations - so back to the clock.

I have not found what Huygens invented but it was probably analogous to holding a stick against the spokes of a bicycle wheel to get a tone that could be compared with others. In the 19th century they used a siren (air blown through holes in a rotating disks) for the same thing. In both cases the it depends on timing the rotation accurately.

The “so back to the clock” should have been on the end of the last paragraph 🙁

‘’it lets you tune you flute to any key but other than that what other use does a slide have???‘’

Maybe you didn’t express that right but it allows you to tune to another ‘pitch’ not ‘key’.

As said above its useful with humidity changes etc., from where I start of in a session the slide is all the way in but after a few tunes it could be as much as a centimeter pulled out. So unless my flute is unusual I’m guessing that would be typical. So your going to be doing a fair bit of rolling in and out to play in tune and to my experience the flute doesn’t sound at its best if you have it rolled in or out.

Saying that if Catherine McEvoy can sound the way she does without one then there is definitely a case for a ‘slideless’ flute.