I’m about 9 months into playing the flute, and the biggest thing holding me back is intonation. I don’t think the problem is my flute - I seem to have the same issues when I borrow someone else’s flute.
I like the sound I get from the lower octave, but I have a lot of trouble getting the second octave to flatten so it’s the same pitch as the first octave. Does anyone have any good tricks for flattening that second octave a bit? It gets 20+ cents sharp sometimes, and it sounds bad when I play with other people. I’ve tried changing the angle of air, but it doesn’t seem to help much.
If an experienced player has played your flute and it’s definitely not the flute’s problem, then I’d guess that the real issue is that your bottom octave is flat. You likely aren’t blowing the bottom octave into tune correctly.
Strong focused embouchure, blow down into the hole, try to play the second octave notes less loud (or at least no louder) than the first octave. I think of ‘crafting’ the second octave notes. Takes practice.
You need to work on tightening up your embouchure, especially in the second octave. It is common for new players to have a fairly large, open, embouchure … and here I’m talking about the gap between your lips, not the hole in the flute. This is not only inefficient in terms of air usage, but it also makes it hard to play second octave notes quietly, or in tune. The second octave requires a faster air stream than the lower octave, and this should be achieved by tightening up the embouchure rather than by blowing harder. The latter is a very common mistake new players make, simply because their embouchure muscles are not well trained yet (so they can’t tighten up their embouchure), and it leads to second octave notes being sharp, loud and harsh sounding. As Jim said, practicing playing second octave notes as quietly as possible, and focusing on clarity of tone while playing long notes, is a good way to improve. If you find that your cheek muscles get tired while doing this, then that is a sign you are doing something right. It is exercising those embouchure muscles, and as they strengthen and gain endurance, your embouchure will get tighter and you’ll be able to play those high notes cleaner, quieter, more in tune, and for longer.
If you want a demanding embouchure workout, try playing a piccolo or high pitched fife. After a while doing that, the upper notes on your D flute will seem easy.
The other thing you could try is pushing the cork out a couple of mm, i.e., increase the distance from the center of the embouchure hole to the face of the stopper. This will flatten the second octave notes relative to the first.
Another option to the tuner is to play against a set of drones. There are several web sites available that provide constant drones. This allows you to adjust your embouchure to work with the drones aurally as opposed to watching a tuning meter.
Thank you all for your advice! Much appreciated. I’ll focus on narrowing my airstream rather than blowing harder, and remember to blow into the flute more than across!
Following from suggestions that it’s the bottom octave that’s the problem. I find it a lot harder to change the pitch of the second octave than of the first. You could try setting the tuning slide for the second G against a tuner then blowing the first into tune against a drone.
I also had to work to avoid playing sharp. Jim’s and Paddler’s comments helped me a lot.
One other question is: How much of the embouchure hole do your lips cover?
In-person flute lessons once a month or even once per quarter are very helpful in speeding your learning and correction habits before they become ingrained.
I actually don’t believe this is primarily the problem. Once I sit down and micro-adjust my embouchure a bit, I can get the lower octave loud and clear. It wasn’t like this before, but after months of practice, I’ve gotten the lower octave in tune even with the tuning slide pulled out.
Yes, the advice on here was helpful. Today I think I finally realized what the problem is. It all comes down to blowing too much “across” and not enough “in” in the upper register. I’d heard this advice before, but I needed to be reminded of it. I’ve been playing with a tuner and getting it on the green in both octaves by adjusting my jaw so that the airstream is more downward for the second octave. I just have to remember to jut my jaw out the tiniest, tiniest bit and the second octave flattens into tune. (Hopefully I’m doing this right! It’s possible I completely misinterpreted the advice Flutern and Jim Stone, and what I’m doing just happens to work).
I’m not really sure if the jaw jutting out is what’s causing it to flatten (my guess is that it isn’t). Perhaps it’s making the octave switch easier, allowing me to blow lighter, bringing the note into tune.
In answer to your question, my lip covers very very little of the blowhole itself. Just a millimeter or so.
I think you are right. The tiny movement of the jaw helps to switch octaves, allowing you to avoid doing it by blowing harder. Just thinking about tightening the embouchure for the second octave is usually enough to cause some change. It won’t be long before you don’t have to think about it at all, and it just happens naturally when you think about the sound you want your flute to make. It is a bit of a journey, but developing this intuitively flexible and focused embouchure is one of the great joys of flute playing. I’ve been playing the flute for over 50 years now, so my embouchure seems to just happen naturally. If only I could say the same for my fingering! That used to be the easy bit, but hand problems (a severe case of Dupuytren’s contracture, and the onset of arthritis) have turned the tables me and now that is my main challenge.
In answer to your question, my lip covers very very little of the blowhole itself. Just a millimeter or so.
That sounds like very little coverage. I’ve heard 1/4 to 1/3 of the hole, but I’m not a teacher.
If you cover too little, then you will definitely be sharp. You can adjust the cork, but now you are making adjustments to the flute rather than learning the best technique. You can get used to playing too sharp or too flat, but consider that you want to be somewhere in the middle if you want easy intonation adjustments - up or down.
I only discovered I played too sharp after getting a patent head flute which comes from the factory with a preferred cork placement. Well also, my session mates complained about playing too sharp in the second register. To be fair to me, I play sharp when I’m not warmed up, and also when I get nervous and my embouchure goes to hell.
We’re talking about the bottom lip, right? That’s the only lip that’s “covering” the hole, if by “covering” you mean actually obscuring it. And if I move it forward so it’s covering 1/4 of the hole, everything flattens (particularly the first octave) and it has a really breathy, quiet sound with a rather bad tone. I can only get it to sound good if my bottom lip is barely covering the hole at all.
When I watch flute instructors playing, it doesn’t look like they’re covering the hole that much with their bottom lip either. For example: https://youtu.be/F3sZBlC9ny8?t=321
I was under the impression that you were only sharp in the second octave, and not the first. I don’t think that is caused by a coverage issue, because covering more embouchure hole should flatten both first and second octave more or less equally. It may be worth experimenting with various levels of coverage to get the kind of tone you want, but I don’t think it really affects the octave balance. In my experience, it does have some effect on intonation, in the sense that covering more of the embouchure hole seems to flatten the left hand notes (C#, B, A etc) more than the right hand notes, kind of like pulling out the tuning slide, but at least for me it doesn’t seem to have a different effect in the second octave than the first.
On the cork position issue, I’m not convinced that there is an optimal cork position for a flute taken in isolation of the player. And I know this may be controversial given the patent heads on some R&R flutes. But I think it is important to understand that the player’s mouth and vocal tract cavities, and even face shape, also influence the resonances that occur, and these are different for different players. The flute is only part of the instrument, so to speak. I think each player should experiment with the cork position of their flute in order to find the tone and octave spacing that best matches their goals. And, of course, the goals are also subjective.
Mostly Off Topic:
Paddler, you said you’re dealing with severe Dupuytren’s contracture. I have it in both hands, affecting two fingers on each, had needle treatment followed by surgery with complications on the left around 10 years ago (I’m 69 now). After recovering I rearranged the songs I play on guitar to avoid little-finger stretches.
A year ago I picked up my wooden flute again and found my daily guitar practice had stretched my fingers enough to reach all six holes with a little warming up. I then bought a used 6-key Lehart flute, which I play alone with great pleasure, mostly airs, improvisation, and slowed-down dance tunes. The flute tips and discussion on this forum have been a great help as I work on my embouchure and fingering technique.
My little fingers can’t reach keys, so I only use C, short F, and Bb keys with a rare R1 stretch for a G#. Eventually, I expect R3 will worsen and further limit what I can do but my voice is now much better so, one way or another, there’s a way to keep playing music. Feel free to message me if you have questions about Dupuytren’s.
I think this “covering” should be seen as a “lid on a hinge” covering the hole (where the lid is the lips), not a lid that slides along the hole. So it’s difficult to assign a value to it (be it in fractions or mm). The edge of the embouchure hole should align with the edge of the lower lip to start with, this is the “hinge” (see this video for exemple: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te_22KWgkWI). So when you say you are barely covering the hole at all, you probably got it right. From there you should be able to flatten the notes by changing the angle between the lips and the embouchure hole (consequently you will blow more into the hole than across), but your lip should not slide on the flute, there is only a rolling movement, and it is not huge.
Sometimes people blow harder as they play the 2nd octave, which sharpens the notes. The blowing pressure should remain the same as in the lower octave, but your embouchure needs to become smaller to increase the speed of the air. Air speed needs to get faster as you go higher but you don’t blow harder.
). I came to realize that after reading this book (for Boehm players, but most of it applies to simple system flutes):
I’ll focus on narrowing my airstream rather than blowing harder, and remember to blow into the flute more than across!