I remember seeing a guy busking at a local farmer's market with a baritone recorder and it was one of the most haunting and beautiful sounds I've ever heard. Any instrument can sound good in skilled hands.
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
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The recorder is like the guitar: just because generations of talentless kids inflicted them on their parents doesn't mean they're bad instruments incapable of producing good music. It's just that most people have also heard good guitar and know what it can sound like, while very few have heard good recorder.
generations of talentless kids inflicted them on their parents
I'm not sure who actually is/was inflicting recorders onto whom here.
It was inflicted on both groups by the school district.
The worst part is that schools use the recorders with "German" fingerings which make a C major scale dead easy, but anything else is a nightmare.
So it's next to useless for actually learning to play recorder, too.
But EXTREMELY useful for learning C flute
Probably Big Recorder. They've got their hands in lots of industries.
The next cheapest melodic instrument would be a 6 hole flute, but that takes a bit of practice just to make a noise. Recorders make noise for anyone that can breath. It's the wood sticks of instruments, anyone can use them, most will learn some tiny amount about music, and a very tiny number will learn actual musical skills.
TIL that German „Blockflöte“ (literal translation „woodblock flute“) is recorder in English. A noun I normally connect to cassette recorder or record something.
Blokfluit in Dutch,
It was a mandatory instrument on the Rudolf Steiner school I attended back in the day. 20 kids blowing that thing horribly. My music teacher was actually a conductor of the North Holland Philharmonic Orchestra. Must have been torture for him.
🎵 Een smidje in zijn smidse 🎵
It's due to its historical use as an aid to musical composition and writing down music.
Thanks. This also confused me.
Same in Spanish. They are simply called "flauta" ("flaute" literal transltion).
A noun I normally connect to cassette recorder or record something.
And here, I'm gonna break your mind: a cassette player isn't a person playing the cassette. How sick is that eh? 🙂
I translated from German „Kassettenrekorder“ which is tape deck in English, I guess.
The recorder is among the rare group of instruments that all but require mastery in order to produce anything resembling music. Not unlike the armpit, bagpipes, and spoons.
It's quite easy to produce music on the recorder. Young children often lack the breath control to not overblow and produce a horrible sound, but getting past that stage is seriously not that hard.
Beyond that, I would say that while instruments vary in their inherent difficulty, almost all instruments have music written for them that is designed to stretch the absolute masters of those instruments. The ceiling on musical skill is extremely high because of this.
This. Pretty much any music instrument can be made to sound really good if you put in enough time and skill. The recorder, being a beginner's instrument, just hardly ever gets this amount of love while getting a ton of kids who can hardly hold a note.
Simmer down. Next, I'm criticizing the kazoo. Pace yourself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89NXvvbU-XM&t=50
Sounds pretty amazing in the hands of someone who knows what he's doing.
Ehhh...
Yeah I got through 3 minutes of it. This would be great at an 8th grade recital.
I wonder what it would sound like without any other instruments. Seemed like the piano carried it a bit.
Us classical musicians have always known this! Check out https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hggISFswKcw&pp=ygUZdml2YWxkaSByZWNvcmRlciBjb25jZXJ0b9IHCQkVCgGHKiGM7w%3D%3D And https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_AJMrub11Lk&pp=ygUXUXVlZW4gb2Ygc2hlYmEgcmVjb3JkZXI%3D
wow what links, you can safely delete the tracking parts: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hggISFswKcw and https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_AJMrub11Lk
Is there a tool you like to do this with? Never really share YouTube links so didn’t even think of if
Desktop firefox has a button in the rightclick menu "copy clean link" or something. But usually you can delete everything from the first & or ? sign. They are called query strings and if you learn how they work it's easy to spot the tracking ones.
Lately I've been getting into Sabrina Cruz's Answer in Progress videos. She's got an episode about the recorder that's a lot of fun to watch but also informative.
I've been meaning to watch that. Might as well do it now
TIL there's a contra base recorder. They're 2 meters tall.
a close cousin of the recorder is the tin whistle, and listening to a minute of mary bergin's whistling will quickly shatter any illusion that fipple flutes are toys
If you're getting into treating the recorder as a serious instrument, you might want to check out some Team Recorder videos :D
Where's Andre 3000?
Half is about right