First of all…

Get your mind out of the gutter!

I mean fingering charts. See, I just bought a flute for my trip to India; flutes are great because they’re compact, light, easy to carry around, and for me it’s a chance to practice an instrument I haven’t tried to play in a long time. I was never very good to begin with, but having started on a pawn shop flute with keys that didn’t seal even after repairs, one shouldn’t be surprised. 

However, this flute is a nice Japan-made Yamaha F-100SII. It was fully serviced before I bought it and significantly cheaper than a new flute, the equivalent of only a few hundred dollars. Its a C-foot, not a B-foot, but that’s fine… it’d be nice to have the B-foot, but everything my band plays is in C anyway, so I’ll just make do without one piddly little passing tone. When I tried it in the store, I was absolutely surprised at how easily I could make a sound on it. Maybe starting on a bad flute did lend me the advantage of feeling really good now whenever I manage to make any sound at all, especially in the lower register.

Anyway, I was starting to notice how limited my playing is: I know the fingerings for the first couple of octave (which are in fact pretty similar to saxophone fingerings); but beyond that I don’t know how to play past a high D (D4 I think), and I have never needed to. But if I am going to spend two months practicing this thing, I may as well learn the scales across three-and-a-half octaves instead of just two.

So, what was I thinking? I was thinking I’d better ask my sister to scan her old flute fingering chart for me and email it over. Because, like, I’m still sometimes living in the 1980s. I may have a blog all my own, and friends all over the planet, but… does it occur to me that I can very easily get more flute fingering charts than I can handle on the net if I only search for a few minutes?

No, it doesn’t… until… today. Now, there are a lot of charts out there put out by companies, like this flute fingering chart by Emerson. [The flute to the right was “borrowed” from that page, in fact.]

If you ever need flute fingering charts, this is the place to go: Tim Reichard’s The Woodwind Fingering Guide

There are flute fingering charts, and sax altissimo fingering charts. On the sax, altissimo is the range above the normal range. The range that really cool guys play in during the heat of their solos. The range I cannot play in yet. Because I am not that cool, yet. But when I come back from India, once I get my sax chops back up, if I spend a few months practicing, perhaps I can be that screeching cool type of saxman too. Unfortunately, most charts out there are for the alto sax (like this one)… which doesn’t make sense to me, as alto’s a higher instrument than the tenor, and because altissimo on tenor sounds so good. But… there’s a guy named Pete Amberg who’s got some tenor-sax specific altissimo charts online; I intend on checking out those, too, in my quest for increased saxophonic coolness.

By the way, one more good (Dutch, I think, but mainly written in English) page of sax resources can be found here, at Ernst Kühne’s Saxophones on the Internet.