Dear fellow flautists…
My tone is OK but “sometimes” it sounds a bit weak compared to other flautists. Any advice or exercises that work in improving my tone “quickly” are greatly appreciated. 
Time is an issue here as I have to “brush up” for the Christmas charity concert and “nerves” are an issue.
Go raibh maith agaibh. Thanks!
F.D.
Long held notes is the conventional wisdom.
I’ve been told also that the low D is the foundation for the flute. In other words, if you can get a good hard low D, then the rest of notes will fall into line much more easily
I’ve recently started trying to improve my tone - and the long notes approach really does work. Also, to ensure that you get used to the tiny changes from note to note, I use the approach in Grey Larsen’s flute and whistle tome - start on B say, hold the note for roughly half your maximum duration whilst concentrating on getting the fattest tone you can, then drop down without articulation to A and hold to the end of your breath. Repeat for G to F#, E to D. After just a few days of this kind of exercise I am finding much more control and nuance in my tone and finding the zone and keeping it is easier. Oh, and it’s as if my lips have been to the gym - they tingle from the exercise!
Since control of your embouchure is the key aspect to tone production, and a well directled stream of air is key, exercises that tighten the embouchure can also help - I do the overtones exercise which is to play a low D then flip it up to the next overtone (D’) without articulation - swap back and forth really feeling what you are doing to the embouchure. Don’t cheat by using tonguing or throating to help the jump! Then try for the next overtone, which is A’, then the next D’’ and see how far you can go! Once you can go up and down the overtones try jumping to arbitrary overtones eg - D to A’ etc. Again taken from Grey’s book this is a great exercise.
Finally, something I got from a workshop with Mick McGoldrick a couple of weeks ago - play a G which frees one hand - use this free hand to feel how much air is NOT going into the embouchure hole - typically people with weak tone (and a more Boehm flute style of sweet puffy tone) have a lot of air escaping or blown across the hole. Try then to focus the airstream more and direct it into the flute so that you can’t feel air escaping with your hand - at the same time if your lucky the tone becomes edgier, more reedy.
Good luck!
Thanks very much, I will practise as much as I can.
Any other tips are most welcome…
Here’s one I got from a professional Boehm flautist. It’s related to the overtone exercise. You want to finger a low D, but play as softly as possible. You should get some very high, very soft overtones, and work around up there, to try to control whichever one you want. They almost sound like a ghost is playing your flute!
You can hear the same effect at the end of Noel Rice’s tune on Wooden Flute Obsession I. He dies out, but as he does, you hear these very soft, very high little whistle-y noises, as he fades right out.
No doubt this is an exercise that will help you get better tone, but it may come at the expense of getting a good hard low D. The hard low D, deep and growly, is totally absent of these higher overtones yet right at the edge of bursting into them. Which is why, when you miss hitting the hard low D, you end up playing the next-higher D. Even the best flute players, such as Matt Molloy, do this a lot. There’s no shame in it!
But maybe this could help your low D if you’re able to do the exercise to perfection and then when you want to hit the low D you can just program your lips to do exactly the opposite of what you did to get the high-overtone ghost tones. In theory, if you’re able to do that out should pop a perfect hard low D!
Really, though, any of these exercises that helps you gain pinpoint control over your embouchure is going to improve your tone.
BTW, Noel Rice (who you mentioned doing this) plays the silver Boehm flute. (But you probably already knew that.) So maybe what he does is a silver-flute thing. I don’t know, as I play on the wooden flute and haven’t tried it myself. Maybe I should…
That overtone thing does work on wooden flutes, though I’ve not been able to get as many as easily as on the Bohem flute. I think, unless I’m doing something different. Another one is playing a scale in the second octave, but only moving the fingers of your right hand(assuming you play righty). You do the first 4 notes(d-e-f-g) normally, but then put your fingers all back down for the next note(a) and lift them in sequence again for the last 3 notes (b-c#-d). Or something like that. It’s been a while since I’ve done that, so I may remember it slightly wrong, but I don’t think so. Sorry to be so vague!
I find this advice a bit misleading, since you are not actually blowing any air into the flute, even if it may seem so by directing the airstream downwards. All the air blown “into” the hole is actually going into the air surrounding the embouchure to the outside, and it is not “escaping”. The air in the flute vibrates, it is a static vibrating column of air, air does not move through the flute.
So all you can feel with a hand in front of the embouchure hole is if the airstream is more powerful focussed “across the hole” (more blow on your hand), or more diffused, which is the desirable state for a powerful tone, since more energy has been transmitted to the vibrating column of air inside the flute.
Thanks for that correction Hans - you are of course absolutely right, but from the perception of the player that is how it feels even if it isn’t an accurate description of the physics. You raise an interesting point though, which I hadn’t really considered - if you don’t feel as much or any air reaching your hand once the stream is focussed, but the air isn’t really going into the flute, where is it going? You seem to be saying that if you succeed in getting most of the energy into the air column in the flute, the air is then much more dispersed rather than still in the form of a stream as it left the lips. This makes good sense to me, and maybe on reflection sharing that ‘proper’ understanding with a player might indeed help them improve their tone.
That is what I feel. The air is just going in lots of directions, instead of predominantly one.
I like using low G as a starting point for tone development. It’s a fairly easy note to hit and control.
Start with that G. Play it normally, then really concentrate on adding speed and support to your air until the note is just about to jump to the upper octave. (You will have to breathe at some point during this–that’s ok! Just return to the point in the exercise where you were at when you had to breathe.)
Now keeping the same speed of air and the same support, concentrate on making the hole between your lips as small as you can get it by pressing the lips together and pulling the corners of the mouth down. What you are after is the same sound and volume, but using much less air. Note that the speed of the airstream doesn’t change, just its width.
As you get good at this you will find that the tone gets even more focused and aquires a kind of cutting edge, almost like an oboe. That’s the basic woodenflute sound I like to strive for.
Now once you get good at this on G, go down a note and repeat on F-sharp. Then E, and only once you’ve “got it” on F# and E do you go on down to low D.
Then go to the D one octave up, and repeat, only this time moving up the flute: start with d, one it’s good move up to e, then f#, then g, etc.
I have had good luck with this routine. I can’t lay claim to inventing it–I found this on a website years ago but don’t remember where.
–James
Yes, doing this exercise really requires your embouchure to be pin-point small. – at least that’s the only way I’ve been able to do it.
I’ve tried getting that Noel Rice sound on wooden flute, and kind sort of do it. Of course, even on a Boehm flute, I don’t sound anything like him, though. 
That’s the way I try to practice, and the tone I try to capture. Although I’ve noticed that the tone that happens when I practice, compared to what happens when I “play” are often 2 separate things…
There’s the challenge!
Mary
This may be true for getting the best tone on the Boehm flute, but it’s absolutely wrong for Irish traditional playing on the wooden flute. You want to direct the airstream from your embouchure INTO the flute. It’s the angle at which you do this that produces the waves in the air within the flute and creates the sound. The number of finger holes covered determines the frequency of these waves (the shorter the length of the vibrating airstream, the higher the freqency and therefore the higher the pitch; it’s actually not quite this simple, but this is the basic idea.)
And the air does move through the flute, contrary to what you say. Try playing your flute in a very cold room and hit a low D. A puff of steam may come out of the end of your flute, as happened to me once in a session in a very cold pub. (I wondered why everyone was looking strangely at me…) Or play that same low D and have someone place their hand over the end of your flute, which will stop the sound. Neither of these things would occur if air was not moving through the flute and out the other end.
The exercise mentioned above for placing your hand in front of your embouchure as you are playing and making sure you feel little or no air blowing onto your hand is exactly what you need to be doing. If you’re getting a good tone and still feeling a lot of air on your hand, then you’re blowing WAY harder than you need to be.
The airstream is split by sharp edge of the far side of the embouchure hole. This splitting of the airstream causes a vibrating turbulence to form via the Bournelli effect.
This vibrating turbulence (called an “air reed”) then sets the column of air inside the flute into motion, forming a standing wave. This vibrating column of air inside your flute produces the sound you hear.
All flutes and whistles form sound in this manner. On a whistle, there is a windway to guide the air to the blade. On a flute, your lips are the windway.
Some air moves into the flute as an unavoidable consequence of having split the airstream; however, this air is essentially wasted and does not take part in sound production.
As an interesting demonstration, if you have access to a Hall crystal flute, play it for a few minutes in a cold room. You can see patterns in the condensate which show the passage of this extra air.
–James
Well I said the air column in the flute is vibrating but static, you say the air moves through the flute. I just now made a little experiment, by taping over the bottom three holes, plus the two on the foot section, and covering the top three and played a low D, feeling the air behind the flute’s end with my free hand. I can feel a very soft movement of air coming out the bottom. But it is very little compared to what comes out my mouth. And it may be more noticeable with a conical flute than with a cylindrical one, since the conical shape adds more focus to any small air stream coming out the end. Putting my hand underneath my chin I can feel a much stronger air movement. Putting my hand opposite my mouth I can feel very little. I conclude from this that the biggest part of the air stream does not go through the flute, but goes in a downwards and slightly forward direction past the embouchure hole. Only a very small part of the air stream comes out the other end of the flute.
And obviously when you place your hand right over the end the sound stops, since the vibrating air column inside the flute needs two open ends, and moves in and out of these ends just a small way in the frequency of the sound produced.
My remarks were not intended to discredit the exercise of feeling the air in front of your embouchure hole, nor the practice of directing the air stream downwards “as if blowing into” the flute. But we are not in the business of blowing air through the flute, we should play clarinet for that, or trumpet.
The air jet vibrates
The jet of air from the player’s lips travels across the embouchure-hole opening and strikes against the sharp further edge of the hole. If such a jet is disturbed, then a wave-like displacement travels along it and deflects it so that it may blow either into or out of the embouchure hole. The speed of this displacement wave on the jet is just about half the air-speed of the jet itself (which is typically in the range 20 to 60 metres per second, depending on the air pressure in the player’s mouth). The origin of the disturbance of the jet is the sound vibration in the flute tube, which causes air to flow into and out of the embouchure hole. If the jet speed is carefully matched to the frequency of the note being played, then the jet will flow into and out of the embouchure hole at its further edge in just the right phase to reinforce the sound and cause the flute to produce a sustained note. To play a high note, the travel time of waves on the jet must be reduced to match the higher frequency, and this is done by increasing the blowing pressure (which increases the jet speed) and moving the lips forward to shorten the distance along the jet to the edge of the embouchure hole. These are the adjustments that you gradually learn to make automatically when playing the flute. Flutists are usually taught to reduce the lip aperture when playing high notes.
I conclude from this that YOU are putting a very small portion of your airstream into the flute, so even if all that air ends up coming out the other end it’s not gonna feel like that much. Even when I put ALL of my airstream into the flute, it doesn’t feel as strong coming out the other end for at least three reasons: (1) the diameter of the stream at the end of the flute is 2-3 times greater than it is at the embouchure hole where it goes in, meaning that the air pressure coming out is going to be correspondingly less than it was going in, (2) there is a pressure drop as the airstream makes the right-angle turn from blowing in to the embouchure hole toward heading out the end of the flute, and (3) drag along the sides of the bore reduces the pressure of the moving airstream. All air that you put into the flute (by volume) eventually must come out, otherwise the flute would expand and explode like a balloon (assuming a very long blowing time - but the principle holds nonetheless).
Air comes out the embouchure hole and the six tone holes of the flute, as well from the end of the flute. The air coming out of the embouchure hole is vibrating at the frequency of the airstream inside the flute, which produces the note. This is why flutes are miked near the embouchure hole.
So, you seem to be saying that air blown into a clarinet or a trumpet does eventually come out the other end. (And you’re right.) Ever feel the pressure of the air coming out of the bell end of a clarinet? It’s about the same as the air pressure you feel coming out the end of a flute if all the airstream is directed into the flute. Another point in favor of the conclusion that the airstream is indeed moving through the flute.
James, note what the sharp edge of the far side of the embouchure hole looks like on a wooden flute. It’s like the side of a cliff with a somewhat sharp edge at the top. So when you direct an airstream with a pressure high enough that you can feel it on your hand at this cliff face, you can choose to angle that stream straight across the top edge, or point it down at up to a very steep angle, and the sharp edge at the top of the cliff face will still break the stream in two. By putting all of the stream into the flute, as I’m saying, keep in mind that you can’t really do that. Some of your stream will spill out over the top of the cliff face, producing the vibrating turbulence. The pressure of the airstream on the outside of the flute will be so low though as to not be felt by a nearby hand, which is not to say that it’s not there. So I guess technically when I say all of your airstream should go into the flute, what I’m really saying is ALMOST all of it, with that almost being as large as is physically possible in order to produce a tone. Does that make sense? (Note: on the Boehm flute, YMMV. I speak only wooden flute.)
You’re referring to what are known as “whistle tones” to Boehm flutists,and is an embouchure exercise. However, the fade-out of Noel’s track as it appeared on WFO1 was the work of the mastering engineer, as the next tune in the set involved other instruments. If I recall correctly, the tune ends with the piano chord that begins the next tune in the set. I’ll have to listen carefully to hear if there is anything whistle-y going on.
Kevin Krell