You can understand from all this, that the flautist can generate subtle changes to the sound produced, so on your Yamaha AR, you can adjust the many different settings that are available to produce the flute sound that you like. The main area for this is in the
Condition Page.
Pay particular attention to the
range of the flute, which is from Middle C and upwards for three octaves, so with an 8' setting on your Flute Voice, never play the notes in the lowest octave of your upper keyboard, to be authentic.
Make the necessary adjustments to the notes you actually play on your Yamaha AR, if you select either a 4' or 16' setting for your flute
A good flautist can generate a little vibrato when playing longer notes or playing slowly, but not as much as a clarinetist. So
if you use vibrato, do so sparingly and with very low settings.
Remember that
once a flautist stops blowing the sound stops immediately, so
never use Sustain on your Organ with a Flute Voice, because it is impossible to do so on the real instrument.
Yamaha help us here in that they made sure that with a Voice on our
Lead, on the Upper Keyboard,
you cannot choose sustain, anyway!
Don’t forget that a
Flute player can only play one note at a time.
So to be authentic, make sure you do the same, and only play single note melodies. Therefore, it is helpful to select your clarinet voice from the Lead Voice section.
It also prevents you from wrongly adding sustain, as we have have just noted.
By
controlling the air flow, a flautist can slightly increase the
volume on one note, or a series of them. This is no where near as great as can be done on the clarinet, but the flute player can achieve some small variation here.
Equally, do consider 'dynamic contour'. By that I mean simply, that unlike a piano or violin, all brass and wind instruments don't have the ability to go from very soft to very loud right across their entire range. So there is no point in expecting a real flute player to play his lowest Middle C at
ff, or in his highest ranges at
pp. It just can't be done, so to reflect authenticity, adjust your AR Voice accordingly.
We have on our Yamaha AR organs, both
Initial Touch and
After Touch.
Initial Touch is affected by how hard you strike the note, whereas After Touch reacts to how hard you press down on the note once you have struck it. You can combine these two to create the same effect that a flautist can make, but the difference for the flute player is much less than on the clarinet.
You can view what your Yamaha AR manual says about the Touch Tone feature by clicking this link, to open it in a new window:
http://www.ar-group.org/smforum/index.php?topic=3193.0Don’t forget that the flute player has to
breathe regularly. So when you use that voice on your AR, you should also ‘take breaths’.
One way of perfecting this is to take a real breath yourself, as you begin to play a phrase and as you let it out, see how long you can maintain it before you have to take another. This should help you to lift your fingers from the keys at appropriate points, especially at the end of phrases, in order to allow the flautist to effectively take a breath.
And again with
Initial Touch and
After Touch you can reproduce what the flautist does with their breath control.
I trust this will help you to think, therefore, and play like a true Flautist.
Peter
p.s.
In its most basic form, a flute is an open tube which is blown into. After focused study and training, players use controlled air-direction to create an airstream in which the air is aimed downward into the tone hole of the flute's headjoint. There are several broad classes of flutes. With most flutes, the musician blows directly across the edge of the mouthpiece, with 1/4 of their bottom lip covering the embouchure hole. However, some flutes, such as the whistle, gemshorn, flageolet, recorder, tin whistle, tonette, fujara, and ocarina have a duct that directs the air onto the edge (an arrangement that is termed a "fipple"). These are known as fipple flutes. The fipple gives the instrument a distinct timbre which is different from non-fipple flutes and makes the instrument easier to play, but takes a degree of control away from the musician.
Another division is between side-blown (or transverse) flutes, such as the Western concert flute, piccolo, fife, dizi and bansuri; and end-blown flutes, such as the ney, xiao, kaval, danso, shakuhachi, Anasazi flute and quena. The player of a side-blown flute uses a hole on the side of the tube to produce a tone, instead of blowing on an end of the tube. End-blown flutes should not be confused with fipple flutes such as the recorder, which are also played vertically but have an internal duct to direct the air flow across the edge of the tone hole.
Flutes may be open at one or both ends. The ocarina, xun, pan pipes, police whistle, and bosun's whistle are all closed-ended. Open-ended flutes such as the concert flute and the recorder have more harmonics, and thus more flexibility for the player, and brighter timbres.
An
organ pipe may be either open or closed, depending on the sound desired.
Flutes may have any number of pipes or tubes, though one is the most common number. Flutes with multiple resonators may be played one resonator at a time (as is typical with pan pipes) or more than one at a time (as is typical with double flutes).
Flutes can be played with several different air sources. Conventional flutes are blown with the mouth, although some cultures use nose flutes. The flue pipes of organs, which are acoustically similar to duct flutes, are blown by bellows or fans.
In the next Reply we outline some of the variations of the flute instrument.
