How Does Reverb Work With A Flute

Video Transcript

"The final element of what might help your enjoyment of the flute is not about your playing, it's not about your sound, it's not even about your flute directly. It's about how your environment reflects your sound back to you and the topic here is reverb or echo and the recordings that we hear usually have some kind of echo or reverb built in so we're used to hearing that. If we play our flute out in the field, the sound will go out directly out from you in all directions and not bounce back at all. But even if you're on a lake and there's cliff on the side of the lake you can play a note, stop playing and you hear the note bouncing back at you. If you're at the right distance you can even play along with that. You have an echo going and you can play harmonies with yourself. It's a lot of fun. If you're indoors if you're in a carpeted room with lots of furniture, the sound will be deadened and you'll get much the same effect as if you're out in the field. But if you're in a room like this, this is a gallery the sound is very live here. You can play, you hear the sound happening for a second or two after you stop playing. So if you're lucky enough to have a space like that, a chapel, a stairwell, a hallway, a gallery, whatever you can experiment, just bring your flute to different places and see what sounds the best to you. If you're lucky enough to do that, that's one thing. If you're not, you can also do it electronically and there I would advise just going on ebay finding a very simple reverb unit and a microphone and speakers and a amplifier. You can set up your system very easily, even just for headphones. So it really adds to the pleasure of playing these flutes."