Just wondering if anyone else has had this experience:
I’m without a simple system flute for a little while (Burns is with Casey getting worked on; trading in other flute with Doc) and have been playing a lot of high-D whistle. I’m enjoying playing whistle but it seems to be adversely affecting my ability to play my silver flute, i.e. I’m not as focused in tone throughout the 3 octaves. It seems to me that I play whistle best with a tight embouchure around the mouthpiece. I’ve seen others let the whistle flop around in the mouth but that seems to me inefficient. Could this development of, in a sense, larger mouth opening with the whistle embouchure be making it more difficult to produce the smaller, tighter flute embouchure? I guess with practice it could be possible to play both well, but I only have so much time and energy. I’m thinking I may need to play flute mostly and whistle infrequently in order to keep my fluting at its best.
I’ve definitely noticed my flute tone sucks if I switch over right from playing whistle. I think part of My problem is that my current whistle is a Susato, which has a fairly thick mouthpiece (right now I’m waiting for a Burke, yay!). When I move over to my flute I feel like there’s still that big gap between my lips, and that makes it really hard to focus the tone. It only takes a few minutes to get over it, though. Having said that, I also play an awful lot of Boehm flute, so I’ve spent a lot of time already developing my flute embouchure.
I don’t notice that whistle-playing affects my flute embouchure, (playing reeds definitely did – so I stopped).
However, I DO notice that it always takes me ten minutes of warm-up before my flute embouchure hits its stride, (meager though it be). I’m not a performer, but if I were I’d definitely need to warm up backstage before attempting to play before an audience. I wonder if that’s a problem that you get past with more time and experience.
is this a lippey thing or is this a ‘the flute is cold’ thing… because im under the impression that when my flute is cold and dry it cant play and when its warm and moist it rocks out.
Whatever embouchure you use for the whistle, it will necessarily be different to what you use for the flute and you’ll be temporarily confused when switching from one to the other - unless as you say, you can spend plenty of time with both and the change becomes easier - automatic even. This is also true for the business of air control and holding the instruments.
I know that during periods where I have time to play both a lot, the switch between them is noticeably easier. But I wouldn’t say that the embouchure needed for one would be bad for the embouchure of the other - it’s more a matter that you’re simply going to spend less of your practise time on the flute if you also spend some of it on the whistle. If there was a risk of one embouchure type actually being bad for the other, people wouldn’t double on sax and flute which require very different embouchures for example…
On the positive side I find that playing the whistle first does help to loosen up my fingers for the flute.
This is what I tend to do for the same reasons of limited time available though I do get periods where I even do the reverse.
My experience is that whistle playing in no way hurts my flute playing.
Especially if one has a tight embouchure on the whistle. Exercise/strength
is exercise/strength. If fact, after playing whistle for a long while
I picked up a flute for the first time and, to my amazement,
had the embouchure to play it–not that I didn’t need a lot
more work, but I could play tunes OK. I don’t recommend
whistle as a substitute for flute, of course, but I
doubt very much it will hurt. Of course lots of good
flooters play whistle too.