In the last six months or so I’ve moved from whistle to flute. It’s been fun to pick up a whistle now and then and feel the difference in play! I don’t want to give up whistle, but I can see that the better I get on the flute, the more the whistles get ignored.
I found that for me the helpful thing in the second octave was practice in sustaining the notes and getting a feel of what my body (breath, lips, throat) was doing to sustain a good, or at least decent) sound.
and yay! … I’m hoping for my Casey Burns boxwood to arrive sometime this month!
I don’t think anyone has mentioned this, although the rice grain exercise may be close. One of my teachers taught me that the lips were sealed gently until a small amount of air “unsealed” them. This was to counteract my habit of keeping them way too open.It forced me to economize and to rely on less air. I personally do not think that you need to “strengthen” an embouchure, but rather to minimize it and focus it. I hope that helps.
Just my two cents worth. I too am just starting the flute. Bought myself a Tipple for christmas and it is coming along quite well. I’m teaching myself as there are not many flute players around me and I find the info here very very helpful.
Jem you a wealth of knowledge. I am however going to slightly disagree with your advice that you have to blow harder to get the 2nd octave on the whistle. I think that it is well known that most of the great whistle players play with their lips gently resting on the mouthpiece. I do as well. The second octave is more easily achieved by tightening your lips instead of blowing harder when playing the whistle. I agree that there may be a little push but I find that is the case with the flute as well. That being said. I think that whistle players should practice the exercise you describe for the flute. i.e. tightening your lips instead of blowing harder and try the same on their whistle. It does work and it is a good general approach to jumping the octaves. This will also train your lips for an easier transition for the flute. INMVHO.
Fair enough. I’ve never encountered that (re: whistles), either in the flesh nor spoken or written about that I remember! I’d like to consider myself a competent whistle player, but I was not giving advice about whistle playing in any sense whatever rather I was describing what happens/is done by, I suggest, the vast majority of whistle players of all levels of competence.
Yes, one rests the tip of the whistle beak lightly between the lips, but not normally in such a position as to be able to seek to control the size of the airway input aperture with the lips… not that that isn’t potentially feasible on some whistles - though not, I should think, on very narrow windway ones like Overtons/Goldies. In any case, I would rather doubt quite how much difference attempting such a technique could really have in terms of the physics - most windways are long enough that any increase in air pressure and air-stream speed effected by narrowing the lips would have reduced/evened out by the time the air exits from the windway into the window and strikes the labium blade. The only way to get the pressure in the whole windway to rise and therefore increase the speed of the exiting airstream is to force more air into it - i.e. blow harder. (The thumb has to be over the end of the hose to make the water squirt; pinching the hose 6" from the end won’t have much effect on the water stream from the undistorted open end, short of squashing it so much you diminish or cut off the flow.)
When playing a transverse flute, the lip-aperture is the last influence, totally governing the intensity (together with the supply pressure), shape and direction of the airjet across the embouchure, a distance so short that controllable effects can be achieved before the wider, static, ambient air’s influences cancel things out. (To continue my analogy, it is equivalent to the thumb over the end of the hose.)
One more fun exercise - take a piece of paper (A4?) and place it against a wall at face height. Stand in front of it and try to keep it in place by blowing at it. move away and see how far away you can get and for how long you can keep the paper stuck.
Also, see how far away you can get and still blow out a candle…
Another tradition is to get the overtones out of beer bottles:-) I can get at least four (including the base tone) and sometimes five out of an empty half litre Paulaner bottle. Warning; this behaviour will get you thrown out of pubs!
An excercise i practice: with xxx xxx fingering (all holes closed) i play all three D’s up and down. I have actually produced 5 notes from that fingering, two above third D.