Part 1. Low Longtone Warmups (free pdfs)

Dear Flutelovers,

Download free Longtone Warmups (Low/Medium) in pdf here.
(Updated Feb. 4th new and improved version)

In my last blog-post I spoke about Longtones and the best way to practice them, helped along by several videos I made about obtaining "Pure tone".

The often overlooked point about pure tone exercises is that the very first note you play (B natural in the lower octave) should be absolutely GORGEOUS, ringing, pure and celestial; your best, most heavenly flute tone of the day.



When you get a gorgeous B natural, you then proceed to listen to and keep that tone, matching it gradually, by descending semitones, to every other note on the flute.

If your slurred pairs of semitones sound all different in tone quality, like this,



then you will benefit from closing your eyes, listening closely, sensing your embouchure position, steadying your air, and experimenting, in a relaxed way, in matching the two tones. It's a "Zen-like" experience as you continue to listen, repeat, breathe, relax, repeat, listen and improve. What you're truly doing is improving your Ear-Mouth co-ordination. :>)


And the flute embouchure is so flexible, and small changes can result in huge improvements. In truth, sometimes just "thinking a change" in the embouchure is enough to clear up a whole row of notes. Sometimes just releasing all excess tension in the face and throat and letting the air carry the tone is all that's needed. You'll discover this. It's fascinating! :>)

Most flute novices find that their slurred pairs are all different in tone quality as shown above. That's why we need to simply ask for a good flute teacher's help to assist us in figuring out what we're doing that is interrupting our quality of pure, effortless, beautiful, ringing tone down through the basic longtone/puretone exercises. An experienced flute coach who can "spot what you're doing" is the most valuable help you can have during the first few weeks of tone practice.

And once you "get it" you'll be totally amazed, engrossed, and excited by this exercise.
Trust me on that one. :>)

Here are the free TONE WARMUP pages for you to print out:

Tone Warmups - Longtones in low and middle octave.
(Updated Feb. 4th new and improved version)

It's about 161 kb, and can be three hole punched and put in a practice binder (along with other free pdfs linked below).

Also see High Longtones:
http://jennifercluff.blogspot.ca/2012/02/2-higher-longtone-warmups-free-pdfs.html

Please help yourself.
I was originall going to start my own flute book with this warmup, but since almost every flute player will find it easy to read and understand, it's helpful to have it in advance so you can get started.

Also see:
Breathing advice for easy breathing.

And more free pdfs (scales that are fun!) for your music stand or flute practice binder.

Best, Jen

Easy Posture & Pure Tone

Dear Flutelovers,

In trying to answer the way-too-huge number of flutey-email questions that arrived in my email over the past three months, (after the launch of the new edition of "The Art of Playing the Flute"), I've realized that it's impossible to keep up with the sheer number of them. There are thousands of flute students in the world, and I am only one teacher. :>)

My best advice to all the emailing flute students is, of course to work well with your own private flute teacher because only your flute teacher sees and hears you every week, and gets to know how you learn, and what you hear, and what your flute playing truly needs now.

So while dedicating yourself to finding your very own personalized, qualified and devoted nearby flute teacher, please help yourself to these basic videos about:

Easy Flute Posture and Longtones & Pure Tone.

Easy Posture for Flute Players:
video



Note: Sound quality best at 240p.

More articles on preventing flutey aches and pains are here.

What is Longtone Practise?

Long or (better yet) Pure Tone basics: Video




Note: Sound quality best at 240p. Sorry about the audio; got to get a better video editing compatibility, doh!

And for the love of those pure tone quality exercises see....

Longtones - What are they and how do you use them?

What's the deal with Longtones?

1. Teaching Tone: Video 1 How to play longtones - Basics for newbies

2. More on Teaching Tone. Videos 2-3.

4. Playing with Tone Colours.




ahem....

And a quick P.S. for the very curious:

To train a cat to ring a bell to have the door opened you have to:

- previously have had a cat that totally wrecked the doors/screens/weatherstripping
- or meowed horribly in a disgruntled way
and then:
- when the new kitten is old enough to go outdoors you simply ring the bell every time you're about to open the door.
Sooner or later, the cat rings the bell for you to open the door.

Best,

Jen

Flute Moves on Chin

Question: My teacher says that I move my flute on my mouth too much when I play the flute. For me, this results in losing the tone suddenly, especially in the low register.For some reason I cannot figure out how to fix this.
Can you help?

Dear Student,
There are several ways that flute students move the flute on their mouth too much, so you might want to discover what the actual problem is.

If you set a video camera to film yourself up close when you play you may instantly see exactly how the flute is moving at the lip.

Then check this list and see which seems most likely.

From the most common to the less common, some of the possibilities include:

1. The flutist rolls the flute inward as they play, especially for the very low or high register.
This can be caused by:

a) The flute is rolling inwards by itself due to the misalignment of the headjoint causing the heavier rods to be pulled inward by the downward pull of gravity (also see How to Line Up Your Headjoint for photos and explanations on how to correct this.)



b) The student unconsciously turns the flute inward with their hands, in order to create a shorter distance (shorter air-reed) in order to try and get low or high register notes to sound "better"
This is a common but flawed technique, and can be corrected by working on making the lips more mobile so that the lips flexibly travel across the blow hole, rather than rolling the blow hole inward.


(Note - Click on jpeg to enlarge; use back button to return.)
The above diagram uses a simple drinking straw experiment to demonstrate that moving closer to the splitting edge, with the lips, results in sounding the higher octaves. It is taken from pgs. 71-77 of Robert Billington's excellent flute technique dissertation about Robert Aitken's teaching, entitled "The Physical Flute", which is a Phd. paper available at: http://www.rdbflute.com/RDBDE.html)
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2. The Flute is unstable because of the right thumb not having enough friction on the body of the flute, or the left thumb being curved on the thumb key.

For the first: Right thumb unstable, reposition the thumb to have more friction contact on the body of the flute. You may wish to turn the thumb so it points up the tube (see photos of class being taught by Joanna G'Froerer here.) Or, if you have very long or very short fingers/thumbs, it's very inexpensive to try the $20 removeable Thumbport and test all kinds of positions of the right thumb, where the shank of the thumb is supported by the shelf of the Thumbport.

For the second possibility, the left thumb and its position on the thumb keys, and especially for flutists with long fingers, Alexa Still gave some advice to one of the flute groups about she allows the Left Thumb to cradle the edge of the thumbkey at the knuckle, which helps keep the flute at the correct angle for easy fingering, rather than having the thumb slide around on the smooth surface of the flute's thumb key.
It's especially difficult to steady the flute using the thumb key if the thumb is crooked (bent like a "7"). If your left thumb is straight or "J" shaped, it can keep the flute's keyboard parallel to the ceiling, by its ability to balance the edge of the thumb keys.



Like the thumbport for the right thumb,the flute's stability in the hands through using the knuckle bone on the shank of the left thumb,to tip the flute forward consistently and without unecessary tension,offers an extra point of stability for turning the flute's keys either fully upright or tilted slightly forward.
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3. The flutist is trapping the lower lip under the flute's lip-plate, and because the lower lip is moveable and loose, is unknowingly pushing their lower lip around with the lip-plate when they play.

This can be caused by:

a) The pressure of the flute's lip-plate is too high on the lower lip, which distorts the lower lip or shifts it from side to side, disturbing the tone quality

b) The pressure of the flute's lip-plate is too high on the lower lip and the flutist has added more pressure to force the lower lip to conform to a certain embouchure position. Because the hand pressure now control the contours of the lower lip, the embouchure is not flexible, and the hands and arms become more and more tense trying to control the lower lip at a distance.

c) the flutist is using too much finger pressure or hand and arm pressure when playing, perhaps due to undiagnosed pad leaks which they are overcoming by forcing the pads to close.

See James Galway's Embouchure Teaching Exercise where he places the finger then the headjoint on the chin and flexibly moves lower lip up and over the upper lip to show how "untrapped" it is.

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4. The flute's lip-plate is not making complete contact with the skin of the chin area, but is almost hanging in mid-air with only a tiny amount of friction contact with the skin.
This is caused by:

a) trying to balance the flute's lip-plate on only a 1/4 inch of skin on the chin or just below the lower lip edge, rather than placing the entire lip plate in the dip of the chin, and then forming the embouchure to suit the new placement.

b) having the headjoint lined up wrongly so that the flutist must bend their head forward in order to create the right angle to blow at, and perching their chin on the flute inconsistently.

See Jen's video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tjbd2P5-Kpg

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5. The flutist is either mistakenly jutting their jaw forward and backward to create octave changes, (see jaw jutting on this blog.)
or is moving the jaw up and down as they play, in such a way that the lower lip and flute's lip plate are being constantly moved around.
This causes inconsistent tone especially when changing from low to high registers.

See Jen's jaw motion video: http://jennifercluff.blogspot.com/2009/05/jaw-motion-for-flute-is-your-jaw.html

Also to see up and down motion:

In this Robert Dick teaching video, you can see that the inconsistency in tone control of the student is caused by the flute moving up and down on the chin caused by the pressure of the lip-plate being too high on the lower lip: http://vimeo.com/19124030
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6. The flutist is unconsciously moving their lips when they tongue (single or double) which causes their lip aperture to become large and then small between notes.

In the teaching video at this link:
http://www.myspace.com/video/dong/manhattan-school-of-music-faculty-linda-chesis-39-s-flute-lesson/27333025 flute teacher Linda Chesis demonstrates what it sounds like when students "nibble" or minutely move their lips open and closed while tonguing.
The correction is to play the tongued passage all-slurred at first, then sense the exact position of the lips when the all-slurred version has perfect tone, and then maintain that sense of the lip position when tonguing.


I highly recommend the exercise called "Lowering the lip-plate's pressure on the chin" by Roger Mather in Vol. 2 of "The Art of Playing the Flute."

It may also help not only to video record yourself to see for yourself what it is that's causing the flute's instability on your chin, but also to video record your teacher's observations during a lesson.
If you cannot borrow or locate a video camera, then using a mirror when practicing, and in your lessons can really help you see what you're actually doing.

Good luck, and let us know what it turned out to be.
Best, Jen

Teaching Breathing Easily

Question: Dear Jen, I've started some new intermediate flute students this term, and several of them have breathing problems. I haven't had any extraordinary breathing problems myself over the years, so I'm not sure of the best remedies that will give quick and lasting results.
Can you give me some straightforward breathing/teaching techniques?

Dear Flute Teacher,

There are a few "tricks" to breathing that I find are readily teachable, and easy for the student to instantly grasp.

1. Firstly, of course, overall body posture is all important as are the equal balance of the weight on the two feet.
There are a couple of excellent points made by Fiona Wilkinson in her book "The Physical Flute" about keeping the shoulders low, while gently lengthening between hips and shoulders, and then, again keeping shoulders low and relaxed, lengthening the distance between the shoulders and ears.
Make sure your feet are shoulder-width apart, and that your knees are flexible (not locked) and you are not arching the small of your back to start.
Then the rest of the basic posture points are summarized in this diagram.


Click on jpegs to enlarge. Use back button to return here.

2. Along with the idea of torso lengthening, there is the all important raising of the sternum by 1/2 an inch. This is a position of the chest and ribcage that spontaneously makes breathing easier, and is covered in Roger Mather's book "The Art of Playing the Flute (pdf)".
These are the instructions that work for both singers and flute players:

If you raise your sternum (the bone at the solar plexis) approximately 1/2 an inch upward, breathing suddenly becomes effortless and the tone quality becomes more resonant.
It places your stomach and rib cage in a relationship to operate smoothly and effortlessly.

3. Another quick teaching pointer about effortless breathing came from William Bennett who, in an interview, said he learned from the great singer Janet Baker.

There is a triangle of nerve endings at the back of your throat, which, if you feel the temperature of the "cool air" when you breathe in, will spontaneously lower the diaphragm.



Click on jpegs to enlarge. Use back button to return here.

This is a topic that I originally covered way back in 2005 on my breathing for flutists page: (however, the Bennett quote is no longer on his webpage, unfortunately.)

4. Fourthy, the quick and intelligent use of the Psoas muscles that join the top of the leg bones into the pelvic girdle, is all important to what flute teachers have long called "support" of the breath.

Your blowing muscles are connected by this large pair of very powerful pelvic muscles, from the bottom of the diaphragm, to the tops of your leg bones. Have a look at an anatomy diagram of the Psoas in red below.



The Psoas run diagonally from the top of each thigh-bone, buried deeply within the pelvis, (where you spend your life being unaware of them), and if you 'push down against the floor with your feet' (such as when you go from sitting to standing or vice versa) they give added "ooomph" to the breathing aparatus. (Singers are taught about this anatomy also, in choir warmups when you sing a held tone, and then go from sitting to standing, while singing. You will hear the added "ooomph" in the vocal quality.).
Consciously pressing down, very gently, with the arch of your feet, allows the flute player to exhale into the flute with a controlled air speed, and with almost no effort needed. It is especially useful for the highest register.

The bottom of the diaphragm is connected to the Psoas muscles, and without having to stiffen any other muscles, allows the flutist to exhale steadily and very easily, and make the breath last longer.

Note: The two feet are equal in their balance and the pressure applied would be very light.(Feet should not be crossed at the ankles, or leaning more on one foot or the other, or feet too close together.)

The flutist's stance of "feet shoulder-width apart" is key to the success of this, and then all you have to do is "push gently down against the floor using the arch in the center of both feet when you blow out".

To inhale, feel cool air on the triangle on the back of the throat, and then to exhale again, gently push down against the feet. Both these techniques instantly do the work for you to create the ease in the breathing apparatus.

The diaphragm's ability to sustain a constant air pressure is hugely improved (without any other muscles being used) as long as the flutist is standing with an open and balanced set of gently active Psoas muscles. After several weeks practice, these muscles can also be used while sitting. (Push down against the seat of the chair very lightly.)



Click on jpegs to enlarge. Use back button to return here.

5. Fifthly, the amount of air and the air pressure are most easily related to singing.

Singing and playing allows the flutist to use the minimal amount of air-moving muscular effort to creat a songful, musical phrase.

Singing is the closest thing to flute playing; same air, same phrasing, same naturalness.
So, as shown in Robert Dick's "Tone Development through Extended technique", it is easy to sing and play first, then to switch to only playing, and use the exact same motion of air.
The embouchure is the "nozzle" instead of the vocal cords, to increase air speed and focus on the tone.

A simple way to use singing-while-playing is during longtones where you play the original longtone the first time, sing any low mezzo-piano humming pitch while you play it the second time, and then play it plainly the third time and listen to the increased resonance and improved tone quality. I hope to demonstrate this in the future. (Let me know if you need an mp3 or a written exercise sheet.)

In summary, I find that with students of any age, that these five teaching methods above represent the fastest way to learn to control air for easy breath use for flute playing.

They avoid "paralysis by analysis" and, providing the flute student doesn't "try too hard" (ie: sing until they hurt their throat, or push their feet into the floor using too many unecessary muscles, or "overdoing" the instructions in any forceful way)
then the average student picks up on these pointers immediately and gets instant results.

Mind you, sometimes in individual flute students, breathing problems are the result of practicing in bad habits such as:

- going too long without a breath (see sample of Andersen Etude for creating better breathing during learning)
- emptying the lungs too far (which causes gasping)
- trying to speed up the air by tensing the throat, or closing it down
- mistakenly tensing the abdomen during inhale (backward breathing)
- raising the shoulders high
- trying to play with too little air speed or air pressure.

These are separate topics which I could cover in another post if there are lots of interested readers.
Let me know.
Use the comment button below. Thanks!

Best, Jen