I’ve been playing whistle about a year and flute about 6 months. Flute is a Burns D olive wood. I feel like I have a decent embouchure and tone but not the wind. I can barely make it 4 measures in a tune like Hector the Hero (3/4 waltz) without having to take a breath. It’s much better than it was but I think I’ve hit a plateau.
My question: do I just keep playing and let it increase organically or should I be doing some exercises to help?
TIA
Bill
I’m not a flute teacher to take this with a grain of salt, just my personal experience in learning to play “Irish” flute. At six months I was having the same difficulty finding enough air. It gradually improved over time, and it’s not something I think about much now.
I believe the improvement was mostly due to slowly developing a more efficient and focused embouchure, so I’m wasting less air. Recently I’ve noticed I’m getting a slightly louder and noticeably “harder” edged tone that I like very much, and this has developed in almost direct relationship to needing fewer places to take a breath in a tune. That’s why I’m fairly sure embouchure development is responsible for both benefits in tone and needing less air.
Maybe someone else can offer some embouchure and breathing exercises. I just got here through patience and almost daily practice playing the tunes. Six months is not much time on the learning curve, so keep at it!
Bill,
Here are a few suggestions:
You may need to also work on the speed with with you are inhaling in order to get that full breath quickly - our natural tendency is to breath slowly when we want to take a deep breath, so it may take practice to get comfortable inhaling quickly.
Focus on making your embouchure smaller, from top to bottom rather than from side to side. Don’t do this by tightening up and squeezing your mouth and lips, just concentrate on making the aperture smaller in a relaxed way.
Practice looooong tones, this will help greatly and give you some objective feedback on how well you’re doing making that embouchure more efficient. It will also help you improve your tone and intonation. Record your long tone practice sessions and compare from week to week.
Keep with it and you’ll soon be wondering how on earth you managed to be running out of air so quickly x weeks/months ago.
This is only tangentially related to the OP as it doesn’t address breath capacity per se, but it can be of help to those with chronically limited tidal volume, and besides, in terms of performance it’s good practice anyway: When taking breaths, mix it up by not taking them at the same time every time. Rather, intentionally use breath-taking as a rhythmic device that gives a bit of tasty punctuation here and there in interesting spots. Of course it’s got to make sense to the ear, though, and it’s as the tune permits. You take breaths in tactical timings that don’t merely refuel the tank, so to speak, but also create phrasings that become an integral part of the musicscape itself, no less than the fingering. Done that way, some breath intakes will be less, and some more, depending. The main thing is that whether the breath taken is less or more, it’s one in a succession that keeps you comfortably topped off so you can keep going smoothly and without dread. IOW, rather than trying to play without a hitch - which, barring circular breathing, is impossible - instead call the shots by using the hitch to the simultaneous advantage of both your aesthetic hand and your breathing needs. Your ears will tell you if you’re taking too many breaths in too close a succession too often - one tries, of course, to also be able to do long runs - but OTOH you definitely don’t want to heedlessly keep playing until all your breath is gone; that’s far too late.
In taking breaths, just as in all else, it’s musically important not to be monotonous.
A question, ripleywm: You mentioned Hector the Hero. Do you have trouble making it to the end of a phrase, such as the first one, for example?
These responses are fantastic. Thanks everyone!
Yes, this is correct.
TBH, we would have to see you either in person or on a vid to get a sense of why this is happening. There could be a number of factors, but embouchure comes first to mind: If the embouchure is inefficient, it takes a lot more breath to get tone. With a truly good embouchure, it should take only a bit more breath than you would use for talking (!) to get any tone you want, including a loud, ringing tone. It’s true. The more your embouchure develops (and by that I mean fine-tuning; it’s not a matter of effortfully powering your way into it, although you’ll probably have to go through a period of that as a phase in the learning process before you eventually discard it), you’ll be surprised at how it improves your efficiency, and there’s no end to the possibility for continued development; in terms of execution, which is to say what the embouchure does, the difference between 6 months and five years might be subtle but the results enormous, and likewise five years compared to twenty. The longer you go, those differences can be hard-won, but the rewards can be huge, so you have a lot of exploration ahead of you; but rather then letting that daunt you, take it as good news, because it means you don’t have to be stuck so long as you put the work into unlocking the secrets of what your better and better embouchure can be. At six months, you’re hardly in a position to know what a good embouchure is yet. Trust me on this; your difficulty in even making it through a phrase speaks volumes. If you have an advanced player or a reputable teacher you could consult one-on-one, that would be best.
Yes, everything you said, Nano. Except for: “the difference between 6 months and five years might be subtle but the results enormous,”
In fact, the difference between 6 and 12 months is huge, the difference between 1 and 2 years is huge, the difference between 2 and 4 years is huge. That may sound like a long road, but that’s actually for the better. It is a long and enjoyable road.
I agree with that. In my defense, I was trying for compression, because I have the bad habit of blackening a page. 
What they said.
Personally I never practiced exercises but found that playing any tune enough times let me find spacing, and any breath for me is just a fun part of playing, i.e. not stressed and not at a point of stress. If I play a lot (say a few hours a day) over the space of a week or so, then I find myself much more in touch with my breathing, probably embouchure also, to the point where I never feel short no matter what or how I am playing (obviously I don’t play a whole tune on one breath either etc.) . That point I reached after about a year of playing though, and even now if I don’t play whole tunes for a while (i.e. when learning new ones or just taking a rest from playing), it takes a few days of solid playing to be back in shape.
It’s not really advice of any sort, just own experience.
Great reply’s. Thanks very much.
You might also look into the Arnold jacobs breathing exercises. A search should take you to .Docs or .PDFs & YouTube videos illustratiing and discussing them. Focus is on Brass instruments, but should be applicable to others.
Here’s one document: