Chords on the Flute (multiphonics)

Can be played only softly. In the octave above middle C:

C# and E: Thumb, second and third fingers on left hand; on the right hand, use your F finger to put the F down and your D finger to put the E down. Then use the E finger to press the first trill key.

D and F: Finger F while pressing both trill keys.

C and the D an octave above: Finger the third D and underblow it.

Other: By playing a low note (middle C, C# or D is best) and overblowing to get the harmonics, you can sometimes get two or more harmonics to sound simultaneously, hence getting intervals of an octave, fifth, fourth, and third.

You may have to experiment with breath pressure in each case. (There are other multiphonics, but they don’t all work on all flutes.)

High notes

The “official” highest note of a standard flute is the C 3 octaves above middle C (called “4th octave C” if counting from where the flute starts, “7th octave C” on the piano), but I sometimes get asked how to finger notes above it (e.g. when CUCOS played arrangements that seemed determined to push the flutes too high). Here is a quick reference, although I do not recommend these notes as they can be noisy.

Note - Left hand - Right hand

C#: - A, G# - F

D: - thumb, G - F, E, C

D#: - All down to Eb (i.e. thumb, B, A, G, G#, F, E, D, Eb)

E: - B, A, G - tr1, E

F: - A - tr1, E - difficult

F#: - thumb, B, G - F, D, Eb+C (use little finger for both) - more difficult

G: - thumb, A, G, G# - E, tr2 - even more difficult (does not work on all flutes)

Alternative fingerings for fast passages can sometimes be found by simple experiment, but for the 3rd octave it’s useful to know that:

Overblowing 2nd octave fingerings usually works well enough for loud-and-fast orchestral passages, at least up to about A (maybe up to B on a good day)

For notes up to about G (sometimes higher) you might get a slightly better result by overblowing 1st octave at a 12th (i.e. count up a 4th and drop two octaves, e.g. low F for 3rd octave C, F# for C#, etc) but this is best worked out in advance.

Quiet 3rd-octave notes *are* possible (it’s an embouchure technique; try tightening the lip muscles a little more), but this works best below the A; after that it’s increasingly difficult to play softly without an unacceptable level of “hiss”. Leaky pads can make the things worse (have the mechanism adjusted if necessary).

Lilypond fingering diagrams

The GNU/Lilypond music typesetter can produce woodwind fingering diagrams (introduced in version 2.14). These can take up a *lot* of space between the staves, but if you need the above fingerings as diagrams in Lilypond, here’s some Lilypond code and the resulting PDF file.

Lilypond code

resulting PDF file

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