100 dollar flute?

[HC]

http://www.wwbw.com/BandNow-Student-Flute-i122434.music
apparently made by some company called band now? Any information? Does it play? Would love to give flute a try for 100 bucks.

[Gordon (NZ)]

There is a rash of flutes in USA made in India. This could be one.

You get what you pay for. It quite likely needs immediate repairs before it will play. Technicians will quite likely say it is just not worth working on. Such very cheap flutes recently turned out to be such a can of worms for Walmart that they stopped stocking them.

Quotes form John Ruskin (1819 - 1900):

"There is hardly anything in the world that a man can not make a little worse and sell a little cheaper. And people who consider price alone are this man's lawful prey."


"It is unwise to pay too much, but it is worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that is it. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - It can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better."

[Mike W]

Great Post Gordon NZ.

[bruce bailey]

Some of these cheap flutes actually have a pretty decent sound WHEN THEY ARE WORKING but the soft keywork and ill-fitting parts are impossible to keep in adjustment. A customer brought one of these to me and I adjusted the LH and by the time I finished with the RH, the LH was back out of adjustment. You are better off finding a Gemeinhardt, Emerson, Yamaha, etc. that is ugly but will play for $100.

[HC]

In general, is it trustworthy dealing with ebay? I managed to teach myself clarinet, but I found that I'm exceeding Bass and Contra clarinets, but still squeaky on Bb. How hard is it to learn flute?

[Gordon (NZ)]

How hard is it to learn the flute?
The threads "Similar Fingerings" and "Dear Gordon" , and others before them may help answer this.

It depends what you mean by 'play'. To play the music typically encountered by 'doublers' in shows, to a good standard, one would have to have spent FAR longer working on learning flute than learning sax.

Many flute players can pick up a sax a play it over its most common range of 2 1/2 octaves reasonably well, with pleasing tone, within a few hours. The same cannot be said of sax players going to flute. I think it is fair to say that by comparison it is quite a challenge.

Ebay purchase of instruments is very high risk unless you know a LOT about the instruments you are targeting. You cannot really afford to go Ebay unless you can afford to throw that money away.

Consider that when a person wants to dispose of an instrument which is no longer (or never was!) worth getting to a good going condition, Ebay is the obvious way to go. The buyer then becomes the 'legitimate prey'!

[Whatasaxman]

Just a note. I charge 175 for a flute rebuild. Most of the low ost flutes I have sen in my shop had so much "flex" in the keys, there was no way the could seal consistantly.
Just my $.02
rick

[HC]

So bottom line: you get what you pay for. When buying that flute, your essentially throwing that money down the drain. Where and how much would I expect for a used studnet flute that plays. No preference, AS LONG AS IT PLAYS. I remember the days trying to learn Contra Alto and the high G sound stuffy and anything above that wouldn't play. Turned out to be a faulty register key mechanism. Gordon, can you please email me a copy of that handbook that you I've heard so fondly of? My e-mail is howard11528(at)yahoo(dot)com
Would clarinet experience help? Evidently saxophone experience doesn't really.

[Kareeser]

Take a look at the comments on the Band Now flutes.

There is one there that doesn't even talk about the flute... I found that amusing.

[Gordon (NZ)]

IMHO

Clarinet playing helps a flute beginner rather little, apart from raw basics like reading music and finger dexterity.

However there are definitely cross-over insights and benefits from instrument to instrument for the serious doubler. They involve more subtle issues like blending with others, attack of notes, awareness that individual notes need individual specialised attention at times (especially when slurs involve notes that are harmonically related), consciousness of pitch change with volume and how to compensate, effects of air temperature on tuning, etc.