Chapter 3: Choosing Your Instrument
The flute and France Some features on flutes labeled French style or having French names like plateau or embouchure hole are holdovers from the time of Louis Lot and the rest of the French flutemakers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Before flutes were made in the United States, the New York Philharmonic and Boston Symphony flutists,
some of whom had immigrated from France themselves, were performing on French flutes. The flutemakers who began working in Boston were copying the Louis Lot flutes that were brought over to the United States from France. So today’s American flutes have a strong French heritage. Vive la flute!
Tone holes: Drawn versus soldered Tone holes have evolved tremendously since the time of the earliest bone, bamboo, and wood flutes. While tone holes still are just basically holes in a tube with chimneys attached, the science of discovering the correct placements and sizes of the various holes has been the subject of an infinite amount of research. As a result, flutists have the luxury of playing on flutes that are better in tune than ever before. Because of the competition in the flute market and also because flutemakers tend to be perfectionists, new configurations, or flute scales, keep coming out. The main choice you need to make when buying a flute is what type of tone hole to go with:
✓ Drawn tone holes are made by extruding the metal right out of the flute tube. Drawn tone holes, just by the nature of the extruding process, don’t add any extra material to the flute, so they leave the flute feeling and sounding lighter.
✓ To produce soldered tone holes flutemakers leave the tube alone and solder the metal chimneys onto the tube. Compared to drawn tone holes, soldered tone holes add the slight weight of the separately made tone holes and the metal alloy used in soldering. The extra weight gives the flute a slightly darker sound and more resistant feel when played. The soldering process makes for a more expensive flute, but just because a flute costs more doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a better instrument. Your budget may make this decision for you because, as a rule, student and conservatory models use drawn tone holes, which are less labor-intensive to make. However, some professional models are also made with drawn tone holes rather than soldered. It’s a matter of preference.
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