Thanks to both Bilbo and Tonehole for very detailed and helpful responses!

Hi Travel,

No problem! Hope you get to try one ... I think I'm hooked


Bilbo - any chance you've got to hear a Beaudin? He's in the wrong side of the world for me to try, but his flutes aren't known over here.

The Palanca copies were all the rage, but even they don't sound very 'baroque' to my ears. They are nice too.

Yes - I've got the Louis Moyse Volume 1 & 2 edition. It's not printed anywhere as well as the violin transcriptions which extend the flute repertoire nicely. The anacrusis always bewildered me - I thought that these were there since violin players who play flute music (rather than the other way around) might want to play both notes at the same time on different strings :D

Thanks for the feedback about the maintenance issues on your traverso. I doubt I will ever get to see a Bigio traverso on sale (except for an astronomical amount). The blowing method of the baroque traverso is making much more sense to me than when I started the thread too.

Thanks for all your help

I've decided I will probably try for a German ex-factory baroque traverso first, and maybe stick at it for a year, before moving on. I can always borrow a plastic Aulos traverso in any case, just to keep up the embouchure skills. After that, then I might go for a grail traverso once I raise the funds.

Anyone want to buy a silver Boehm flute which isn't being used much :D

well, I bought a Stanesby copy by Aulos.

It's a very very sweet sounding flute. Bilbo's right - the air column is very different from Boehm playing and I've been overdoing it, making it very wispy and rustly in tone. Now it's better.

The problem I'm having, which I'm not sure if anyone can really help with, since it may be a design fault - is that the 3rd octave F/F sharp are very difficult to sound without overtones. The instructions indicate that these notes are difficult.

I didn't find this problem with more expensive traversos (ho hum..) and wonder if this is just a limitation of the Aulos Stanesby. Is it a limitation of all the Stanesby copies? The forked F in the first and second octaves are less problematic.