Being the Flute Police

Tags

embouchure, flute embouchure, flute pedagogy, flute posture, flute students, flute technique

Now that your students aren’t beginners anymore, what do they need to keep developing their flute and musical skills? The flute police! I’m joking, of course, but in a way I’m not. The interactions with and interventions by their teachers, both their band directors and private instructors (if they have one), during their first two or three years of playing are really critical for determining how long they continue playing and the level of competency they achieve.  In order to keep my own students on track, here’s what I have to be constantly vigilant about for them:

• Embouchure, embouchure, embouchure – make sure they are shaping the right size aperture, know where the flute is placed on their bottom lip, and that they understand how to change the direction of the air without changing the size of the aperture.
• Blowing – as important as embouchure. You can have a great embouchure, but it’s not of much value if you’re not putting air into the instrument. Likewise, a student can have great technique, but it is of little use if you can’t hear them due to insufficient air. Be sure to teach kids to drive the air with their abdominal muscles (often referred to as “support”).
• Balancing the flute and hand positions – turn the headjoint back and turn the mechanism more forward just a little so the weight of the mechanism is more on top, rather than dragging the flute back. Left hand and wrist under the flute to support the weight, right hand behind the flute with fingers extended. Right thumb under and more on the back side of the instrument.
• Posture – align shoulders over hips, whether sitting or standing. Turn head left about 45 degrees and bring the flute up into playing position. The plane of the body and plane of the flute intersect near the left shoulder. The end of the flute should be in line with your nose rather than in line with your right ear (you will be amazed at the difference in the sound with just this one simple adjustment).
• Technique – teach the kids the patterns of music including scales and arpeggios in all major keys. Teach your flute students to play in sharp keys. I get it! Band repertoire puts the flute parts into flat keys in order to accommodate the transposing instruments. However, you severely limit the playing options available to your flute students if they never play in any other keys besides F, Bb and Eb until they get to high school. And teach them the correct fingerings in the third octave.
• Counting and rhythm – be sure to teach kids to count for themselves rather than learning rhythm by rote. In more than 30 years of teaching lessons in schools, I have seen band teachers whose students have excellent counting skills and those whose students couldn’t count their way out of a paper bag until someone “shows them how it goes”. The student who understands rhythm and can figure out music they are learning on their own is much more likely to stick with playing long term. They will be able to benefit from your instruction about ensemble skills more readily because they will be more flexible and adaptable.

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 privately on Facebook or email me at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.

Where it All Started, The Legend of “Kiss and Roll”

Tags

beginning flute, embouchure, flute embouchure, flute pedagogy, flute students

It has been a really busy week for me at the Chicago Flute Festival helping flutists learn about the Rhino Flute Resonator. There has been no time to blog this week, but I would like to share with you the very first article I wrote on Dr. Cate’s Flute Tips, entitled The Legend of “Kiss and Roll”

“For many band teachers who learn to teach beginning flute, the so-called “kiss and roll” method of teaching students to form an embouchure is what they are told is the quickest and most effective way to learn to direct the air into the blow hole at correct angle. From my perspective as a flutist who has taught many beginning flute players, this method is based on a fantasy. The fantasy is that we all have the same size and shape lips. If we center the blow hole between then lips and roll it down, it will be in the best position for making a focused sound on the flute.

In reality, the “kiss and roll” method causes more problems than it solves. For the majority of flutists, the end result is that the flute winds up too high on the bottom lip. This results in a small sound which is often sharp. It is also impossible to develop fullness and power in the tone because the transit time (the time from which the air exits the aperture to when it hits the blowing edge of the embouchure hole of the head joint) is too short. Another persistent problem is that students continue rolling the flute down into position long after the need for such a crutch has passed. It becomes an annoying and unnecessary mannerism at best, and a real impediment to developing a mature, characteristic tone at worst in more experienced students.

So what to teach instead? Bring the headjoint into playing position from below by bring the curve of the lip plate to rest against the chin. Then bring the edge of the blow hole up to about the bottom edge of the lip. The crisp edge of the lip plate is very easy to feel at the transition between the lip and skin of the chin. Then teach the students to aim the air at the opposite edge of the lip plate to make a sound. Depending on how full the bottom lip is, the best position can be higher or lower on the lip.”

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 privately on Facebook or email me at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.

Warm Air, Cold Air: Sense or Nonsense

Tags

beginning flute, flute embouchure, flute pedagogy, flute students, flute tone

Very frequently when I’m doing clinics, I ask flute students the difference between blowing a note in the low register versus blowing a second or third octave note. They will report to me that they were told by their band teacher to blow warm air for low notes and cold air for high notes. I’ve been pondering the veracity of that assertion for a while now. Initially it seemed to me like it could be a good way to conceptualize the difference between the registers. However, the more I’ve mulled it over, the more problems I see both with the concept and with how it manifests in students’ playing.

Let’s first look at how this concept is presented. If you open your mouth in an “O” shape and blow gently on your hand, the air hitting your hand is indeed warm. Then if you shape a flute sized aperture with your lips and blow at your hand, you will feel a much faster, concentrated, cooler air stream hitting your hand. So far so good. Seems like a good analogy until you actually put a flute on your face.

If you blow on a flute with a large enough aperture to have a noticeably warmer temperature in the air stream, the low notes are guaranteed to be soft, unfocused, lacking projection and likely flat. If you know a flutist who can play with a strong, focused sound in every register, ask to examine the temperature of the air column while they play in different registers. I’m sure you will find there is no appreciable difference. What you will find is that they blow with a uniformly strong air column that varies in intensity according to dynamics, but maintains the speed of the air column regardless of dynamic. This is how the finest flutists can play with a strong, focused, projecting sound in the low register and can play an exquisitely soft high note with control. They know how to maintain the speed of the air column and change the direction of the air for different registers and for different dynamic levels.

As always, playing with a strong, focused, characteristic flute sound is understanding how to change the direction of the air while maintaining the speed of the air column. The PneumoPro is an invaluable tool for visualizing this concept. Another demonstration you can do with your students is to have them pair off. One student plays and the other holds their hand close to the face of the other student and reports whether the direction of the air is changing and whether the air column feels concentrated or diffuse. You will find that kids pick up quickly the difference concentrating the air stream can make for their sound in all registers. Even your beginners will have a focused and characteristic sound if you teach them to always concentrate the air coumn and effect changes in register by changing the direction of the air.

Now you know why I think the whole warm air, cold air analogy doesn’t have much value as way of conceptualizing register changes and dynamic control. It causes more problems than it solves for the students.

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 privately on Facebook or email me at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.

To Roll or Not to Roll: That is the Question

Tags

dynamics, flute embouchure, flute intonation, flute pedagogy, flute tone

Do you ever feel as if getting your flute section to play in tune is like herding cats? Have you ever told your flute students to roll the flute in or out to adjust the pitch? Me and my flute teaching colleagues are all holding our ears and crying, “Noooooo!” Why the extreme reaction, you might ask? The answer is because rolling in and out to change the pitch is a chewing gum/rubber band solution for the issues of pitch awareness. It really doesn’t address the underlying issues of embouchure formation and pitch awareness. The student might be more in tune for the moment, but they won’t really learn what “in tune” really means and rolling in/out has a really negative impact on tone quality. And the next time they play the same passage, you are back to where you started because it will be just as out of tune as it was before you asked them to roll in or out the first time.

What are the tone problems caused by rolling in and out? If you roll in, you wind up covering the blow hole too much. This will make it flatter, but it also makes the tone dull, small, lifeless and impossible to play with any kind of dynamic range. If you roll out, the pitch will be somewhat sharper, but the tone will be thin, weak, won’t project and makes it impossible to play with any dynamic range.

It is essential to understand that correcting pitch problems means correcting embouchure and placement issues. Embouchure flexibility, dynamic and pitch control are basically one issue. As developing flutists, we all have to learn consistency in where we put the flute on our bottom lip/chin and how we direct the air. The best place to put the flute is where you can get the most resonance from the flute. This is different for each person because of the endless variation in size of lips, teeth and oral cavity. The only way to achieve a good, in tune sound is through experimenting with blowing angle, how much to open or cover the blow hole and teaching students lip independence. When students are not energizing the air column sufficiently (supporting), you see all kinds of compensating behaviors including pulling corners, pinching the aperture, closing the throat, clenching the teeth. All these behaviors cause pitch problems.

Here are some general guidelines for pitch and dynamic control:

• To raise the pitch, push the bottom lip forward to raise the airstream, while making sure the top lip is directing the air at the blowing edge.
• To play more softly and in tune, raise the air stream
• To lower the pitch, reach over with the top lip to direct the air down more
• To play more loudly and stay in tune, blow down more
• Be sure to blow with an energized air column (support) at every dynamic level.
• Stay relaxed in the throat, jaw, cheeks and use a focused air stream through the aperture in the lips.

Try this exercise with your students individually and in sectionals. Use a tuner and maintain the pitch with crescendo and diminuendo using the guidelines above.

If you find these entries helpful, subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly for more flute tips. Feel free to comment and ask questions. What do you want to know about flute pedagogy? Maybe the answer to your question will be the next flute tip. Find me on Facebook or email me your questions at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.

Independence for Lips!

Tags

flute embouchure, flute pedagogy, flute students, flute tone

If you play an instrument where you have the mouthpiece between your lips or in direct contact with both your lips, the idea that you can move bottom and top lips independently of each other will likely sound foreign to you. For flutists, this is how we control most everything: register changes, pitch control, dynamic control, color changes, you name it. Of course all these things can only happen with good control of the air through breath support first. It is the refinement of the sound we control through the ability to move our lips independently.

Which brings us to the question of how firmly the flute should press against the chin. Why is this important? If you press the flute too hard against your chin, you immobilize your bottom lip and jaw. If you immobilize your bottom lip and jaw, you will have a lot of trouble with everything mentioned above: register changes, pitch control, dynamic control, color changes……High notes become hard to produce, pitch will likely be flat, pitch will fluctuate wildly with dynamic changes and just forget about anything except one basic color.

To characterize the distinct roles each lips have, I’d have to say that the job of the top lip is to make sure the air is aimed at the blowing edge and the bottom lip is in charge of changing the direction of the air to control register and dynamics. Another important consideration is that bottom lip also provides a cushion, so to speak, for the air. The air should be moving across the inside, wet part of the lips, especially with the bottom lip.

Here are several ways you can help your students get acquainted with the independent movement of their lips.

• Without the flute, put your bottom lip in front of your top lip and blow up your nose/your bangs.
• Again, without the flute, put your top lip in front of the bottom and blow down your chin.
• Using your finger as a pretend flute under your lip, shape a flute aperture and move your bottom lip back and forth to experiment with flexibility.
• Using a PneumoPro, shape a flute aperture and practice aiming the air at the different pinwheels by moving your bottom lip. Don’t tip the PneumoPro to aim the air. (Put a coin on the end of the pinwheel arm to make sure the student keeps the PneumoPro level. If you do it correctly, the coin will stay in place as you aim at the different pinwheels.)

If you teach your flute students to move their lips independently, you will soon hear a more characteristic and focused tone from them. This is an essential skill for developing a mature tone and well worth practicing at every level of experience. It is why I use the octave exercise as a warm up with students in sectionals and lessons. This gives us the opportunity to examine steadiness of blowing, smoothness of intervals, dynamic control and a whole host of other issues.

If you find these entries helpful, subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly for more flute tips. Feel free to comment and ask questions. What do you want to know about flute pedagogy? Maybe the answer to your question will be the next flute tip. Find me on Facebook or email me your questions at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.

The Sins of Articulation

Tags

articulation, flute embouchure, flute pedagogy, flute students

What would you consider to be the biggest sins your students could commit with regard to tonguing and articulation? Have you ever noticed these habits among your school flute students? What can you do to help your students articulate correctly? Me and my flutist colleagues have a laundry list of articulation problems that are extremely common among flute students who have never had a private flute instructor. (Flutists, by all means, jump in with a comment if you have one I’ve overlooked.)

• Not tonguing at all, even after playing for three or more years. I’ve met kids that were really skillful with breath articulation and no tongue at all! Yes, it might be tricky to tongue while shaping the aperture, but you really have to insist they get it. Have them practice by putting their finger under their bottom lip (pretend flute), shaping the aperture and tonguing where their teeth and gums meet. Then have them do it on just the headjoint. Not tonguing is to be expected in the first 3-4 weeks of playing. Make sure they get it in that time. Otherwise, not tonguing becomes an ingrained habit. It becomes much harder to create the new habit of tonguing the longer they play.
• Tonguing too hard. The flutist’s aperture does not respond well to hard tonguing. Tonguing too hard causes the aperture to lose focus and direction. The result is a harsh, spread, unfocused sound. Teach your students to do accents and staccato with a stronger breath pulse behind the tonguing rather than just slamming the tongue harder. It’s a much more musical and elegant approach to articulation.
•   Tongue stopping. In other words, using the tongue to stop the sound as well as start it. Tonguing is TA or DA, never TUT. I have heard rumor that some band teachers are actually telling their flutes to tongue this way in order to get the kids to release together, especially in marching band. If you want them to release together, teach them to stop blowing together. A release should be like releasing a bird by throwing it up in the air, not like chopping something with an axe. Tongue stopping is a very difficult problem to correct so please don’t let them start doing it in the first place.
• The jaw drop release, abruptly opening the jaw to stop the air. Nearly as bad as the tongue stop release, and in my experience is something a lot of kids come up with on their own as a solution to being asked to do a quick release. Teach your students to maintain the aperture shape and just stop blowing.

On the flute, good articulation is based mostly on breath management with just a little bit of tongue for definition, a clear ictus. In fact, I would say there are two distinct types of blowing — legato and staccato. Good flutists can go back and forth between the two types of blowing instantly based on the demands of the phrasing and indicated articulation.

If you find these entries helpful, subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly for more flute tips. Please comment and feel free to ask questions. What do you want to know about flute pedagogy? Maybe the answer to your question will be the next flute tip. Find me on Facebook or email me your questions at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.

When Do You Start Teaching Dynamics?

Tags

dynamics, flute embouchure, flute intonation, flute pedagogy

The short answer to that question is, “It depends”. What does it depend on? It depends on a student’s ability to blow with a steady air stream and to differentiate between air speed and air quantity. Learning to differentiate between air speed and quantity takes time for the student and an understanding of sound pedagogy from the teachers who work with the student.

When a kid starts on the flute, the first job is to learn to direct the air properly to hit the strike edge of the blow hole. Then they need to learn to change the blowing angle to play in the different registers. Often at this stage the student is blowing through a large aperture, expending a lot of air, huffing and puffing, making a fuzzy sound and having trouble sustaining anything longer than two or three beats. As they continue practicing, most of the time the student learns to blow through a smaller aperture, control their breath and make a clearer tone.

Is this a good time to start introducing dynamics? I would say no, absolutely not and here is why. You can do more harm than good for your kids because they start trying to do what you are asking without having the skill set to play with dynamics correctly. Kids will pinch the aperture, which can make them play sharp. They start rolling the flute in and covering more. This will make the pitch flat. They try to control the air by squeezing their throats. Do you really want your students to sound like they are strangling? And they don’t really know anything about managing the air stream so they wind up trying to control the dynamics with their lips, tongue, throat, size of the oral cavity, etc. Kids are enormously creative in their solutions but the results for both pitch and tone can be devastating. And they wind up building in habits that they may never overcome.

A few pointers for teaching dynamics:

• Never mind about dynamics for a least the first year to two years of playing.
• Teach them to blow with a steady, supported air stream always (using their abdominal muscles to drive the air).
• Teach them that the size of the aperture stays pretty much the same throughout the range of the flute.
• Show them that the air speed and air quantity are not the same thing. You can play very softly provided that the air column is moving quickly enough with enough pressure.
• Dynamics on flute are controlled by a steady air speed and varying the quantity of air, not with the embouchure. The embouchure’s job is merely to point the air in the correct direction. Think of a garden hose. The actual source of the water pressure is far from the nozzle. The nozzle directs the water wherever it is pointed.

Your students will develop a wide palette of dynamic expression if you spend time helping them learn to control the air column in the first couple years of playing. It all comes down to how you manage the air.

If you find these entries helpful, subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly for more flute tips. Please comment and feel free to ask questions. What do you want to know about flute pedagogy? Maybe the answer to your question will be the next flute tip. Find me on Facebook or email me your questions at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.

The Myth of Tighter Higher, Looser Lower

Tags

flute embouchure, flute pedagogy, flute tone

There have been many times flute students have come to me with a woolly, unfocused tone in the low register and a tight, pinched sound in the third octave. They report that they can’t play high notes easily and they don’t like playing low notes because they can’t play very loud or control the tone quality. It is clear the kids are lacking the information they need to acquire the skills to make an full, even and characteristic tone. On further questioning I discover that the kids have been told in school that they should use a looser embouchure on the low notes and gradually tighten the embouchure as they go higher. And then I discover that their band director is a brass player.

By no stretch of the imagination would I claim to be expert on brass embouchures, either high or low. It is my understanding that tighter higher, looser lower is pretty much how it works, as well as a lot of attention on what one does with the corners of the mouth, especially for high brass. However, when it comes to a flute embouchure we can safely say this just doesn’t work. The other major issue is that our lips, as flute players, have to function as our mouthpiece.

I’m not a fan of the so-called “warm air – low, cold air – high” analogy either because I don’t think it is particularly helpful. Warm air low implies a more open, relaxed aperture in the low register and encourages pinching in the third octave.

What can you share with your students to help them develop a mature and characteristic tone?

• The size of the aperture stays the same from octave to octave.  The aperture should be about the same size and shape as the opening in an oboe reed.
• Changing the direction of the air is what is needed to change octaves. Top and bottom lips move independently of each other to change the direction of the air. Reach forward more with the top lip to blow down, push the bottom lip forward to aim higher.
• If anything, one needs a firmer aperture (so one has some resistance) to play with a strong sound in the low register and a more relaxed aperture (provided there is sufficient air speed) in the third octave.
• Remember, it’s not about the corners. It is about how one shapes the aperture and moves the air.

If you find these entries helpful, subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly for more flute tips. Please comment and feel free to ask questions. What do you want to know about flute pedagogy? Maybe the answer to your question will be the next flute tip. Find me on Facebook or email me your questions at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.

Flute Embouchure and a Teardrop Top Lip

Tags

beginning flute, flute embouchure, flute pedagogy, flute tone

What do you recommend for a student who wants to play the flute and has a prominent teardrop in their top lip? Can a prominent teardrop limit the student’s ability to produce a characteristic tone or their future success on the flute?

A prominent teardrop in the top lip is not an obstacle in any way for a student who wants to play the flute. However, the student probably will not be able to play very well through an aperture shaped in the middle of the lips. This is because the extra flesh of the teardrop will split the air stream so it goes in two different directions on either side of the teardrop.

So what can you teach the student instead? Instruct them to blow through an aperture shaped on one side or the other of the teardrop and seal the other side of the lips. It is generally more desirable to shape the blowing aperture to the left of the teardrop rather than the right, but I have seen it work either way successfully. It doesn’t really matter as long as the student has good control of the direction of the air stream. The primary reason to encourage blowing to the left side of the teardrop is because of how embouchure holes are cut on headjoints. They are not cut symmetrically because the flute is played transversely. Consequently, even someone with a symmetrical embouchure is actually blowing slightly to the left of center. Therefore, the sweet spot for maximum resonance and response on most headjoints is slightly off center to the left.

In evaluating a student’s potential embouchure, besides the obvious observation of having a prominent teardrop, the other thing you can check is the shape of the vapor trail on the outer edge of the lip plate when the student is blowing. If there is a neat triangle with the wide edge of the vapor trail at the outer edge of the embouchure hole, then the student can easily develop a characteristic sound. On the other hand, if there are two triangles side by side, it is vitally important to direct the student to play slightly off center (usually to the left, as mentioned). The split vapor trail indicates that the flesh of the teardrop is interfering with directing the air in a concentrated stream when it hits the blowing edge of the embouchure hole. Finally, you will also see kids with a prominent teardrop when their lips are relaxed which disappears when they shape a flute aperture. Encourage these students to blow through the center, since there won’t be any splitting of the air stream.

If you find these entries helpful, subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back regularly for more flute tips. Please comment and feel free to ask questions. What do you want to know about flute pedagogy? Maybe the answer to your question will be the next flute tip. Find me on Facebook or email me your questions at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.

Diagnosing and Fixing Tone Problems

Tags

flute embouchure, flute intonation, flute posture, flute tone

Diagnosing the tone problems we hear with our flute students is one of the thorniest issues we face as teachers. And hand in hand with tone problems are intonation problems. If the sound is not good, chances are that the intonation won’t be good either. The fundamental question is to ask is what is the student doing with their playing apparatus (lips, oral cavity, throat, breathing) that is making it sound the way it does. I have explored this question by trying to create the sound the student is making for myself. Doing this have given me a lot of insight into why a student is having the problems they are having because I’m essentially recreating what they are doing. I learned this trick from my teacher, Thomas Nyfenger, who could imitate anyone, good or bad. Let’s examine the each of the areas of the playing apparatus listed above.

Lips – essentially our lips function as our mouthpiece, shaping and directing the air at the blowing edge, assisting in creating sufficient resistance to make a characteristic flute sound. Lips cannot provide support to the air column. Many students squeeze their lips rather than use their supporting muscles.

• If the sound is reedy, thin, sharp or strident, chances are that the student is pulling their corners, stretching the lips laterally and/or flattening the blowing aperture. It is often a combination of all of these.
• If the sound is wooly, flat and unfocused, it means the aperture is too large and the student isn’t gripping the airstream firmly enough.
• If the sound is sweet, clear and small, the student has the flute too high on their bottom lip. This can be caused by being taught the kiss-and-roll when they started.

Oral cavity – while it is necessary for the flute to rest (not press) against the bottom teeth with the lip in between, it is important to relax the jaw and open the oral cavity as much as possible. It functions as a resonating chamber, along with the sinuses, nose, throat and chest (ask the singers). If you’ve explored all the possible lip issues and the tone is still small and tight, experiment with opening the oral cavity more.

Throat – needs to be open, with the base of the tongue relaxed for the most resonant sound. Squeezing the throat or tensing the base of the tongue will muffle the sound. Students will frequently squeeze here rather than engage their supporting muscles. I like the analogy of imagining that I am on the verge of a yawn. The tongue is down and relaxed and the throat is wide open. Throat is merely a conduit for the air column. Keep all the physical structures of the throat out of the way.

Breathing – If everything else is out of the way, then the torso with its abdominal and intercostal muscles are free to support and pressurize the air column. I really like the idea of allowing ourselves to breath naturally, deeply and freely rather than over-analyzing the breathing mechanism. The truth is, kids rarely understand the difference between the quantity of air and the speed of the air. If the air is moving sufficiently fast enough, the sound will be good and it will be in tune, provided that they are playing on a flute with a good scale (note that some of the older brands still have not updated their scale, especially in the beginner level instruments). Sitting up or standing tall with good open posture is critical to being able to use the air effectively.

If you find these entries helpful, subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back next week for another flute tip. Please comment and feel free to ask questions. Maybe the answer to your question will be the next flute tip. Find me on Facebook or email me at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net. For information about clinics and workshops click here.