On Hitting the Top Notes on the Piccolo

In response to a post on Flute Forum where the OP wanted some tips on hitting high B♭ and other notes higher than high G for a show next week:

Well, next week can mean anything from three to seven days. Your window to get successful is very small. Just want to ground you a little before helping.

To start with, is your piccolo's headjoint pulled out very far? If yes, you may want to consider pushing it back in more and adjust how you are covering the embouchure hole/blowing to play in tune. Reason: the sizes of the tone holes are way smaller than a flute, so that extra 3mm that you pull out does make a very big difference in comparison with the concert flute. The inner taper of the piccolo is very different from the concert flute, which makes this extra length a bigger problem than you might expect.

Next, assuming you have the headjoint at the right place, start with a high G and see how you are playing it. Are your lips feeling tight? Are your cheeks squished? You need a smaller embouchure, yes, but your lips shouldn't be strained that badly -- you should open up your mouth cavity more. Higher notes does not mean ever shrinking embouchures -- it does mean faster moving air, which can be done without squeezing the lips tighter and tighter.

By the time you reach this paragraph, the only other thing to try is look for a website for piccolo fingering charts, and try the alternate fingerings for the notes that you need above that high G. Again due to the tapering, tone hole sizes, and a myriad of other things, high A, B♭, B, and C may respond better to some fingering patterns than others, and this includes even the "standard" flute fingerings. Try them all out and note which ones are firstly more responsive, then in tune -- I'm assuming that it is more important for your playing to "hit" the high notes as a transient than to do anything particularly harmonic up there.

Oh, have plenty of rest in between to relax those lip muscles, and good luck!

That first point was a personal revelation when I was messing with the GUO Grenaditte piccolo---for a long time, the high B was not sounding at all, before I finally realised that I had pulled the headjoint out for just a tad too much at around 3 mm. Once I did not bother pulling out the headjoint and just adjust the way I blow to keep things in tune, the high B miraculously showed up, clean and beautiful.

That's it for now. Till the next update.

Lust?

A little unbelievable that it was barely a week since I last wrote something here. Time truly and surely does fly.

Today's Good Friday (or yesterday, if this entry takes longer than an hour to put together). It is the day that we remember our saviour who was crucified in lieu of us for our sins, to make good our relationship with God the Father.

It is also the day that I completed reading The Pearl, a nineteen volume old timey smut extravaganza.

``MT! Why do you admit such things out loud! Aren't you ashamed?''

What's there to be ashamed? There is a difference between reading something versus acting on something---only a fool/immature person cannot examine an opposing viewpoint/different idea regardless of their level of agreement. And I tell you, the thought that reading erotica somehow makes one more susceptible to wanting to fall into the featured debauchery is, in my case at least, largely illusionary.

If anything, I get even more turned off by the whole idea of sexual intercourse than anything else---the acts of lust as depicted in The Pearl are as immoral as one might imagine, and are generally distasteful with twenty-first century moral and ethical understanding.

The smut, it debases all the people involved, both male and female, into mindless sex addicts that are worse than animals. Super-saturating myself with this hunk of smut just enhances my overall understanding of myself that ``lust'' really isn't something that I'm into.

Again, I'm no morally upstanding individual---I too have my sins that I need to repent. But my negative reaction to lust solidifies my realisation that I need to rationalise the act of sexual intercourse to actually have some interest in it; there seems to be something missing in the way my mind is put together with respect to basic human nature.

I mean, I can sort of see how many people can have lustful thoughts ``by instinct'', but for me, I seem to need to actively will myself to do so. Don't know why, and as far as everything is concerned, don't really care since being un-lustful by nature seems to be the kind of trait that society seems to love.

🤷‍♂️

I could have stopped reading The Pearl after the first volume, but truth be told, I'm kind of running low in the number of named items in my read list, and The Pearl contributes a nice 200+ such named items.

I'm just glad that I'm done with the smut. The anonymous writers weren't particularly imaginative fellows, and there was only that many times of seeing the word ``gamahuche'' before it gets exceedingly boring---no wonder Sade wrote what he wrote, though Sade did write his infamous work before 1800s but was only published in the 1900s.

Anyway, that's about it for now. Programmed reading will go back to some non-fiction soon enough---I still have 500+ chapters of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine to go, among other things.

Till the next update.

Stella [Nagahara]

It has been a while since the last entry. Things are progressing well enough in life, and I thank the Lord for that. That said though, with this month (and thus the second quarter) finally starting, the road ahead is likely to see even more things that are happening that will strain and stress every fabric of my being.

But first, for something happy. After thinking and saving for nearly eight years, I finally got ahold of a Nagahara MINI in African blackwood, with the basic M1 headjoint.

I call her ``Stella [Nagahara]'', named after Stella Chang, better known as 张清芳, a Taiwanese songstress active in the 1980s/1990s who is well-known for her clear vocals and ability to hit the high notes. She is contemporaneous with Teresa Teng, but I decided to name my new MINI after her instead of Teresa because I find that Stella uses high notes more frequently than Teresa does, and that they always sound so clear.

That's what my MINI's timbre is like.

I will just copy wholesale what I had written in my email correspondence with Nagahara Flutes:

In terms of first impressions for the sound, it sits between the conical bore set up of a regular piccolo, and the cylindrical bore set up of the all-metal ``marching'' piccolo. For the repertoire I play (more relating to the Chinese orchestra than regular piccolo/flute music), it is of the right timbre. The added range on the low side definitely helps, though I definitely need to get used to the different resistance needed for the high notes -- almost all my flutes (used generally here to include the piccolo and dizi) vent out much earlier than the extended tube. General responsiveness across the three main registers are quite high, and the mechanisms were nimble enough to make me forget that I was playing a keyed flute as opposed to the simple one often found in the dizi (my primary instrument).

After taking Stella into rehearsal on Saturday, I have a bit more to add: she can really go high without sounding shrill, hitting concert C8 and C♯8 quite nicely, and not displaying any of the usual problems of intonation for piccolo with respect to the concert B7 note.

I would say that Master Kanichi Nagahara has achieved his exact aim of making a miniature flute with the MINI, as opposed to ``just'' a piccolo with extensions for concert C♯5, C5, and B4. The resistance (used here as a catch-all for amount of effort required to change the embouchure + air stream to sound a note at mf) is very consistent, similar to that of my S.O.S., which shares a similar geometry as it is an Armstrong 204 that has a cylindrical body bore. It is actually easier to play on Stella than the equivalent G 梆笛 for the same set of high notes, but this is hardly new since almost all piccolos play easier for the high notes once one goes beyond concert C6.

``But MT, why did you suddenly decide to pull the trigger and buy now? I thought you were `scouting around to learn more on getting a better piccolo'. What changed?''

It's hard to really say what was the big trigger. Part of it was definitely about the recollection of a statement that Sean made some time back about how Kanichi isn't exactly getting any younger, and my realisation that throughout these eight years, there was still only Nagahara Flutes that made an instrument just like the MINI. My shopping list did posit the option of either the MINI or the Braun ``small flute''. I had tried the Braun small flute and liked it, but it went down to concert C4 only. It's subtle, but if I really wanted a viable option to cover the 梆笛 range comfortably, it had to go do the concert B4 (this is the lowest note of the lowest dizi that ``counts'' as a 梆笛---the E 梆笛).

And thank the Lord for that quick thought of just pulling the trigger---I initiated the email conversation near the end of February 2023, and managed to commit to an order before the most recent price revision that saw an increase in prices across the board.

That said, I should really remove all the other piccolo options now that I have my End Piccolo, but I'll just leave them there for now as a record of high-end piccolo makers/marks.

------

With the something happy said, we'll progress to something a bit more serious. After two plus years of following Christ, and a year and change after baptism, it's finally time to actually serve instead of just being served. I don't have the kind of easy-friendliness that many long-time Christians have (I wonder if I still have trauma that I haven't sorted out, or if I'm just not good enough yet), and therefore can serve only in capacities that deal with people but in an abstract way. I have indicated interest in serving the music ministry at church, and will be going for a simple audition and a chat with the deacon in charge soon. I did send the music ministry folks my battered-ass performance resume---I'm no professional by any measure, and much of my experience comes from the Chinese orchestra tradition at an amateur level.

If God is willing, I will pass the audition and serve as a musician in the music ministry. That's the least that I can do to contribute back to the church community, seeing that I'm not good/willing to work with children, not friendly enough to be part of the greeters' ministry, and not street-wise/savvy enough to support any of the many professional skills-related ministries (why would the church want a computer scientist who has machine learning background serve using the aforementioned ``professional skill''?).

I could write more, but I suppose some 900+ words are sufficient for now. Till the next update then.