Playing Softly Without Pinching

Tags

breath control, dynamics, embouchure, flute intonation, flute pedagogy

Once you have confidence that your students know how to blow with a steady air stream in at least two or more octaves of the flute, it’s time to help them develop a dynamic palette from piano to forte, so they can begin to practice and understand balance and style. How many of you have tried teaching your students to play more quietly only to have a host of weird compensating behaviors magically appear, not to mention having the pitch go haywire? Things like:

• Pinched aperture, shrill tone and sharp pitch
• Rolling in/covering to much of the blow hole, dull tone and flat pitch
• Clenched teeth, tight sound lacking resonance, probably sharp
• Tight throat, strangled, dull tone and probably flat
• Slow air resulting in flat pitch, trouble placing and controlling high notes, thin, bleating tone

Ok, so the problem with all of these “solutions” is they miss the point that makes the difference and you wind up with all kinds of compensations that just make a poor situation worse. The point is to understand that there is a difference between the quantity of air and the speed of the air. Youngsters and anyone who doesn’t really ‘get’ flute have trouble conceptualizing the difference between air quantity and air speed. In fact, for kids speed and quantity are the same thing. The way I explain it is that until you understand better, air speed and air quantity function like a bad marriage, needy and codependent. One cannot exist without the other, but to the detriment of the both partners.

In order for a player to be able to control dynamics and pitch, air speed and air quantity need to get a divorce and be able to operate as separate entities. The speed of the air stream has to be maintained (supported) while the quantity of air determines the relative volume of the sound. You need to maintain the air speed/pressure using the abdominal muscles while decreasing the quantity of air you are blowing. Here are a couple other concepts to incorporate into the mix to get good dynamic and pitch control:

• Maintain the oval shape of the aperture without flattening it out
• Maintain the position of the flute on your lip without rolling in or out
• The less air you blow, the more you need to raise the blowing angle towards more straight across the blow hole to maintain pitch
• Keep back teeth apart and mouth cavity open
• Keep a relaxed and open throat. Think of how your throat feels right on the edge of yawning
• Keep the speed of the air, just less air

As always, if you find these entries useful, please subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly. Feel free to comment. If you have a topic you would like to see explored more fully, you can contact me via IM/Messenger on Facebook or email me at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics, workshops and performances, click here.

Some Thoughts on Vibrato

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blowing, breath control, flute tone, vibrato

Once you have started your students on playing with vibrato and they are starting have some control over the speed of the vibrato, you will want to introduce other exercises to help with control of the speed and amplitude of the vibrato.

After you students have learned to pulse the air column in eighth notes, triplets, sixteenth notes and sextuplets, introduce this exercise. This way they have to repeat each pair of notes at different speeds before going on to the next pair. This sample has only a few pairs, but be sure to continue up at least an octave.

The choo-choo train exercise links the parts of the exercise above so students learn to accelerate and decelerate their vibrato within the span of one breath. Pick a low register note. Make sure to take a full breath. Over  eight beats at mm=60, start out slowly, accelerate to around 6 pulses/beat and then decelerate to approximately eighth notes.The point is to seamlessly get faster and slower without a definite number of pulses per beat.

Vibrato in the high register requires some extra effort beyond what it takes to incorporate vibrato in the low and middle register of the flute, especially at the fuller dynamic levels from mezzo-forte to fortissimo. Because of the higher frequency of the sound in the third octave, you have to engage the abdominal muscles more to make the vibrato noticeable. You could even say there is an additive quality to playing forte with vibrato in the third octave, meaning you have to physically push into the pulse from your abdominal muscles. This is different than lower on the flute, where you are letting up to generate the vibrato. The extra push is needed to widen the amplitude while maintaining a faster speed vibrato. If you don’t pulse with the abdominals, you will get an essentially straight tone. A light, shimmery vibrato for piano and pianissimo playing is created more similarly to vibrato in the other registers by letting up, very fast and with a shallow amplitude.

You are going to want your more advanced students to learn to incorporate vibrato on sustained notes. In band literature, there are numerous examples of the entire flute section hanging on a pedal point in the middle of the texture or floating above the ensemble. You will want to have them play with more than just a steadily pulsing vibrato through the duration of the note. This isn’t very interesting for either the flute players or the audience, not to mention that is isn’t very musical. See if you can have your flutists vary the speed and amplitude of the vibrato through the duration of the note to match the phrasing in the other sections. That way the flutes can provide more support for the other sections and help the rest of the band shape their phrases with more sensitivity. It will also help your flute players feel like they are making more of a contribution how the entire ensemble sounds.

If you find these entries useful, please subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly. Feel free to comment. If you have a topic you would like to see explored more fully, you can contact me via IM/Messenger on Facebook or email me at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics, workshops and performances, click here

Developing Better Breath Control

Tags

beginning flute, breath control, flute embouchure, flute pedagogy, flute students

Good breath control is an important issue for any wind instrument, but can be especially problematic for flute players because we don’t have a mouthpiece like the other winds and brass. As I tell my own students, everyone else has a mouthpiece and we have a hole. It is no wonder that breath control becomes such an issue for flute students, especially in the early stages.

A long time ago, a voice teacher pointed out to me that breathing to sing or play a wind instrument is different from regular breathing in one significant way. The relative speed of the breathing cycle is reversed. Here’s what this means. As you are sitting there reading this post, notice that you inhale relatively slowly and exhale quickly. When we sing or play a wind instrument, we need to inhale quickly and exhale much more slowly, and at a controlled rate. Teaching this to youngsters is a tricky thing. If you ask kids to take a deep breath, they will probably lift their shoulders and tense their necks. As you know, you have to relax through your trunk and allow everything to open up (ribs and abdomen) and allow the diaphragm to contract downwards. (N.B., you can’t make your diaphragm contract anymore than you can make your heart beat. The diaphragm has the same kind of nerve endings as your heart. It just does it’s job. It will work most efficiently in the breathing cycle if you focus on being relaxed and open through your chest and abdomen.) To demonstrate to kids how to breathe naturally, I have them lie on the floor on their backs with their knees bent. Then I have them pay attention to how their abdomen rises and falls with their breath. Finally, I have them reverse the cycle by inhaling quickly and exhaling slowly while still lying on the floor. When we sit up again, they have a much better sense of how to take an easy, full breath.

In orchestra, I’ve always been envious of the ability of oboe players to spin a long line. They can seemingly sustain their blowing forever compared to what we can do as flute players. Why is this? It’s because they have the natural resistance of blowing into the tiny reed opening. We flute players need to create more resistance in order to have better breath control at every stage of our development. For beginners this means learning to shape a really small aperture with our lips, about the size of the opening of an oboe reed in fact. The aperture needs a fair amount of firmness to create the resistance necessary to spin the air column and sustain our blowing. As young players develop, they need to learn to pay attention to how efficient they are being with the air. Even if the aperture is the correct size and firmness, it is endemic to the flute that we frequently blow more air than is necessary. Provided the flutist is taking in enough air, the trick is to get more sound by using less air more efficiently.

If you find these entries useful, please subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly for more flute tips. Feel free to comment. If you have a topic you would like to see explored more fully, you can contact me via IM/Messenger on Facebook or email me at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.