Though a brass player by training, I’ve been messing around with flute for the past 6 months or so – actually, playing nearly every day. Thanks to the Flute Pedagogy class I had 20 years ago in college, I know the very basics, and can get a decent tone on my instrument (a Firth & Pond 4-key), including on bottom D & E.
But can anyone point me to any good book(s) with some embouchure-building exercises or techniques? Mine seems to tucker out at odd times – I can start “The Old Grey Goose” with a strong, clear tone, but sometimes by the time I reach the end, my low notes are thin or even gone altogether.
(I realize lessons with a good teacher would be the best solution, and am looking for one; but what can I do in the mean time?)
I used to have the same problem. I play the Fife which is similar to the flute.
My lips use to get sooooo tired that I would have trouble speaking!
I just slowly increased my playing time and kept strengthening my lips by playing. Good luck with your flute playing!
I’m a brass player myself. The teacher who has helped me the most had an interesting observation. She said that it’s hard to teach the flute to brass players because they don’t want to “give up the corners.” What she means is that brass players are conditioned to maintain firmness at the corners of their mouths. The flute embouchure I’ve been taught requires you to relax them. For the first year or so I played I was working way too hard, maintaining tension where it didn’t need to be maintained. My endurance increased when I learned to play more efficiently.
Once I found a good teacher I made more progress in a month than I did my first year. I had initially wanted to try to teach myself. Like Rocky used to say to Bullwinkle, “That trick never works.” (or it takes a whole lot longer)
I think you will find your embouchure really comes online at about 9 months. You’re doing well, it sounds.
Along with the suggestions above I find that playing a higher pitched fife/flute very helpful at
strengthening embouchure, e.g. a Sweetheart A flute. Just play the tunes on that, worthwhile for its own
sake, more interesting than exercises. It’s a lot more demanding and builds a stronger embouchure and it’s fun.
Thanks for the speedy and thoughtful replies! I’ll try each of these suggestions, besides continuing the search for a teacher of course.
MikeS, the mouth-corners issue is very likely a big part of my problem – besides 30 years of horn playing, I’m naturally prone to tensing up things that just don’t need tensing (e.g., my biggest challenge with Uilleann pipes is trying not to strangle the chanter, even though sometimes it seems to deserve it!).
Since you mentioned you were looking for a book… There’s “A Trevor Wye Practice Book for the Flute: Volume 1, Tone” which contains lots of exercices (including harmonics and long tones) and advice to improve one’s tone.
There’s a nice aphorism in it taken from Moyse’s “De la sonorité”: “it takes time, patience, and intelligent work”.
Pretty much as Gwuilleann mentions - the Moyse’ classic ‘De La Sonorité’ and the Trevor Wye Practice Books for the Flute (5 volumes and Alto Flute version available too) are the classics in western Europe. In the USA and Asia, the Rubank Methodology is very popular (and much cheaper than Wye’s, which is much cheaper than the stratospherically priced Moyse’:
Moyse is better as a reference book. Wye’s book is rather dry, and it takes perseverance, but it is very helpful, if you like self-directed learning. The Rubank is probably more approachable and comes in two volumes.
Once you’ve mastered the elements of embouchure, the challenge is stringing together, ‘phrasing’ or sentences in music, to make it sound plausible. After a while, you might try a variety of world flutes, and see how adapting to each one, ‘wrecks’ your embouchure control. In essence, it just teaches a flute player, how primitive his flute embouchure is, until he has sufficient control to move fluidly from one kind of flute embouchure to another…if it doesn’t do you in, during the process of adapting to world flutes, and make you give up altogether.
If for example, you are spending 6 months learning Boehm flute and getting nowhere with your embouchure, then there is something wrong with the method. I know it’s a bit trite (but important) to mention that nothing replaces a real teacher, in teaching embouchure. Having said that, my friend’s son has a regular teacher, and after a year, his embouchure control has had very little work. It only took 30 minutes for me to correct his embouchure, but for some reason, once a week lessons with a teacher didn’t deal with it. I would have been amazed if I had been a teacher, to let a student get away with making wispy second octave notes, and intonation problems like that after a year of playing, but then again, his parents asked for help, because they realised that his flute method wasn’t improving. Telling him to practice 30 minutes on ‘embouchure’ by reading a book for 6 months and doing practice drills really would have done his head in and probably made him hate playing the flute.
Just make sure you get the balance between self-directed embouchure improvement, and getting critical feedback. As a player, I no longer get much critical feedback, and so my flute playing really sucks
