| Keyed or Keyless? |  |
The keyless flute is really a development made in Ireland in the late 1970s in response to the demand for flutes. The old flutes, built as orchestral instruments, had eight keys to make them fully chromatic. The traditional player fingered the flute mostly like a tin whistle, ignoring the keys. In fact, many of the older players simply blocked the keys so that effectively they were playing on keyless flutes. The fact that all the old flutes had keys, but were essentially played as keyless instruments has caused a lot of confusion in the mind of the beginner. It is useful to make a comparison between the tin whistle and the flute. The flute as played in Irish traditional music, is fingered in exactly the same way as the whistle and so for the vast majority of tunes, the keyless flute player is no more or less restricted than the whistle player.
The question must then be asked.....if you can play almost everything
on a keyless flute, why bother with keys? The answer to this lies
in the fact that although traditional music is mostly in the keys
of D and G and their related minors, which use only the open holes
of the flute, many players find it useful to have one, two, or more
semitones at their disposal. Some tunes have an F natural, which
requires a key to play properly, and a G sharp key is very useful
for playing in A, which is becoming more common. To some extent, using
the keys is a matter of style, and some players make more use of
them than others. Most players will at some stage however, want to
have the facility of at least some keys.
Have a look at the catalogue to see some of the different types of keywork available.