Flute Go Juice

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articulation, dynamics, embouchure, flute pedagogy, vibrato

We have spent a great deal of virtual ink on this blog exploring flute embouchure, articulation, intonation, technique, dynamics and vibrato. While all of these things are essential to good flute playing, we’re overlooking the elephant in the room, namely blowing. Indeed, if you don’t have good mastery of blowing, you aren’t going to be able to articulate well, play in tune, control dynamics or play with vibrato. All the blah, blah about embouchure is meaningless if you are not moving air through the embouchure into the flute. Technique is worthless without the air behind the fingers.

A few thoughts about blowing as it relates to teaching kids, in no particular order:

• Beginners – give me a kid with an enthusiastically windy sound any day over a kid that is timidly tweeting little peeps. It is much easier to help the first kid refine their sound and become more precise with how they direct their air than to get that shy kid who is barely making any sound to actually put some air into the instrument.
• Students who come to the flute from a piano background often have to be cajoled into blowing more. My conjecture about this is that they are used to thinking of the sound being generated by their finger technique. You need to help them understand their fingers make very little sound , but that their go juice on flute is the air stream.
• Hold off on teaching/expecting dynamics until you are sure the student has sufficient mastery of steady blowing to be able to understand the difference between air speed and air quantity. Getting to this point can take up to a couple years, depending on how much they play in band/practice on their own.
• Encourage your students to blow freely and refrain from using what my teacher, Tom Nyfenger, called the nay-palm, shushing your young flute players in the front row to hear the brass line behind them. The flutes are not impacting the balance of the ensemble they way you think they are. The reason they sound loud to you is they are sitting right under your baton. This is so incredibly damaging to developing young flute players. The truth is, a flute will never be able to compete in terms of volume of sound with most any other instrument in your ensemble, not a trumpet, a saxophone or even a clarinet. By shushing them and not instructing your flute players how to play more quietly, the kids develop all kinds of negative compensating behaviors such as pinching the aperture, squeezing in the throat, clenching their teeth and just not blowing. The consequence is that the flutes sound terrible and have horrendous intonation problems. These problems are then compounded if you then tell them to roll in or out to fix the pitch. All of these problems with evaporate if you encourage your students to blow in the first place.
• If your students know how to blow well, learning to play with vibrato, developing lively articulation and meaningful technique is part of a natural progression of acquiring skills. Good blowing and a steady, supported air column facilitate all these skills. You have to have the go juice first.

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

Reviewing “Teaching your Students to Play with Vibrato”

Tags

flute pedagogy, vibrato

Beyond the new weekly posts on this blog, the old article that has been getting the most attention this month is from January 2015, “Teaching your Students to Play with Vibrato“. Since there isn’t time to write a full article this week, please enjoy this oldie, but goodie. I’ll be back next week with a fresh tip for you.

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, workshops and performances, click here.

Getting the Cart Before the Horse

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beginning flute, dynamics, flute embouchure, flute pedagogy, flute students, flute tone, vibrato

And the unintended consequences

There is no question that developing a wide dynamic palette and intelligent use of vibrato are essential skills for any aspiring flute player. Dynamics and vibrato add dimension and polish to the playing of individuals and within a flute section. However, I advocate waiting a bit before introducing these skills with your youngest players. Why? Because it is so critical for beginning flute players to master good embouchure and blowing skills first. Keep in mind that flutists don’t have a mouthpiece per se. We are relating to a simple hole that sits under our bottom lip. Our lips are our mouthpiece. Lips need to be trained to provide proper resistance, as we have discussed in other entries on this blog. And strong, supported blowing is an issue for any wind instrument beginner. Give your students the opportunity to solidify these skills before you introduce dynamics and vibrato.

When you ask your flute students to play with dynamics before they have mastered the basics of blowing and embouchure, the consequences can be quite dire, even to the point of them quitting altogether. Short of quitting, kids get into all kinds of compensating behaviors in order to do what you are asking of them. The kids resort to various kinds of constriction of the air stream, all of which sound really bad. They include pinching or biting down on the aperture (think about the sound of letting the air out a balloon while stretching the opening of the balloon), clenching of the teeth (also a tight and constrained sound, in extreme cases can lead to TMJ problems), and closing the throat. Once kids form the habit of constricting the air to play more quietly, it is a huge task (and often unsuccessful) to convince them that there is a better way to control their dynamics by controlling the amount of air and the blowing angle. Kids are smart. If it sounds bad and feels bad (which is how any kind of constriction feels), why continue? It is discouraging and frustrating for them. They will find other outlets for their creativity that are more rewarding.

There are similar problems that occur when you try to start kids playing with vibrato too soon. It has been shown that flute vibrato emanates from the epiglottis, the flap of tissue that blocks our wind pipe for us to swallow. It pulses but doesn’t completely close off the wind pipe when we play the flute. Again, it is absolutely essential for a student to develop a strong, steady, supported air column before introducing vibrato. If they don’t, the vibrato will be the most noticeable thing about their tone and it will not be possible to control the speed or amplitude of the pulse. Too heavy a vibrato is definitely worse than playing with a straight but supported air column. Teaching vibrato too soon is also a distraction and discouragement to ever learning steady blowing. Why set kids up for failure and disappointment?

Teach your students to blow and how to develop a flexible, sensitive embouchure first. This can take a year to two years of playing. Then adding in dynamic control and vibrato is a relatively simple job. In fact, there’s a good chance that these skills will just magically appear in your flute players if they are well grounded in the basics of sound production and musical phrasing.

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.

Using Vibrato For Expression

Tags

flute pedagogy, flute tone, vibrato

It usually takes about a month to six weeks of practicing basic vibrato exercises for a student to begin to start using vibrato naturally in their regular playing. Other than making sure they are doing the exercises at increasing speeds, up to about sextuplets at mm=60, no other supervision is really needed. Sometimes you will have to encourage students a bit to get them to try incorporating vibrato into longer note values, but it often happens quite naturally without the student being aware that they are doing it.

When you can hear that they are beginning to use vibrato as another component of their tone, you can begin to provide some guidance on how to use vibrato to enhance expression and musical inflection. Here are a few things in no particular order that you can offer to help students to use their new vibrato more expressively:

• There are two basic components of vibrato, speed and amplitude. The speed can vary somewhat (usually faster rather than slower) but the biggest expressive component is the depth of the fluctuation. More amplitude in the fluctuation means greater intensity, volume and excitement in the sound. A narrow amplitude is more appropriate for simple melodies or for creating an ethereal, floating color in the third octave.
• Some judicious vibrato is great for showing inflection (very subtle) of strong and weak beats. Also intensity of vibrato can be used to show the apex or arrival point in a phrase.
• Avoid slow vibrato, especially in the low register. Nothing like a slow, sagging or limp vibrato for putting the brakes on the momentum of a phrase.
• Vibrato is a tool to be used with discretion, not a constant. Constant vibrato at the same rate and intensity, no matter what, is no more interesting than a totally straight tone.
• For Pete’s sake, please don’t tell a student to put seven pulses (for example) into a note. Vibrato is not about mechanics but about feeling, expression and inflection. Show them that the note needs more vibrato because it’s the apex of a phrase, and help them learn to feel the necessity of that rather than providing a mechanical solution.
• Teach your students to observe the hierarchy of beats with how they inflect the strong beats. In short, weak leads to strong 4-1-2-3-4-1-2-3, etc. Proper use of vibrato will follow naturally.
• Make sure your students are blowing sufficient air along with the vibrato. Playing with vibrato requires being able to move more air than just making a basic sound. If there isn’t enough air, the pulses will sound kind of squarish and won’t add anything to the warmth or quality of the sound.

Here are a few examples from the band literature to illustrate the above points.

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.