A controversial subject, I know, because I’ve just been Googling it! Some say go ahead and some say don’t do it. Some say brass playing will hurt your flute embouchure and some say they’ve played both for years with no problems. But I’m pretty sure we’ve got at least some brass/flute doublers here and interested to hear from you…
While my specific interest is trombone and flute, any brass/flute experiences would be relevant. Having long had a vague interest in trombone and even enquired about lessons at school some forty-odd years ago before taking up the flute, I got myself a pBone (plastic trombone) for fun three years ago after hearing about them from our school brass instructor. Then gave it a wee go before putting it away and hardly touching it for ages till something just recently prompted me to get it out again. And now I’ve been giving it a proper go and finding I can actually play things on it, this thing’s just way too much fun!
So who’s played brass with flute and who thinks what? While I can’t see why working at a brass embouchure should lead to irreversible anti-flute physical changes, that’s probably the one scenario that could yet see me backing right off on the trombone and accepting it’s just an occasional bit of fun I’m not going to get much better at. Otherwise I’m aiming for credible beginner-to-intermediate level, with credible beginner on the fairly short-term agenda (on which note, sure, I play many instruments at jack-of-all-trades level, but the flute’s still increasingly top dog since I got seriously back into woodwinds a few years ago!). I’m not bothered about instantaneous switches and quite prepared to give my lips anything from a few minutes to an hour or two to recover from a beginner trombone thrashing before expecting to get anything like my best flute sound. Just so long as there’s no permanently detrimental effect, which (as suggested above) I can’t see any logical reason for.
Two more things I might just throw into the mix:
Most, if not all, of the ‘brass is bad for flute’ advice I’ve seen relates to ‘blowing across’ silver flute technique rather than ‘blowing down’ trad flute, and it’s thirty-plus years since I took Boehm flute seriously.
The trombone would, of course, have been a good choice for me in the first place with my nine fingers and could yet be a useful standby in years to come if my arthritic fingers keep getting worse!
I haven’t played trumpet in years, but once played trumpet and clarinet and that was never a problem. I do have a couple of points/questions, though:
Is it only brass and flute that’s supposed to be bad? I would think that the muscles used in the trumpet and flute were more similar than reeds and flute, and plenty of people do that (Ian Underwood of the Mothers, Ian McDonald of King Crimson/Foreigner, and Walt Parazaider of Chicago come immediately to mine). Or, brass and flute seem more similar than brass and reeds.
Cross-training is supposed to be good for other muscle groups, so I don’t see why the lips would be different in that respect. To contradict myself, I saw in interview with Hilary Hahn in which she said that when she was young she had to scale back her weight training because her big muscles were overwhelming her small muscles and she was losing some precision playing the violin. (I’m seeing her play Dvorak two weeks from today!)
Jazz great Ira Sullivan plays the trumpet, flugelhorn,
soprano, alto, tenor, baritone saxophones and the concert
and alto flutes with equal ease and facility. Many times
a doubler’s flute tone will suffer. Not in Sullivan’s case
so it can be done. Bob’s example of Ben Jaber is a perfect
one noting the nice sound he gets on the flute. The trombone
embrochure being much more relaxed than the french horn
is probably more conducive to playing the flute.
I’VE been a doubler on trombone and/or sackbut and woodwinds (especially flute) for many years. There came a point when I realised that my brass embouchure was being undermined by playing direct-to-mouth reed instruments, namely clarinet and sax. As the trombone had become my main performance instrument I packed in the reeds. But I never gave up the flute – in fact, I play it more than ever nowadays while keeping my sackbut/trombone chops intact. While I could see that a woodwind embouchure that required reed and mouthpiece to be gripped might have a disruptive effect on brass technique, it has never occurred to me that a flute embouchure, a slight stretching of the lips, would have a deleterious effect and I don’t think it has (within the limitations of my technique). Experts of a more scientific bent who like to pore over those rather grisly anatomical drawings of the lip muscles that appear in some works of pedagogy might disagree, but I can imagine that a flute and a trombone embouchure might even complement each other. Toggling between the two instruments, as I sometimes have to do in early music concerts, can require some rapid adjustment – I waggle or loosen my lips in an exaggerated fashion before switching from sackbut to renaissance flute (with its tiny embouchure hole). But at my level of performance, that is no problem. Of course, if you are aiming for virtuoso mastery of either of the two instruments under discussion, then such an unusual double would probably be inadvisable, but for us jacks of all trades it quite acceptable.
I play flute and trumpet (and other weird things like natural trumpet and cornetto) and have found that playing any other instruments (or singing, for that matter) only improves your playing on all of them, for the most part. Being able to find your pitch with various waveforms kinda reinforces the musicality in all. That said, I would rather play flute and then trumpet in a public setting because the trumpet tends to “moosh” my embouchure for a little while, making the flute a little troublesome, but I played (in public) trumpet and then flute a couple of nights ago and both seemed to be OK. As an aside, I was not able to play the flute well until I switched my trumpet embouchure about 10 years ago to the tongue-forward position espoused by Jerry Callet.
It’s great seeing something other than us usual suspects answering questions. I don’t want to post any less, but I wish longtime lurkers would post more.
I mainly play trombone and tuba, but have played flute for ten years or so. I don’t think they detract from each other but they do require different approaches. A flute teacher I know says that the toughest part of dealing with brass players is, “Getting them to give up their corners.” You need to relax the corners of your mouth in the flute embouchure- it took me a while to learn that. One thing I have found is that I can put down a flute and pick up a trombone immediately, no problem. Going the other way goes better after a half hour break.
Well, now my lips have stopped literally tingling every time I blow the thing…
I’m starting to think Will could be right here. Because not only are the trombone tone and range improving rapidly, but the flute’s sounding satisfyingly solid and vibrant on not a lot of recent practice!
Yep, flute to trombone’s still easier for me too, but not needing anything like the ‘hour or two’ mentioned in my OP!
Well, three months down the line with a Yamaha 354 superseding the pBone in early December, I’m going to come right out and say trombone’s not bad for flute and may even be good for it! For sure, the flute suffers if I don’t play it for a few days, but it does that anyway without trombone and keeps playing very nicely so long as I do some flute (though I’d still make sure to put in the time for performing or recording on it). And, while recognising that my trombone adventure’s only just begun and I’ve still so much to learn, I’m hopefully past the raw beginner stage and chasing that ‘credible intermediate’ goal now…
