Her tone was so much better, that I was hoping she'd take the hint and upgrade her own flute - the improvement was night and day. To hear someone do it justice, I once loaned it to a friend who could really "rip" on flute in her jazz band. But as far as the acoustic sound of the thing is concerned, it sounded/sounds way better than the Gemeinhardt, Armstrong, and Bundy flutes that my friends and family have owned. Was the upgrade to a semi-pro flute worth it? Not to me in those days - a Bundy run through a 70's PA head would have sounded about the same.
It still tarnishes, but less than as some of the silver-plated nickel silver flutes our family has owned. The head and tube on my semi-pro flute was made out of coin-silver, which is is a step down (about the same as Mercury head dimes). (A few have been made out of brass that has been silverplated.) Many of the best flutes have heads and tubes made out of sterling silver. Most of them are plated with silver, though, which is why they tarnish. Student flutes are usually made of "Nickel Silver," also called "German Silver," an alloy that actually has no silver. That said, since that band broke up, 99% of the time that flute has been played, the pickup was not attached. It also could be run through devices like my old tape-based echoplex, which gave a really trippy effect and made me sound much more impressive than I really was. But it could be amplified without having to wave at the PA guy to get his attention. And the pickup picked up almost as much handling noise and key/pad noise as it did flute sound. The truth is that the sound coming through the pickup did not do the flute justice - it had limited and uneven frequency response, like piezoelectric pickups on acoustic guitars. Much better than I did when I installed the brass-colored mount that came with it onto my Signet tenor saxophone because I was having the same problem getting my sax into the PA in another setting later. There wasn't a preamp, but at least I could crank up the input on my amp, and crank the volume down on the belt pack until I needed it cranked up.įlute pickups today are a lot less intrusive, but the store's repair guy did a very nice job of installing the mount. There was also a little belt-mounted volume control. There was a snap-in piece to cover the hole when I wasn't using the pickup. It would snap into a special mount that was drilled and soldered into the headpiece. The pickup was built like a transistor radio earpiece in reverse. So I took the flute back to the same store (hey, we didn't have many choices in those days) and got a pickup for it. Oh, that's right - he had a built-in pickup that allowed him to move all over the stage. The guy in Jethro Tull didn't seem to have a microphone problem. But at the time, I was still naive enough to think that sounding as good as I could was more important than having, say, really good hair. In retrospect, the drunks in the clubs or the teenagers shuffling around in the high school dances probably didn't worry about that sort of thing nearly as much as I did. Imagine "Colour My World" without the flute solo in the third verse. Sadly, I wasn't good enough on flute to be really loud, and the PA guy never noticed I was playing flute in time to turn me up before the solo was over. We only had so many microphones, so I needed to play it through the same mike I sang and played my sax through. I learned to play the flute, and used it in the band, but it was hard to get the sound into the PA. But now that I have it, I'm not likely to let it go except to family members. Like at least one other woodwind I have owned, it deserved a better owner/player. So, unbeknownst to me, my folks went to the big music store in town, where they let the guy talk them out of a used or student-line flute into a semi-professional flute. But there weren't as many outlets as there are today, and my folks would have been paranoid that they were being "taken" (something my dad specialized in, by the way). The band I was in was getting better gigs all the time, and we were trying to broaden our repertoire, so a flute seemed like a good investment to me.Īt the time, we could probably have got a used flute in playable condition for $35. A number of rock bands were using the flute, including Chicago, BS&T, Jethro Tull and a local band with a national hit - Green Lyte Sunday. When my parents asked what I wanted for Christmas, I said, a used flute, so I could double like the sax player in Chicago. In late 1971, I was playing saxophone in a rock band that played a lot of Chicago. Horns in my Life: 1971 Selmer Signet Flute
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