How to Play a Tune on the Irish Flute

Video Transcript

" Hi I'm David Cantieni and on behalf of Expert Village I'm going to be showing you the many aspects of playing the Irish wooden flute. If you are interested in more information or finding out other places where you may find me you can go to www.digdigmusic.com or you could email me at digdig@cracker.com. I'm going to show you how to play a tune. Now we could take a simple tune like Mary Had a Little Lamb or a simple Irish tune sometimes it comes down to the same thing. Recognizing patterns and of course making your fingers move in those patterns. As you may know by raising and lowering your fingers you will change the pinch and the pinch is determine the length of the air column between here is the open hole, here is the close hole so this is actually the hold of it that is making the sound. You would also see if I play all of my fingers down I will get the lowest note. If I played a different flute in a different key I will put all my fingers down and get a different note. Now I will go back to this flute. The way that your raise and lower your fingers make quiet a lot of difference. I will show you a simple tune how about if we do Mary Had a Little Lamb. When there are repeated notes there is always a question about what to do. Traditional classic flute would require that you go t, t, t. in Irish style we shy away from using our tongue very much. Often you to make a division between the notes you would use a k sound in the back of your throat which will actually makes for a bigger sound that we could play. You can see that I'm going k, k , k perhaps you could see that. So that is the basics of playing a simple tune. "