Category: fourth octave

  • What is your Superpower?

    Having a kid and playing modern board games where it is teamwork against the forces of chance or evil (not everyone for him/herself like in my day), it is easy to fall into this kind of thinking. Because these days, everyone is special, right? No one is supposed to get left behind. Everybody has their…

  • (Bore) Size Matters

    Several times this year I have had other flutists asking me about my bass flute and whether I was able to play easily in the upper 3rd and into the 4th octave. My Kingma bass flute has a mid-size bore (sorry, don’t know the exact specs) and is able to play up to high C…

  • The True Range of the C Flute

    Back in the USSR, when information was really suppressed, many people were hungry for the truth. Now governments hide the truth from us under a deluge of information. I think composers suffer from this deluge, but it is not a government conspiracy. The true range of the concert C flute is a matter of public…

  • The Highest Peaks: Tips for the Third and Fourth Octaves on Flute

    A lot of these tips can be applied to high-register piccolo playing as well. Twentieth Century pioneers in the realms of composition and performance have set the standard for us in terms of how high we are expected to play. For better or worse, we need to have fluency at least up to high D…