The French Flute School, as practiced by pupils of Claude-Paul Taffanel at the Paris Conservatoire, employed a playing style featuring a light tone and vibrato. Students strived to capture the sound quality of Taffanel in their own playing. Louis Fleury described Taffanel's tone as, "captivating, and also very full."This reference of a full sound has often been described as powerful and brassy, which can be taken as derogatory. However, when Gaubert was questioned once about this, he redressed the balance by reiterating the word 'full' by insiting that Taffanel produced a perfectly homogenous tone throughout the entire range of the instrument. This became fundamental quality common to the great flautists of the French School and can be seen in Taffanel's successors. These flautists used metal flutes of the modified Boehm system by Louis Lot and others. This stood in contrast to the mostly wooden German and English instruments, which their flautists played with a strong and steady sound.