Two nice reels I recently picked up from Kevin Crawford’s “D Flute Album”. The flute is pitched in G and is fashioned from a single piece of bamboo - possibly the simplest melody instrument imaginable. It was made by the legendary Pat Olwell and is a joy to play.
This post is not about Irish Trad, but rather about another one of my obsessions: electronic home projects. They’re really not very different. Anyway, after a temporary art installation in my front yard, I was left with a bunch of bright white LEDs and I started to think how I could put them to some good use. So I started reading up on LEDs, and armed with a soldering iron, scraps of gooseneck wire tubing, a 17V power brick from an expired laptop and some plexiglass I came up with the following contraption:
Cozy, isn’t it? The LEDs are arranged in 6 parallel strands of 4 LEDs in series, which can be seen on the following pic. There is a copper wire that runs across the leads in the front (+) and in the back (-), which means that all strands share the same source.
The first design was rather naive. I figured that since I have 4 LEDs in series and each needs 3.7V at 20mA (that’s what the label said), I could simply let the LEDs have 4 x 3.7V = 14.8V and insert a resistor that would take up the remaining 2.2V from the power supply. When I hooked it all up I had the fortune of doing so via a current meter. While I got a really bright light, the current that was flowing was about twice what I expected and the whole affair got hot pretty quickly. Not the way to go. Reading into the matter a little bit, I learned is that LEDs are very fussy about current, whereas the voltage taken up by them can vary considerably, each LED exhibiting its own individual value. Exceed the rated voltage by a fraction, and the current shoots up really fast. After all, these are not linear devices! This meant that I had to learn how to build a current regulator that would feed a constant 120mA into the LED array. The schematic I came up with looks something like this:
As it turns out, the resistor values are not trivial to calculate, so I concocted a little spreadsheet for future projects. Knowing how easily the calculated currents can be off in reality, I substituted one of the resistors with a potentiometer so I could fine-tune the current with the multimeter. In real life, the above circuit looks like this:
Hey, I didn’t say it was pretty! I wrapped the transistor in some aluminum foil for a heat sink. The LEDs get plenty hot too, but apparently that’s what they do, even under normal conditions. Note that running the LED strands in parallel makes the design prone to “current hogging”. To do this right, one would have to either balance out the strands by matching each LED empirically, or by using an LED controller that regulates each strand individually. Maybe next time!
Just discovered Michael Clarkson’s blog. He has recorded many tunes on flute for the purpose of learning, playing each once through slowly, and then once at tempo. He’s a terrific player too, so here’s your chance to learn and absorb.
Fear not! Here is a great series of videos by a fellow whistling theologian. Enjoy!
Had another nice and long-overdue lesson yesterday. I desperately need to work on repertoire, so I brought recordings from my session and had my teacher id most of them. Worked on The Wise Maid, The Abbey Reel and The Duke of Leinster. Have to find a better balance between “smothness” and “pulse”, both of which are desirable qualities in Irish flooting, but somewhat paradoxical.
Another set of tunes with my boys. Starting off with two jigs, “Jerry’s Beaver Hat” and “Tripping Up The Stairs”. Then changing tempo and finishing off with the reel “Soldier’s Joy” (which you’ll recognize from the earlier clip - we’re working with pretty limited repertoire here) 
Monday night I had the fortune of attending a private flute workshop with none other than my personal flute/whistle hero, Lunasa’s Kevin Crawford. Despite his profile, and despite a myriad of more exciting things he could have done on a free evening in a packed gigging schedule, he took the time to sit down with nine intermediate players. He’s a most unassuming, down-to-earth guy, giving individual attention to folks, letting anyone who cared (or dared) to have a honk on his flute, sharing stories of struggles with injury, etc. The evening wasn’t at all about his chops which are out of reach for most of us anyway, but about the love for the music and the practice of appropriating and interpreting traditional tunes.
Initially, he had sent us a list of four tunes that he would cover, but on the spot he decided to test our ability to learn two more obscure (but nice!) tunes by ear. The emphasis was on understanding the structure of the tunes, in order to feel and bring out their “pulse”. They also provided ample opportunity to go over aspects of articulation and (restraint from) ornamentation.
Here are two tips I picked up that I intend to incorporate into my practice:
Once I get the tunes down a little better, I will post a clip.
The following is a response I wrote to someone who saw my playing on YouTube and wanted to know about the flute I’m playing. I thought I’d share it:
Hey Mark,
thanks for your kind words. I’ve only upgraded from plastic last November. My current flute is a blackwood Rudall made in 2001 by Michael Grinter. I only mention the year because Michael has updated his design since. Grinter is certainly one of the premier makers of fine Irish flutes, and some of the best (such as Kevin Crawford and Michael McGoldrick) play his tooters. However, I’m finding out that it is certainly not an “easy” flute to play and I have a long way to go growing into it. There’s a lot more “tone” locked up in there that I haven’t gotten to.
Some peeps make a big deal out of the Pratten vs. Rudall question. My plastic flute supposedly was a Pratten, and I couldn’t for the life of me find an appreciable difference (hole size/spacing, volume, amount of air). That may well have to do with my relative inexperience, but it means that until I get a lot better, it doesn’t really matter yet. The nice thing is that good flutes preserve their value well, or even appreciate over time. That means that if you can afford a good quality instrument (in the range of $800-1400), if you take good care of it and if you can wait for an honest buyer, you can always move to a different one at a minimal loss.
Good flutes usually don’t show up on eBay. I would suggest you hang around the flute section on http://chiffboard.mati.ca. Lots of good players and a few makers (Terry McGee, Tony Dixon, Doug Tipple, Casey Burns) hang around on these discussion boards. People also advertise instruments for sale. That’s how I got mine. Patrick “Doc” Jones is also a regular. He runs http://irishflutestore.com and is a super-duper nice and honest guy to deal with. He sent me a $1400 flute to try out, sight unseen, and insisted in covering his end of the shipping costs even though I didn’t buy the flute. His commitment and service to the flute playing community is amazing. He will talk straight to you and not try to take advantage of you. He might even be interested in your Dixon as a trade-in.
Remember that if you think that your playing sucks, it’s tempting to think that the flute is at fault. However, that’s almost never the case (I’m not talking about those Pakistani and Indian flutes on eBay which are truly atrocious). Every flute has its quirks, and it’s your job to learn to live with them. There are many weak players with amazing flutes while a good player can make even a mediocre instrument sing. So much for the philosophy. I wish you good luck, satisfaction and perseverance with your passion.
– whistlinginthedark
This is a plug for Alan Ng’s excellent tune database, IrishTune.info. Don’t go there for sheet music or MP3s. Rather, the aim is to identify variations of a tune and give a detailed bibliography - which albums and tunebooks it’s in.
