Tag Archives: ormiston

And my Ormiston finally sold.

Good to get it into the hands of someone who will be excited about it and able to really make it sing, because that sure wasn’t me. It sounded lovely, but it was definitely not optimized for classical playing (the long C was unusable), and required hands the size of manatee flippers.

I’m also still talking with Jay Ham, who I hope will be able to pass by my area and take a look at my Copley at some point. I still think wistfully of living in a universe where I could get a Boehm-style C foot for that thing in delrin, but that’s not the universe I live in. :-/

YAY! My Ormiston finally sold!

It sounded so nice but was so impossible to negotiate, and I’m thrilled that I’ll be getting a consignment check for it and that it’s going to someone who will love it and hopefully play lots of ITM on it.

It took a while, but The Irish Flute Store helped me unload all of my unwanted instruments, including the triple ocarina, which I still wish I’d liked. (I have a thing for chromatic instruments with no moving parts, but fipples are just not my thing.)

Heard back from Jay Ham

I’ll be sending him my Copley (WAUGH!) and Ormiston in September, and he’ll fix the Ormiston keys and send that back, and see if he can do a foot for the Copley. (He’ll also send back the Copley but will need it again for the final fitting.) Either way, I’ll be on his waitlist for either a new foot or a whole new wooden flute.

And I consign the Ormiston along with the other extras I have sitting in my drawer.

I should also consign the chromatic Tipple G and the kaval, but I can’t bring myself to. The whole idea of that kaval is transcendent, and … well, I’ll see. The chromatic Tipple G really deserves to be played, though.

I’m also going to consign my Viento 208L to get the silver open-hole one with the B foot. If things work out well, I’ll have one 8-key SS, one Boehm, one Baroque, and possibly one keyless SS. (If it doesn’t, I’ll have a 6-key as well.)

(I’ll also have the keyless in F and the kaval. I’m mulling parting with the keyless in F as well, though.)

I also decided to make myself view the Copley in a more unstructured way, so I can mentally go back and forth from yang to yin on the same instrument. I want that freedom to be something I can go to on my own decision, and not because of what’s in my hands. So I’m just vaguely making nice noises on the Copley, and also starting in on the Vivaldi 443/2 that I like so much, now that I have a better third octave — at last what exists of the third octave on a SS.

Consigning the Ormiston

I keep going back and forth on this. I think the main drawback is that I can’t rotate the bottom tone holes independent of the top ones. That really seems to be sine qua non for me in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. Even my resin Aulos Grenser copy can do that, and I don’t think I can do without it.

Everything else that I want seems to hinge on that, and I had no idea until I was without it.

I think I will end up consigning the Ormiston, along with the many other things that I’d like to get rid of. 😦

I could keep the money and cackle over it like Scrooge McDuck (which is my natural state), or … well, I’m pondering another Copley with the following qualities:

  1. In D with an extended foot,
  2. In mopane,
  3. With the bottom holes independent of the top ones (not a one-piece body),
  4. With silver rings and a silver/nickel tuning slide,
  5. Eb and long F keys, and
  6. A C natural thumbhole that I won’t use for anything but to get the open C# up to pitch.

That’ll be as good as chromatic for me given how beautifully his flutes cross-finger, and it’ll scratch my wood flute itch. Mopane is not only beautiful but hard enough to be close to the grenadilla/delrin sound I prefer. When that bunch of things I have to send to Blayne gets sold, I should be okay.

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.

Found a nicer second octave Cnat

On the Copley, I mean:

(ooo xxo) + Bb key, or even G#/Bb keys

Makes for a really nice transition from B to Cnat in the second octave.

Yeah, I’m on this thing for good, flat C# and all. The other one just … it just doesn’t fit my hand or my mouth. I wish it did. But it’s just not my flute. 😦

Who knows, I may end up posting about how I’m back on the Ormiston in a month. But … I don’t think so. The Copley responds better for me and is much more comfortable in my hands, even though the Ormiston has that nice open C# and a C foot. Which I barely ever used anyhow because it felt so weird and ugly; I felt like I needed a goddamned steel pinky to use it. Maybe block mount non-articulated keys would have made it work, but I’m sick of the grass-is-greener thing. I’m thinking too much about two more stinking half steps.

The Copley also lets me independently rotate the lower three and upper three holes as well, and I only recently realized that I could use that not only to put the lower three holes in a little but also to put the long C touch in a much more convenient location for my index finger. I don’t have to lift my bottom elbow very much, and I can hit the long C as well.

And again, it turned out that I never even used the stupid C foot because it was so clunky and hard to use.

Well, at least I have the convenience of delrin back again. For all its faults, the Copley is my flute.

I feel like I had an affair only to discover that I like my husband more than Mr. Excitement.

In other news, I’m working on the theme from Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite thing in C minor. It’s lowbrow, and I don’t care. It’s pretty.

So I can still use this normal editor.

The good editor, I mean. The one that doesn’t assume that you can count your brain cells on less than one hand.

Anyhow, I’m still working on rejiggering my playing to work on the Ormiston, and it’s actually not bad to have to rebuild everything. It allows one to do a “if I knew then what I know now” sort of thing, so I’m working from the ground up on using less air and keeping my hands completely relaxed as opposed to just trying to get a sound out. I’m working on doing a full up-and-back chromatic scale in the first octave, and going up to the second octave B on a up scale. Then, I’m working on one-octave scales in different keys. First E, then F.

And the piece I’m working on is “Una Furtiva Lagrima,” finally — the whole thing. I wrote down the keys on the sheet, and now I’m finally getting the whole thing down, slowly and painfully.

The lion’s share of my time though is doing the chromatic scales and just getting used to being as relaxed as possible and using as little movement and as little air as I can get away with.

I’m also really delighted that my embouchure doesn’t ache anymore, even a little. It’s amazing how quickly that goes away when you don’t play. It’s not surprising; the little sheet muscles in the face can’t bulk up, so they don’t have much of a “memory.” I mean, no flute player walks around with a ripped face. So you do have to keep at it.

Forcing myself to make the switch

It’s really annoying to do this, but it’s nice to get a feel for the C foot. I’m finding that I have to play it every single day to make sure that the articulated keys don’t stick shut. And my top hand grip has to change since the T1 hole is further up the body of the instrument, and the G# key is further down. It’s really irritating, but since it gives me a better open C#, I’m going to just have to cope with it.

There are also some shifts in the bottom hand, especially B2 and B3, which are driving me bats. They are close enough to the Copley that I expect them to be exactly where they were before, but subtly off enough that I’ve got to shift things by about a millimeter — just enough to be really annoying.

The only real problem is the long C, which I never used on the Copley, but the Copley’s cross-fingered Cnat (xxx oxo) was so good that I never needed it. This one seems to have a classic cross-fingered Cnat at oox xxo instead, which is disorienting for me even if that’s the more common one for most 8-key flutes. It doesn’t have the clarity or punch that the Copley’s did, though. I imagine that’s part of why Copley brought down his T1 hole, to put the cross-fingered Cnat better in tune. Since most ITM is written close to pentatonic and the Cnat is used more often than the C#, it makes sense. But I don’t play ITM, and the flat C# is a bit of a fart-in-a-confessional when playing Chopin or Haendel. At any rate, I like the better C#, but I do have to Apoxie Sculpt the long C to make it more usable. I need to check how it sits in its case so that I don’t do something to it that interferes with shutting the case lid.

I still wish it were block-mounted just for simplicity’s sake and because it’s an elegant way to mount keys in an engineering sense. I love just having simple pins holding the whole thing together rather than a series of pins, posts, and screws.

I’m also just greasing the tenons, putting it together in the morning, and leaving it that way until I swab it out and put it away at night — that’s my maintenance. Eventually once it’s been played in sufficiently (again), I’ll oil it up with sweet almond oil. My swab is an old handkerchief that I found outside recently that went un-picked-up for several days. Turns out that soaking up snot and spit are not dissimilar, and the thing fits in the cleaning rod and works brilliantly.

I guess I’m on the Ormiston now. I didn’t expect this. I still wish that damned Copley had a C foot, and I do still love it and will keep it as a travel flute given that it’s delrin. I dearly, dearly wish Ormiston made delrin flutes. The ease of maintenance is glorious.