I’m curious how long folks here played before they really felt they hit that magic turning point from a rank newbie to someone who could really play a tune?
I bought a flute two years ago this month and for the first year I didn’t really spend much time on it. Every couple days I’d pick it up and try to get a note out of it. Then, last year I went to East Durham and took Frank Claudy’s beginner flute class and the total immersion in Irish music for a full week really energized me.
Since then, I’m been making it a point topractice every day and working to identify the areas I need to focus on. Also, last November I took the plunge and started going to one of the local sessions. Luckily they were happy to have other join in, even if they didn’t know their embochure from a hole in the ground.
I still have a very plain playing style, I can’t quite knock out a reel at session speed yet, but every once in a while I hit a tune that feels right and instead of being completely lost, I can see in the distance where I want to be and what it will take to get there.
Give me another twenty years or so and I may know what I’m doing.
Not trying to be flip here, but I’ll never “have it”, because the bar gets raised all the time. What I have are satisfying moments given whatever my level is at the time. Competency is, to me, a very relative thing.
As to finally being able to get through a tune or a set at a fastpaced session, everyone’s different. Took me about two years, more or less, if memory serves. Probably longer. Then again, I started hard at ITM in early middle age, so it might be easier for those who have youth on their side.
Most people become better players a little bit at a time. Some people are geniuses, and i don’t know how it is for them. Did Matt Molloy wake up one day to the realization that he was the best player in the world? Did Chris Norman? Somehow i doubt it.
If you can put lots of time into your playing, say, 10 hours a day, you will see a lot of improvement fast. In my experience, it’s after the first 2 hours of practice (daily practice), that you start really improving. But nowadays i can rarely put in one hour a day consistently.
So, if you’re an amateur player like me, you have to learn to live with less lofty goals. I’d say that it would take 1 or 2 years to go from complete beginner in the flute to being able to play fast tunes. If you have the extra time, you might make it in 6 months. You’ll be playing slow tunes much sooner, of course. It’s MUCH more important to concentrate on the quality of the sound and the steady beat than trying to play faster. Make this your mantra: slow and tight is better than fast and sloppy.
Don’t worry, it will come to you. It’s just a flute, after all not a fiddle or some other blasted thing.
Ya know, every day is a new flute day with me. It took months just to understand what embocher realy ment. Then it was scales. Up and down and up and down. When I tried to play a tune it was almost funny in a tragic sort of way. I could not play a tune!! So I played scales. And then just messed around with different runs and stuff. Still every time I tried to play a tune that I knew well on the whistle it was like wind in the rigging. So last month I said the hell with it and stopped playing scales and just started playing tunes. After a week or so of wind noise I started to get patches of a tune, and every once in a while half a tune would come out. I was in heaven. In the last two weeks there have been a couple of magic moments that just blew me away. The smile on my face did not help my playing but man oh man I think Im on my way. It is realy nice to know that it takes a year or two to start playing with some compatence. I started in Feb of this year. The struggle has been monumental but now, Oh Boy. I do practice about 2 hours a day and sometimes two sessions of 2 hours a day. Sometimes I go untill my lips give out. I realy dont keep track of the time I play. I pick up a flute as often now as I pick up a whistle. Maybe even more. I have no idea what I`ll be doing in two years time but I bet what ever it is my flute will be with me.(and a whistle or two of course)
Almost the same experience as Blackbeer and in the same time frame. It has been a struggle but I am playing more tunes now than noise. My latest accomplishment is The Butterfly at half speed.
But to get there I had to live with the flute, picking it up any chance I got for any length of time. But my standard routine was to practice one hour to two hours before going to work in the morning, forty minutes at lunch and then another hour or so after work. And it has paid off.
It has been the most frustrating thing that I have ever had or wanted to learn, but when it works ---- oh does work!
Hang in there! Practice when you can. If the practice isn’t going well put the flute down and come back to it later.
If I can do it as one who closer to geezer than youth, so can you.
I have been playing about 6 months now and i know enough tunes and i can play them fast to hold my own in a session. I am young and that is why my parents say i caught on to it so quickly. Comparing myself to a friend jack who has been playing for a year, i dont have anything agaisnt jack, but i blow him out of the water. I meet people how have played for ten years and dont sound like it. I guess what i am saying is it takes time, some learn fast some slow. Then i find myself sitting next to paul mcgrattan in a session and i ask myself am i ever going to play like that.
So i am lucky i picked up flute and whistle at age 13 so now i have a lot of time to get better at it.
-andrew cassidy
i hope that made sense
Yes, by any means. I don’t recommend leaving a wooden flute assembled all the time, but if it’s metal or plastic it won’t hurt it… have a flute that you can leave assembled and at hand to mess with for a few minutes whenever you have time.
When you’re starting, consistency is important. It’s better to practice 15 minutes a day consistently than practice 10 hours then not touch the flute for a couple of weeks.
For the folks who posted saying that they’re practicing multiple hours a day: if you’re going to invest this much time, try to get a teacher (if you don’t already have one, of course). It will make a big difference.
For everybody: don’t give yourself a hard time. The sound and agility will come with time. And if they don’t this doesn’t make you a bad person… :roll:
Well glauber I just put my rosewood Dixon away for the day. Truely a marathone day. 5 hours. My Almound blastic flute is always ready and at hand. Realy a fine sounding flute. A teacher would be so grand, but alas it aint a gona happen. Jeez I hate these wippersnappers that pick this stuff up so fast. Thats why I quit skiing years ago. I kept trying to keep up with the kids and nearly killed my self. Well more power to them I say. But Im pretty proud of my 55 year old lungs right now. So it`s onword and upword.
Thanks for all the replies. I actually feel pretty good about where I’m at, i was just curious about other folks experiences.
I wish I had more time per day to practice, but a job and a girlfriend leave me with only a few hours per day free, not necessarily in a contiguous block. However, I do what I can.
One nice thing about having a polymer flute as my secondary is that I can leave it lying around the house for when I have a few minutes to spare or a tune is buzzing around my head. I don’t think I’d want to do that with my Copley.
What I need to do is become independently wealthy so I can just sit about reading books and playing my flute.
I think we have consensus. I speak Chinese, and it sometimes it awes people, catches Westerners off guard and floors Chinese. But I’ve spent 13 years with it, struggling, always feeling that there is something I cannot express, some character I forget…and as Lao Zi writes in the Tao Te Ching: the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.
[ as Lao Zi writes in the Tao Te Ching: the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.
No different with the flute. Practice.
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Very, very true. I like the language comparison. I speak Japanese and definitely have my good and bad days. Sometimes, I can just chatter away, fill out forms, etc. Other days, (particularly if I have to meet with my ogre-like boss from the local board of ed.), everything I know goes flying right out the window and I can’t say or read a thing. It’s the same with the flute. I’ve been playing for almost seven years now and I had some great days at the beginning and I still have terrible days now. Some days, I can just pick it up and play and go flying through a bunch of tricky fast tunes at a session, other days, as Paul McGrattan famously put it, I can’t get a note out of it. Not once have I ever felt entirely "comfortable’’ with the instrument.
I remember Iain MacDonald, a brilliant flute player and piper from Scotland, said that it took him about twenty years to feel comfortable playing the flute. That’s not the least bit surprising, even though early recordings of him show him to have been a fantastic player even after only a couple of years playing the instrument.
It’s an instrument. It’s a lifelong adventure, and “getting there” is not just half the fun, it’s all of the fun. If any of us flute players, even Matt Molloy or some other flute deity, got up and felt like we had acheived complete satisfaction with our playing ability, there wouldn’t be much point in playing anymore, would there?
I know what you mean – I have the same experience both with languages and with the flute.
I speak Spanish and am tutoring a Spanish-speaking person near me in English. I speak fine with her (with some use of the dictionary), but if I have to talk to her parents, who don’t speak a word of English, I freeze up completely.
On the flute, I play fine at home. But when I go to a session or try to tape myself practicing it totally falls apart. I’ve had good sessions – usually larger sessions when I’m way in the corner and it seems like no one is paying any attention. But boy I’ve had clunkers. Especially when certain very judgemental people come to the sessions and tell everyone else what to do and not do. It makes me feel very self-conscious.
I’ve been playing about 7 years. (Lessons for one year, somewhere around year 5, and then I moved away from my teacher). The first year was all about not squeaking and making all of the notes sound. The second year some of the tunes started sounding like music rather than a collection of notes. The third year I had one lesson and spent the next year trying to de-classicalize my playing. I didn’t really get ready to play anything at session speed until fairly recently (somewhere late in year 5 perhaps). It wouldn’t kill me to know more tunes. The frustrating thing about moving, even from DC to Philadelphia is that the tunes that everyone plays at every session are different, so it’s sort of like starting over.
As someone who picked up the flute later in life, I’m always aware how much less I know than the people who have been playing ITM since they were four. Perhaps I will never catch up. On the other hand, I mostly play the flute to please myself, so I suppose it doesn’t really matter.
I’d practice about 6 hours a day if I had them (and if my husband was a musician himself or was deaf and didn’t care). About 2 days a week, I’m lucky to get an hour in due to my bizarre work schedule. However, the boxwood flute I just bought demands to be played EVERY DAY, so I need to make some adjustments. Hopefully an hour is enough for my long days. Anyone aware of a minimum for flute care?
I want to tell my own experience, similar to others ones:
I’ve been playing flute over the the last 12 years more or less. Every year I could see any improvement, I can play any tune since some years ago, but ONLY IN THE LAST YEAR the sound of the flute began to be the one I was looking for. I’m sure in five or six years this feeling will be the same.
Serafin.
I think this is an important point, I’m doing this strictly for my own pleasure. As long as there’s progress being made and each month is a little better than the month before, I’m happy.
Well, that and as a long as dogs don’t howl when I play and folks in the session don’t pack up and leave when I assemble my flute.
For myself I think this ties into another aspect of my personality. I’m not very competitive with other people, but I am against myself. I started a marathon training program a few weeks ago and I’m amongst the slowest in the group. However, it doesn’t bother me because I can see the improvment and every time I go out I’m competing against what I’ve done before, not what other folks are doing.
not a fiddle or some other blasted thing.