Handmade Flutes

Usually open hole, B foot, made entirely of precious metals

Handmade flute is a common name for a carefully made flute with attention to every possible detail, otherwise all flutes are made by hand. Using other limbs is not recommended, and robots are still not involved although some have entertained the idea. Shaping precious metals from scratch is pretty much the thing of the past, so the truly handmade process that used to be the case is the thing of the past. Nowadays virtually all tubings come from tubing factories, they are seamless and superior to what you can do by hand. Also, why go through the trouble of making the tube yourself if you can buy a ready made perfect one? Other parts are forged, milled by CNC machines, and casted. Holes on the body are drilled by CNC lathe or the old fashion drills. Toneholes are pulled (drawn) and then rolled using machines as well. Doing it all by hand would take weeks and it wouldn't look nearly as good.

So much about the myth of a handmade flute. Now let's examine the real difference between handmade, intermediate, and beginner flute. First of all, the quality depends on the flutemaker's knowledge and skills, as much as the patience and willingness to spend time on the instrument. In that respect the three categories of flutes really correspond to the three categories of flutemakers, the really awesome ones, the quite good ones, and the good enough ones. There are also categories below these three, but you don't want to buy a flute made by those, so we won't discuss that.

Price range of a silver handmade flute is usually anything over $10,000. All gold, don't expect to pay anything less than $30,000, and it's usually a lot more.

Instead of adjustment screws, the handmade flute adjustments would be kind of fixed, and only done by inserting some material in-between the key arms and lugs, which is usually done by an expert flute technician. That's considered superior to adjustment screws which cannot achieve such precision, and being screws you can be quite certain that they will get loose and move at some point, hopefully not too soon.

High end flutes are normally sold by flute dealers, rather than general music stores.

The pads are usually high grade, either made by the same company that makes the flute, or made by pad companies like Pisoni, Straubinger, or others. They are generally "harder", meaning that they don't compress as much as the traditional felt pads, and instead they are carefully seated using fine shims, either paper or mylar (plastic). I'd like to add my own invention to this list, a magnetic pad which makes it possible for the pad to be flexible while adhering to a flat stabilizer, something that was not possible with other kinds of pads. The surface of the pad remains perfectly flat and uniform as there is no screw and washer which inevitably distort the pad. More about my magnetic pad at matijaflutes.com