Online Flute

A tube, a jet of air and fifteen keys

A concert flute is a silver tube with fourteen tone holes along it and no reed: the sound is a jet of air from your lips, split on the far edge of the hole in the lip plate. Every note is a state of that tube — which holes the keys have closed — plus how fast the air is moving. The drawing on this page has every key a player uses: the seven main keys (left thumb, three fingers of each hand), the thumb’s B♭ lever, the G♯ key, the B♭ side lever, the two trill keys, and the E♭ key and foot-joint rollers under the right little finger — 15 in all on a C foot. Tap a note and it shows exactly which are down.

You can play it two ways. In Notes, tap the note you want and watch the fingering; the strip above the keys marks the three octaves. In Fingers + air, you play the flute itself: tap the keys on the drawing to press them, then blow on Low, Middle or High air. The note you hear is the one that fingering and that air really give — including fingerings no chart lists, which sound roughly where a real flute would put them and are marked as off the chart.

No register key: the air picks the octave

This is the thing that makes a flute a flute, and the reason the air is three buttons here rather than one. A clarinet has a register key and a saxophone an octave key. A flute has neither. Finger G and blow gently: G4. Keep the same fingers and blow faster: G5, an octave up. Faster again: D6. One fingering, three notes, and the only thing that moved was the air. The tube is open at both ends, so it resonates at every multiple of its lowest note, and the speed of the jet decides which one sounds.

So the second octave, E5 to C♯6, is the first octave’s fingerings on faster air — nothing new to learn but the lips. In Fingers + air, hold a fingering and slide your thumb from Low to Middle without lifting: that is an overblow, exactly as a flautist slurs up an octave. The one wrinkle is at the bottom: D5 and E♭5 lift the first finger, whose small hole sits where it can act as a vent and help the octave speak.

Three rungs rather than a harmonic for every one, because that is how flautists think: low register, middle register, high register. Inside a register the fingering picks the exact note. The Harmonics switch shows what is underneath — it turns the three rungs into the raw series of whatever you finger. Finger low C and climb: C4, C5, G5, C6, E6, G6, all on one fingering, each in the tuning the physics gives it (the fifth one is 14 cents flat of the piano’s note).

Seven keys, eight notes

With nothing pressed the flute plays C♯5. Put down the left first finger and it drops to C; add the thumb for B; then the second and third fingers for A and G; then the right hand for F, E and D. Eight notes from C♯5 down to D4, each one the tube ending at the first hole left open. The right little finger holds the E♭ key down for nearly all of them: it is a vent that steadies the note, and it comes off only for D.

The notes in between come from the mechanism. Nine fingers work fourteen holes, so some keys close a hole that is not under them. Any finger of the right hand also closes the hole just above that hand, which is why F♯ is the third finger and not the first. The right first finger, the thumb’s B♭ lever and the side lever each close the B♭ hole, which is why there are three ways to play B♭. The G♯ key opens a hole instead of closing one. And the foot joint’s rollers take the tube down through C♯ to C4.

The awkward step is the first break, C♯5 to D5: the flute goes from nearly everything open to nearly everything closed — 7 keys change in one semitone — and the air has to speed up at the same moment. It happens again from C♯6 to D6. Try both in Fingers + air.

The third octave: vents and harmonics

From D6 to C7 the fingerings stop looking like a scale, and there is a reason. Each one is a low note’s fingering with a hole opened further up the tube. Up there the open hole does not end the tube; it vents it, and the note is a harmonic the long tube and the short one share. E6, for example, is the fourth harmonic of E4 with one finger lifted. Turn on Harmonics, finger E4 and blow the fourth rung: the same note, a little less steady, without the vent.

Flute fingering chart, C4 to C7

Every note of the flute’s three octaves on a C foot, at concert pitch — a flute does not transpose, so the note on the page is the note you hear. Dark is a key pressed, outlined is a key up. Read each diagram left to right as the flute lies in your hands: the thumb’s two levers under the left hand, then the left hand’s three keys and the G♯ key, then the right hand’s three with the side lever and the two trill keys above them, then the little finger’s E♭ key and the foot rollers. Under each one the same fingering is written out: the thumb, the left hand’s three keys, the right hand’s three, then any other key by name. The Air column says how fast to blow.

C foot and B foot

The chips above the drawing pick the foot joint. The C foot is the standard one and ends at C4. The B foot is longer, adds a third roller for the right little finger and reaches B3: T ●●● ●●● + low B. It also has the gizmo, a small key that closes the lowest hole alone, which the chart adds to the top C7 on a B-foot flute to steady it. Every other fingering is the same on both.

Blow into the microphone

In Fingers + air, switch on Mic breath and the air is your own. Hold the phone or the laptop’s microphone a hand’s width from your lips and blow across it, not straight into it: any breath sounds the flute, a stronger one climbs to Middle and a hard one to High, the way a real flute overblows. Your fingers stay on the keys. The page measures only how loud the low rumble of the breath is — nothing is recorded and nothing leaves your device — and it sets itself to the room in the first moment, so let it hear silence before you start. It is new, and microphones differ: if the registers are hard to hold on your device, use the three air buttons instead.

How to play it

Hold a note to blow it and let go to stop — a flute sounds only while air crosses it. Slide along the note keys without lifting to slur from note to note in one breath; the voice hears that the air never stopped and leaves the tongue out of the next note, which is what a slur is.

In Fingers + air, tap the keys on the drawing to press them; tap again to lift. Then hold Low, Middle or High. Each air button shows the note it will give under the fingers that are down now, so the three of them re-read themselves as you finger. Turn on Keep blowing to leave the air on while you finger — the easiest way to explore with one hand or a mouse. The caption under the drawing names every fingering as you make it, says when it is the chart’s, an alternate or something no chart lists, and tells you when you are one key away.

On a computer keyboard, in Notes, the letters run up a semitone at a time from Q, which is the D above middle C. In Fingers + air the keyboard becomes the flute’s two hands: F, D and S are the left hand’s keys, V the thumb and C its B♭ lever, A the G♯ key; J, K and L are the right hand’s, H the side lever, I and O the trill keys, and ; ' and / the little finger’s E♭, low C♯ and low C. The number keys blow: 1 Low, 2 Middle, 3 High, and Space blows whichever was last. Hold V, F, D, S and ; and press 1: that is G. Press 2 instead and it is the G an octave above. Every key on the drawing shows its letter.

Tone: normal, airy and flutter-tongue

The Tone menu plays the same flute three ways. Normal is the centred sound. Airy is a wider, slower stream of air — softer, darker and full of breath, the folk and jazz flute sound. Flutter-tongue is a rolled R against the air, which chops the note into a purr; composers write it as flz. Vibrato is on to start with, a moment after each note speaks, and on a flute it comes from the breath, so it moves the loudness as well as the pitch. Switch it off for a straight tone.

Songs to play

Press Play a song under the instrument and pick one. The flute plays all 36 public-domain songs here in G, F, B♭ and C, 35 in D. It opens in G, the key most flute methods start in, where the tunes sit across the first break — part on gentle air, part on faster — and C and D read them higher, into the third octave. Play plays a song for you and shows each fingering as it sounds, which is the fastest way to learn them. Practice waits on the next note and marks the keys it needs in gold, and it works in Fingers + air too: press the gold keys, lift any marked to come up, and blow on the gold air button. Play along closes a ring on each note in time with the music, and Record keeps a take you can play back and save.

What it sounds like, and why

A flute is breathy and a little reedy at the bottom, round in the middle and almost a pure tone at the top, and all three come from the same physics as the air buttons. The tube keeps every harmonic, but a jet of air is a far gentler driver than a reed, so the overtones thin out fast, and faster the higher the note — until, above the point where the open tone holes let them escape, there is little left but the fundamental. Under every note is the sound of the air that missed the hole. The voice here is built that way, from a jet on an open tube rather than a sample of one flute; the numbers in it are modelled, not measured.

More instruments you can play here

The online clarinet and the online saxophone are fingered on the same kind of drawing, with a register key and an octave key doing what the air does here; the online ocarina is the flute’s vessel-shaped cousin, which cannot overblow at all; and the online trumpet is the other instrument whose notes are a fingering and a breath. Got a real flute that sounds off? The flute tuner listens through your microphone and walks you through the head joint, the cork and the octaves.

Frequently asked questions