I think I’ll keep the Ormiston.

I don’t think it’s one of the ones that I’ll never touch again — that is the M&E keyless, the Aulos Stanesby repro, the Tipple D, and the STL ocarina. Those provoke no interest in me whatsoever, and I really do need to box them up and get them to Blayne Chastain for consignment.

But I think I’m getting some sense of back-and-forth with the Ormiston. Why I think this is that I seem to have become really good since going through the struggles I’ve gone through trying to transition onto the Ormiston and going back to the Copley. I ended up moving back, finding the Copley so unutterably comfortable, and figuring I’d settle down on it.

But … since that time, I also found out that I ended up becoming a much better flute player. Oh, I’m still no classical player really. I still fight for high notes, and my embouchure seems to shift and change with the wind. But something changed with that struggle.

As a result, I don’t think I’ll consign the Ormiston. I don’t know if I’ll settle on it ever; I love the Copley too much and it has too much going for it. But I think an occasional struggle may be a nice way to kick myself forward every now and then. Maybe someday I’ll even be more comfortable using the foot keys.

One big thing I didn’t expect to matter so much is the two-piece body on the Copley that allows me to rotate the bottom hand holes slightly in toward myself. Not only does that make it trivially easy to cover the large F# hole (which I didn’t realize until I couldn’t do it anymore), but it also brings the long C key into better alignment to actually be used.

Add to that the closer set of the holes and keys on the top hand, and the fact that the foot keys on the Ormiston are so damned hard to use, and that flat open C# and lack of a C foot ended up mattering much less than I thought it would.

I don’t think there is such a thing as a perfect flute; there is too much push-and-pull and compromise in any flute design. It’s what works best for an individual player, and that Copley is as close to a hand-in-glove fit as I’m ever likely to get.

But I’ll keep the Ormiston (for now at least) in the spirit of recognizing the importance of a struggle every now and then.

In other news, I’m really enjoying Shosty’s Waltz in C minor. I’ve got a lot of work to finish it, but it’s really fun so far. It was that piece that showed me what I had learned from fighting with the Ormiston.