Category: Articles

This is a great post by Bandcamp.com.

https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/jazz-flute-albums-guide

“The thing with the flute is that it’s cathartic…When it comes to actually using a part of the natural environment to amplify the sound you’re hearing in your head, the flute’s the oldest instrument that they found,” Shabaka Hutchings told The Guardian newspaper in June 2024. A year earlier, Hutchings had announced that he was putting down the saxophone to focus solely on the flute, leading him to master the shakuhachi, the ancient Japanese end-blown flute used on his album Perceive its beauty, Acknowledge its Grace, alongside a variety of other instruments from the flute family.

Playing with effects is a thing now. There are lots of places on the internet where you can find info how to do it. Seems a book needed to be published for the beginners in the area? Plus the “space” changes quite rapidly so most of the gear in there might not even be available in 6 months.

I’ll I will contribute to this is that how you get the flute sound INTO the effects box/chain is really what matters. Like if you are playing by yourself, a Shure SM58 would work just time plugging into an effects pedal. However, if you are going to play LIVE with other instruments, then this setup will cause problems.

BLEED…..ie the microphone picking up other sounds and then running that into the effects. You can mitigate it somewhat with putting a GATE before the signal reaches an effect, but it’s not a great way to do it. Plus, it pretty much kills your ability to play softly (as the gate needs to reach a certain threshold before it “opens”, and if the live group you play in is loud and there is a lot of bleed…..)

Then you get into microphones, microphone patterns, how well it rejects off axis, perhaps a close pickup, etc, etc, etc. It’s a rabbit hole, albeit a very fun rabbit hole.

Great interview with Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull

There is a plethora of electronic wind instruments. From “pro” offerings from Yamaha, Akai and Roland, to homebrew instruments. So much that somethings get released and you don’t know about them until someone does a cool video with one. Like this:

The re.corder is an electronic soprano recorder. It looks very and sounds cool, but if you can do that with a recorder, why can’t you do a FLUTE like this????

Interesting cover of the Mandalorian theme with all kinds of ethnic instruments, including flutes.

Sad to get a letter saying that FluteTalk Magazine was not taking renewals for it’s magazine and evaluating it’s future. I truly loved getting the colorful magazine in my mail box ever month.

Please go check them out online!

There is a lot of development using various powerful, low-cost sensors, computers, etc, to augment a musical performance. The idea of taking brain waves and maybe having it start triggering something is very interesting.

I was going to put this on Musescore, but seems you need a PRO account to do anything over like 4 scores on there. Anyone want to gift me with a PRO account? In the meantime, here is the PDF of the Mandalorian Theme from the new Star Wars TV show.

  The Mandalorian Theme for Flute (125.7 KiB, 32 hits)
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