The Hamilton Flute Workshop

In 1979 I set up the first workshop in Ireland devoted to making simple system flutes suitable for Irish traditional music. At that time all traditional players used old instruments made mainly in England and Germany in the 19th century, and I began by making copies of the finest of these. However I soon began to realise that I was copying the drawbacks as well as the advantages and set about modifying the design to produce a flute that was more suited to traditional music.

The two main problems were pitch and tuning. These are related, in that if the tuning slide of any flute is pulled more than about half an inch beyond its standard position the internal tuning of the flute, i.e. the relationship between the notes of the scale, begins to suffer. Tuning, in this sense,depends on the size of the finger holes and their position.

In fact, the positions of the finger holes on simple system flutes has more to do with the size and shape of human hands, rather than acoustics. The holes are basically placed where the fingers can comfortably reach them, and any " unacoustical" position is compensated for by changing the size of the holes. If you look at any simple system flute you will see that the holes vary from about 6 millimetres to almost 12 millimetres. Given this restriction, and the requirement for the flute to play over a range of three octaves, the old makers and players developed a system of fingering which used the keys to help compensate for any discrepancies in the internal tuning caused by all these factors.

To simplify: trying to play the scales used in Irish traditional music using traditional fingering on an old flute, will result in an out of tune scale. Over the years, traditional players have overcome this problem by "lipping" or blowing the notes into tune, a difficult technique which relatively few mastered.

I have introduced two basic design modifications to take these matters into account.

  1. The flutes are built to play in modern concert pitch, not simply by pulling out the tuning slide, but by a complete resizing of theinstrument.
  2. The size and position of the finger holes has been adjusted so that normal traditional fingering will give an in-tune scale.