Days before the lockdown, I received a text photo from my friend of an ALDI catalogue, selling flutes for $100.

Expensive vs cheap flute!

"Look at this!", she said! "Can you believe it?!"

My first reaction (of course) was "Oooh I want to try that flute and see how bad it is!"

So... off I went off to ALDI and bought a mass-produced flute for $150 Australian Dollars (which is about $100 USD).

I unwrapped the layers and layers (and layers) of packaging at home, and started to play...

But! Today's video is not about me laughing at the cheap flute!

> It's actually to show you how surprisingly good it sounds, and why...

Watch the comparison above.

Do cheap flutes work ok?

I have just unpacked this cheap as chips, Aldi flute. It was the equivalent of about a hundred US dollars and it actually sounds pretty good. So I'm going to compare it. The sound you get to hear this between a hundred dollars flute and the $10,000 flute. That's my one.

My name is Jane. If you don't know, I have a flute school online and I love showing people tiny little changes to their playing that make a huge difference to the sound and how quickly they can play, how well they can play, how well they can express themselves because they can play well.

Do expensive flutes sound better?

All right, here's the $10,000 flute. If you're curious, it's a Muramatsu with a Williams head joint but that's not the point. Let me just play a scale, something so that you can hear how this sounds. All right. Now let's do the same thing on this Aldi flute.

It's actually pretty good. I am surprised at how good this is it. Mechanically it totally works. The purpose of this video is not to tell you whether you should buy it or not. And it's not to tell you how much you should spend on a flute. And it's not to tell you what brand of flute you should buy.

It is this, did you notice that rubbish flute, professional flute sounded kind of similar? I know you could hear some differences. I would say they sounded surprisingly similar.

Do cheap flutes sound good?

And the reason for that is 95% of what you just heard on each flute then was me the player. So if you're going to invest time, effort, money, invest it in yourself, invest it in your skills as a flute player, get your skills better because if it's the flute that makes the player, how could I sound so similar on both flutes? 

A $100 flute

This a hundred dollars flute works really well straight out of the box. I suspect that it’s not really going to last more than a year or two, just mechanically. It's going to get a little bit outta whack, I suspect.

This $10,000 flute will take you all the way through to being a professional. You'll be able to get resonance. You'll be able to get speed on your fingers, clarity of playing in control of your playing so much more than you could on this. But how much of that difference did you just hear then?

Not a lot, right?

So most of what you hear, whether it's an expensive flute or a cheap flute, is the way the person plays. The best way for you to invest some time and effort into getting better at your flute playing is to check whether your embouchure is actually really correct.

Mini-course to instantly improve your flute tone

Come and do this free mini-course www.flute.school/free. It's called how to instantly improve your tone on the flute.

And the way I show you how to do that is by checking whether your embouchure is actually correct. It's your embouchure that produces the tone, a good tone on the flute. Of course, it is the flute as well, but again, how much difference did you hear between those two? It was marginal, right?

I made this free mini-course because it's so straightforward to instantly improve your tone on the flute. When you know how, it's just so obvious and I really want you to know that, which is why it's free and which is why I made it.

How to get a clear tone on a cheap flute

So come and join me at www.flute.school/free. And let me show you over three days in this, mini-course how to adjust your embouchure so that you get a much, much clearer, stronger sound on the flute. I'd love to see you there. Bye.