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.

Why Practicing is a Waste of Time

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flute pedagogy, flute students, practicing

Many years ago, there was a high school student in my flute studio who reported to me that she was practicing three hours a day. Her friends that I knew also reported that she practiced a lot, several hours daily, during study halls and lunch. She was always practicing. What surprised me was that she was not a good flute player by any stretch of the imagination. Her tone seemed immature for her age and her rhythm skills were very weak. How could she be spending so much time in a practice room with so little to show for the effort?

Determined to get to the bottom of what was going on with this student, I questioned her further. She came from a family that had a lot of musicians and she felt she was expected to follow the family tradition and be a musician too. She was taught and believed that you had to put in the time to become a good musician. She also was really unhappy with what she was doing. In working with her, I discovered she had absolutely no process to her practicing. It was just playing through things over and over. It had never occurred to her that she needed to be evaluating what she was doing, identifying and solving problems, in order for her practice time to help her become better at playing the flute and learning to be a musician.

When you tell a student they need to practice, be sure you give them the tools they need to practice effectively. Virtually every day, kids demonstrate to me that they have no idea what practicing entails. My tongue-in-cheek analogy for this kind of “practice” is the “piñata approach”. Put on a blindfold and have someone spin you around until you are dizzy. You are given a big stick with which you then flail about wildly in the hopes that you hit something. Hilarious at a party, but useless as a strategy for mastering any of the skills needs to play an instrument well.

Here are practice tools that I offer my own students:

• Teach the student that they must have a plan, set goals, solve problems and implement the solutions.
• Provide flute specific exercises for tone, technique and articulation
• Help them develop their own concept of good flute playing through modeling good playing for them by my own demonstration, as well as videos and recordings available online.
• Teach them to evaluate themselves without judgement by asking themselves how they measure up to their own concept of good flute playing
• Help them devise remedies for areas of their playing with which they are dissatisfied.
• Show them how they can learn more quickly by breaking things down into bite-sized pieces, often called “chunking” in today’s parlance.
• Teach the students musical phrasing and inflection (strong and weak beats, pickup notes, so-called Curtis/Kinkaid groupings). Practice the chunks in a musical way.
• Walk the student through these concepts as many times as needed until they develop the personal habits to do this for themselves.

It takes more effort to teach this way than to teach by rote. When a student understands what they are doing and why, it fires their imagination and they start being more creative in their practicing. That is when you see them start to really make progress in their playing. This is what makes the extra effort pay off both for you and your students.

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.

Teaching Double and Triple Tonguing

Tags

articulation, flute embouchure, flute pedagogy, flute students, flute tone

Just as with brass instruments, double and triple tonguing is an essential skill for intermediate to advanced flutists. Every single day I am grateful for being able to have double and triple tonguing in my tool kit of playing skills because of how it simplifies rapid tonguing passages, whether I’m performing in an ensemble or playing recital literature.

The main issues for good double and triple tonguing are:

• Air – yes, how you use your air is probably the most important part of effective double and triple tonguing. If you don’t blow sufficient or fast moving enough air, all the tricky tonguing in the world will be worth nothing if not supported by a fast, controlled airstream. Simply put, no air equates to no sound. Encourage your students to practice tongued passages slurred to make sure the air is moving freely. Remember, my teacher, Tom Nyfenger, said tonguing is the anti-tone.
• A well shaped aperture – as has been stated before, articulation is inherently percussive and disruptive to the shape and size of the aperture. It is essential to increase the firmness of the grip on the airstream to play with good tone when double and triple tonguing.
• The actual tonguing needs to be super efficient. Instruct your flute students to think about both the consonant sound being used and the vowel sound associated with it. T and K are good, but at fast speeds, D and G are better. Have them think of a really light vowel sound like I or E. A, O or U put the tongue too low in the mouth and greatly impact the actual speed of tonguing because the tongue has to travel from the top to the bottom of the mouth with each tongue stroke. The better one gets at double and triple tonguing, the further forward both the forward and back tongue strokes become. When I’m double and triple tonguing, I’m using no more than the front third of my tongue.
• Triple tonguing options – I think you have to try them all to see what works for you. For me, TKT TKT is the only thing that has worked consistently. Other options include TKT KTK and TTK TTK. I really think there isn’t one correct solution on this one. Everyone is different. Encourage your students to experiment sufficiently to see which on works best for them.

Some final thoughts: Your students need to make practicing double and triple tonguing a part of their life. Encourage them to practice when walking down the hall to class or when they lie down on their bed at night. Double and triple tonguing become easy and natural if you do it all the time, whether with the instrument on your face or without the instrument. And Less is More. Good multiple tonguing is about using as little of your tongue as is possible. If your tongue is flapping around in your mouth wildly, your tongue will fatigue more quickly. Teach your students to be an expert in efficiency. They will learn to tongue faster and with less fatigue.

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.

Piccolo for Flute Students

Tags

beginning flute, embouchure, flute pedagogy, flute students

The conventional wisdom is that is necessary to wait two or three years before starting students on piccolo. Actually, I think starting flute students on piccolo is more a matter of measuring readiness by evaluating embouchure and blowing skills rather than the amount of time a student has played. What are these skills? First of all make sure the student is blowing sufficiently fast air. Also it is important that the student has good control over the size and shape of the aperture. If the student meets these two criteria, they will do fine with piccolo. On the other hand, if a student is already pinching, rather than supporting, to play higher on the flute or trying to overpower the piccolo by blowing harder, it can actually be detrimental to their flute playing. This is why it is so important to make sure embouchure and blowing skills are well developed before introducing piccolo.

How can you help your flute students adjust to playing piccolo? In several ways. The piccolo should be placed higher on the bottom lip than flute. This is because the transit time (the time from when the air exits the aperture to when it strikes the blowing edge) is somewhat shorter than on flute. Conversely, the larger the instrument, the lower on the lip it goes for the same reason. The other major thing to get used to is the different register of the instrument. It is an octave higher, so the low register sounds like the middle register of the flute. Have the students play tone exercises like octaves or long tones and slow scales to acclimate themselves to the differences.

What about starting students on piccolo before transitioning to flute? At the risk of upsetting my flute playing colleagues, I would like to put it out there that this may not be as crazy an idea as it seems. After all, the student gets to learn immediately about a well shaped aperture and moving the air fast enough to get a good sound. Though I have to admit I have never started anyone on piccolo, I have started students on an $8 fife made by a major manufacturer of school recorders with good success. This fife is in the same octave as piccolo and when the students transition to flute, it is a breeze. There is none of the usual struggle to either shape the aperture or figure out how to direct the air at the blowing edge. It is a very easy transition. A respected former classmate of mine started on piccolo and has agreed to talk about her experiences as a beginner on piccolo. Look for her remarks in the comments.

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.

Helping Your Flute Students Play in Tune

Tags

flute intonation, flute pedagogy, flute students

It is extremely common for young flute players to play with the flute placed too high on their bottom lip (see the first post, The Legend of Kiss and Roll for more on this issue). Playing this way causes the sound to be thin, shrill and sharp. Another common problem is covering too much, i.e. more than half, of the blow hole with the bottom lip. This will cause the sound to be dull, pinched and flat. Another kind of weirdness I have observed with some kids is that they are not supporting the flute against their bottom teeth. This will also cause flatness and problems playing third octave notes at all. And lastly, for now, pulling corners when shaping the blowing aperture with the lips also causes sharpness. To quote Suzanne Duffy’s comment on this blog a couple weeks ago, “There’s the big problem in the intonation in these developing groups: incorrect tone production. . . So the best fix is actually changing how those students blow their instrument.”

So how do you go about helping your flute students play better in tune? Does rolling in and out work? Let’s just say no, not really. Constantly changing the relationship of lips to the blow hole does nothing to improve basic tone quality. If it is always changing, the tone will never be consistent. Also, rolling in and out does not really afford a very big difference in pitch on many notes, especially longer, right hand notes like F, E, Eb and D.

What does work, then? In a nutshell, the three things flute players value more than anything else are flexibility, sensitivity and independence of top and bottom lips. These qualities enable us to play with a focused sound, play with different tone colors and to adjust tuning as needed. You and your students can actually visualize this with a tool like the Pneumo Pro. Top and bottom lips need to move independently not only change register, but also control pitch and dynamic level. So if the pitch is too low, push the bottom lip out a little. Conversely, if the pitch is sharp, extend the top lip out a little in order to direct the air at a lower angle into the flute more. With dynamics, in order to play loudly and in tune, direct the air lower, and to play softly and in tune, raise the air stream. As an exercise, have your students sustain a note and go from soft to loud to soft, using a tuner. Maintain the tone color and change the direction of the air to correct the pitch.

If you find these entries helpful, please subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back next week for another flute tip. Your comments and questions are always welcome.

Flutes in the Band Room

Tags

flute posture, flute seating, flute students

Do your flute students look like this, struggling to hold their flutes up, scrunched into tight quarters, leaning their right arms over the back of their chairs, hunched over as if they can barely hold the flute up?

I am sure you have seen variations of this with your own students. And you have to constantly remind them to hold their flutes up, sit straight in their chairs, and on and on…….

Perhaps the solution lies in how the chairs are arranged. In the example above, notice that the chairs the kids are sitting in are side by side, in a straight line along the wall, facing forward. The question I pose to you is if this makes sense, given that the flute is played asymmetrically (as are saxophone and bassoon)? In order to hold the flute up and be comfortable, the kids have to twist in their chairs, rest their arm on the chair back and wind up developing other poor habits. Try this instead and see if it helps your students sit up taller, hold their instruments more correctly and even sound better as a section:

As you can see, all the chairs are now turned about 45 degrees to the right, rather than facing straight forward. Now let’s put the kids in the chairs and you have something like this:

As you can see, the chairs are quite close, everyone can hold their flute up, the kids can sit straight in their chairs with their feet on the floor and the end of each flute is behind the head of the next kid. There is plenty of room for everyone, even if you have a small rehearsal space.

If you find these entries helpful, please subscribe, share with your colleagues and come back next week for another flute tip. Comments are always welcome. Send your questions and suggestions for future posts to me at dr_cate@sbcglobal.net.