Tag Archives: ormiston

So much for that.

Dave Copley’s not interested. It is a constant source of shock to me that this thing I have had to do my whole life — flipping parity — literally seems to make righties’ brains short-circuit. I have to admit, I think of Kumail Nanjiani talking about how it’s not that hard to identify with a character in a movie that doesn’t look like you and then says, “I’ve been doing it my whole life.” Preach.

I think I may have little choice but to put the Copley away and just start over again with the Ormiston. As beautifully as the Copley plays, I want a fully-keyed flute, and the Ormiston does play well, just unfamiliarly. I’m sure as hell not consigning it at this point. And I may have to do the Apoxie Sculpt thing to it now that I know I’m keeping it and making myself work with it. I’ve got a better open C# on it too, so there’s that.

The main downside is that it’s made of wood and not delrin, which I’m not that pleased about. There’s a romance to wood, but there’s also a “holy shit I live on the East Coast of the US and the humidity will suck the water right out of your pores” fear with wood as well.

I’m glad the piano has been so rewarding lately. I’ve been off the flute for so long that I can’t even get into the second octave anymore, and this back-and-forth BS with the foot has drained a lot of my enthusiasm. I like instruments that you just sit down at and they work, instead of these damned klugey things that you have to argue with all the time with a million moving parts that do nothing better than break or misbehave. I had to fight like mad to get the foot keys to not stick shut!

Hm, might not want to do that

It occurs to me that if I’m really going to commit to the Copley, flat C# and all — if I can get a C foot on it when I talk to Dave C in mid-March — I might not want to put any Apoxie Sculpt on the Ormiston. I’ll want to keep it to have a flute around for when I have to send the FOMH to Dave for its new foot, but after that, when I get FOMH back, I can just put the Ormiston on eBay. I don’t want to put AS on it before I do that.

So I’ll just commit to the Copley 100%. It’s the FOMH, and that’s that, and I’ll have to negotiate with that flat C#. (Which seems sometimes slightly improved if I cover the B1 hole, oddly enough.) I’m going to keep playing that, use the Ormiston as far as I can stand it when I ship the FOMH to Dave C for its new foot, and then when FOMH gets sent back with its new foot, the Ormiston goes up on eBay to find its wide-handed proper owner.

I really need to just cut out the GAS; I’ve got the one I love, I got burned bad on it, and I don’t want any grass-is-greener syndrome. The FOMH is greener than any grass I’ve found or am likely to find, and I need to remember that.

Maybe that’s its name: Greengrass. Pratoverde or Spiazzoverde.

I also want to remember to ask Dave C if he could make a Boehm-size case for FOMH.

Apoxie Sculpt and my Ormiston

Well, I’m going to see if I can’t help the long C and the G# a little (and maybe the long F) as well to make this thing more amenable to being used by someone with narrower hands. I hope it works. It shouldn’t be that bad — I just need a bit of a tongue on the G# and a tail on the C.

If I had the time, I’d love to learn Blender. I’d love to be able to scan the key pieces (or have them scanned), and then distort them in such a way as to enable them to work better for me, and then have them printed in glossy silver and install the prints on the flute instead. That would really be nice. I might end up doing that, actually — remove the keys and send them to that place I found that scans small pieces, just to have the files and maybe learn how to alter them as I can find the time.

It bugs me that my standard cross-fingered Cnat (xxx oxo) doesn’t play as well on this one as it does on the Copley. It sounds really perfect on that one, clean as a whistle. That flute offers a lot of really good cross-fingered Cnats.

I really just love the way the Ormiston plays Chopin though, and I do like its response — and its open C# — but I’d need hands like catcher’s mitts to play this thing easily.

It seems on the whole as if the Copley is optimized for ITM (not surprising with its flat C#) and the Ormiston works well for classical. The major advantage the Copley has is that I’ve been playing it for a long time and my mouth knows exactly what to do with it, and that it fits my hands much better.

I really should look into getting the Ormiston’s keys scanned and seeing if I can learn Blender well enough to play around with the files and have new keytabs printed. I’d love to do the following:

  1. Extend the long C up over the body of the flute so I don’t have to kink my bottom hand over to use it.
  2. Extend the G#.
  3. Move down the touches on the C#/C on the foot. They are far, far too long when used with a piper grip and get in the damned way when I’m trying to play a D. They throw that off so thoroughly that I end up not covering other holes with my bottom hand.
  4. Possibly make the long F key touch longer as well.

Yeah you know, looking at this list of things I dislike about the Ormiston’s keys, it becomes ever more obvious to me why I prefer the Copley, flat C# notwithstanding. This thing is just not made with my hand in mind. That’s literally 5 out of 8 keys that I dislike enough to consider learning an entirely new piece of software with a legendarily shitty UI in order to change them.

Luckily, I can fix 1, 2, and 4 with the Apoxie Sculpt, or try to. I don’t even mind using it and “ruining” the keys, because I’m not going to use the damn thing if I don’t change the keys, and frankly I’m still happier with the Copley, so I’m not messing with a flute that I value as highly — even if it did set me back a shit-ton of money. (BUT I’M NOT BITTER.)

Okay, FINE.

I’m not so pissed at the Ormiston today. I found a good cross-fingered C natural that keeps me from having to use that stupid long C key that’s placed wrong for me. Looks to be oox xxo, the standard cross-fingered C natural on a lot of 8-key flutes. xxx oxo is the best one on the Copley. Both enable an easy C-to-D transition, and a fairly decent C-to-B. Neither are that lovely for a C-to-Bb, though. :-/

And my keywork is indeed getting better with the Trevor Wye exercises. He makes you do them in all keys by half-steps, so you’re stuck. Do it or fail. 🙂

ETA: Holy crickets, fingering a D with the Bb key vented makes a nice C natural! If I pinch it, I can get it really, really clean, and since I have the Bb vented already, I can get down nicely in a chromatic pattern.

Okay fine, maybe I don’t hate the Ormiston. I won’t even sell it. Shup, you.

The Trevor Wye books

Working my way slowly through the first one, and already I’m using the long C that I always considered a useless key. Turns out it’s not a bad thing to have when you aren’t arranging your own stuff or transposing other people’s stuff into DM or GM.

I think it just helps in general to be forced to do things that you aren’t arranging for your own comfort on a new instrument. I learn so much on the piano from arranging, but it’s as if my head gets allergic to OPD when I do that, and here I seem to be doing better with a little by-the-book stuff. Although I never did get lessons in the flute and never will. I learned that lesson on the harp; I just don’t want a teacher, even if she was the nicest person in the world (which she was).

But so far I’m enjoying this Trevor Wye stuff. I think my breathing will be better from doing it, not to mention my keywork.

And so I managed to do something to those foot keys on that g/d Ormiston — taking them apart, doing WTF knows what — and now they are behaving. Like Cesare did to Tolomeo, this thing will ruin my peace of mind. Empio, Sleale, Indegno — one of those is its name. The next thing that has to be dealt with on this thing is the long C and possibly the G#, the touches for both of which must be made longer.

Meh on the Ormiston. :-(

Yeah, I just don’t care for it. The Copley is my jam. When I finally get a C foot on it, I can’t imagine even wanting another flute. I learned my lesson.

And now the C key is sticking! No matter what I do — daub the pad, oil the joints, remove the keys and retension the spring. A $4,300 waste is what this thing is. 😦 The whole thing is enraging. This fucking flute is built like a goddamned truculent caber for men only, and like most overly large male things, it doesn’t even work right.

I’m sure that someone else would love this thing, but all I see when I look at it, and I can’t seem to stop lately, is a huge outlay of wasted money that I should have shoveled at Dave Copley, had I had the sense to suggest to him that he 3d-print the foot keys for left-handed flutes. He was probably considering it already.

Although I did talk to him before, and he was fairly certain that he would never be able to make a left-handed C foot. “Never” was apparently within about a year. So I guess I did figure I had no option but to shovel a shitload of money at someone else whose flutes were completely unsuited for me.

I just can’t forgive myself for that waste of cash. I cannot wait until this stupid pandemic is over and I can put this thing onto eBay. Someone somewhere will love it.

Feeling better on my Ormiston

The Copley is still more comfortable and I can’t promise that I won’t decamp back to it when I get a C foot on it because I just love it that much, but the Ormiston is gradually becoming more comfortable for me.

I also need to start doing more long tones to control by breath. I think I use vibrato to disguise crappy airstream uniformity.

Mooshing the keypads on the grasshopper keys

It just occurred to me that the other keys are standing closed, so their pads would have “molded” to the vent holes by now which is why they seal better. The articulated keys are standing open, so they wouldn’t do that naturally. And sure enough, they are leaky as hell.

So I’ve been (gently and repeatedly) mooshing them closed against their respective tone holes — and the C# and even the low C are now standing out, although the low C is still a bit mushy. I think I just have to keep mooshing those keys a bit to soften the pads up and sort of break them in. If that will do it, I’ll be a happy tooter. I’ll still get a C foot on my Copley, but I’ll be happier about the Ormiston, that’s for sure.

ETA: The low C is improving with every key-moosh. I’m extremely happy about this.

Yeah, so I’m fighting with it again.

I think the trick is not to pick up the Copley right before I pick this up, then get pissed because it’s not the same flute. I’m actually playing “Cara speme” on it, and I’ll stay on this flute for a while. It’s still in its playing-in phase, so I can’t do too much for too long, but I’ll try to get it to work.

The tone holes are different enough from the Copley that it’s a real struggle, though.

I even just pulled out my Boehm and could hit the low C on it handily. The Ormiston definitely has shitty articulated key regulation. Not impressed with that at all. I will continue to look forward to getting a full C foot on my Copley, flat open C# notwithstanding.

So apparently now, I don’t want to get rid of my Viento, either. It may well be that the only things I want to get rid of are the M&E, the Tipple, the Aulos Stanesby, and the ocarina. (Aside, why are there so many ways to play a Bb on this stupid thing?)