Hello, my name is Todd Porter, the founder of the music coach. And in this short video, I'm going to show you how to tune your flute. Now the flute is made up of three different sections. And the bottom piece is always going to be fit as snugly as it can against the middle section of the flute, where you can adjust the pitch on a flute is with the head joint how it fits into the body. In a very basic sense, to make the flute go sharper, we're going to shorten the length of the whole instrument by screwing the head joint as far in as possible. And to make it flatter we'll do the opposite which is to screw the head joint out.
And if you're not quite sure what's sharp and flat mean basically, when a notice sharp rate is too high in pitch and when a note is flat, it's going to be too low in pitch. And on the tuner you're going to see the when the note is too sharp it is going to the needles can be too far to the right and when it's too flat, it's going to be too far to the left. You're going to need a chromatic tuner, and there are two ways that you can get them. The easiest way is to go to the App Store, have a mobile phone or a tablet, and download either a free tuner or you can switch to play one or $2 to get a more advanced one. And these are, these are great and they often will have all the features that you're going to need.
If you live near music store, you can also get a physical tuner, which is like the one we're using in this video here. They all basically do the same thing. When you turn the tuner on. The first thing I want you to notice is somewhere it's going to say on the display for 40. And that number is really important because it's the calibration of the tuner. And they're all set to be the default is 440.
But the most tuners have the ability to change that. And for now, you're not really going to need to ever do that. But I just want you to be aware of it to make sure that number always says 440 If it doesn't, it's 438 to 445. I want you to use the calibration buttons to get it to be 440 and that way you're always going to be tuning to The standard tuning of North America and Europe. The next thing you want you to do is to warm up the instrument a little bit. If you just put the flute together and turn on the tuner and go, because the instruments cold, you won't get a very accurate reading.
So make sure to play for a minute or two, you can just play long tones or play whatever you want. Just make sure there's a lot of air that's gone through the instruments to warm up the metal. Once you're ready to actually use the tuner, you're going to make sure that it's on. And what I want you to do is to play a note that's in the middle of the instrument. So in this example, we're going to use a G. If you tune a really low note or a really high note, it's going to give you a less accurate reading of where the middle of the instrument is. Because no instruments are perfectly in tune on every single note.
So we're just going to kind of use the middle to get it as close as we can. Now when you play your note, I don't want you to look right at the tuner, play the note and get it established and then look at the tuner and that'll give you a sense of where it is because I don't want you to make adjustments. I want you to actually see whether the thing is in tune or not. Here we go. I'm gonna play a G So it's pretty well in tune, it's never gonna stay right on the needle the whole time. So don't worry about it if it's moving a little bit this way that way, but in this example I'm going to make the instrument flat I pulled the head joint out, and here's what sounds like.
I want to get closer to the middle so I'm gonna screw the head joint back in to make the instrument shorter. And there it is. Nothing I recommend is to note in another register so I'm going to tune the middle D can also hear how that sounding and there you have it, remember to head on over to your music coach comm for a free beginner flute lesson. Thanks for stopping by and I look forward to seeing you soon.