Monthly Archives: June 2012

Many students are in the dark about how to practice effectively and especially how much time to spend on each aspect of  their daily practice routine. I often also b find  that many students spend too much time  daily on their pieces and not enough time daily  on what I call the basics of playing the flute…. at least that is what I have observed in many students who have come to me as “transfer” students. Many times I am actually astonished to find that the only music they have worked on are pieces( or as students nowadays  call  repertoire…. “songs”)!

In my opinion  daily practice  of  only pieces  is simply not  an efficient way to improve or to get better on the flute. I firmly believe  that repertoire should be the “dessert of our practice” and should be approached  daily only after one has spent quite a considerable amount of time working seperately first on what I call the basics of practice:  that is tone exercises . technique excercises  and etudes. Pieces simply should be practiced only after all the rest of these basics have been done!  I also believe practice should divided up into sections   because  I feel  repertoire   needs to be approached musically and  not as fodder for perfecting the technical elements of flute playing. Practincg a piece for overcoming technical elements cannot be helpful  in developing musicality  because if we have to focus on technique perfection when we pactice  a piece….. we cannot also focus on playing musically and epressively. And I firnly believe that the  technique of playing the piece  should not  get in our way  of practicing to  playi musically !

So, with this in mind below are some suggestions for how to   effectively schedule your daily  practice sessions   in a way  that I believe  will  help you end up improving faster  and  also end up helping to use  your limited practice time more efficiently so that when  you do get to your pieces ( at the end!!)  you not only  will  enjoy them more ,but you also  will  end up playing them  much better.

In general,  assuming you are planning to practice two hours a day,  the regime  described below is  how I suggest  my students   divide up  their practice  time  The first half hour should be spent on tone:Here are some suggestions for tone excercises: 

a.  start with the Moyse De La Sonorite exercise number 1  first in the low register 

b.Then add Trevor Wye’s slow melodic  tunes in the low register.

c. After that  do some harmonic exercises to get ready to move into the midlle register.

d. when your lips and embourchure are ready move into the middle register with some of the Suzuki/Takahashi exercises from the Flute Book #1.

e. Then do the entire Moyse tone exercise in threes: loud and then repeated soft from B 2 down chromatically.

f. finaly move up into the High register with the Moyse excercise #1 going up and finsih up with the Baker tone study for virbrato ( the “high tone study”)

Your second half hour of practice should move you into technical studies such as the Taffanel Gaubert Daily Excercises. (or the Reichert Studies or whatever else your teacher has you working  such as the Pares etc studies) Here are some suggestions for those of you working in the Taffanel – Gaubert Studies.

a. First do T-G Number 1 all slurred  then double tongued.

b. Then move to number 4 and play through the entire section with as many of the varied articulations listed in the beginning of the excercise. as possible.

c. Finally finish up with the  sevenths Arpeggio study from the T-G all slurred and then double tongued.

By now your lips, tone and fingers should be ready for the third half hour segment of your daily practice routine: Etudes: If you are working in Andersen studies, do them now or Altes or Berbiguier etc.  I recomend spending at least 30 minutes on this portion of your daily pracice.

And   only now  lastly should you move onto the final segment of your daily practice routine: your pieces.When practicing  your pieces a very effective way to  learn how to play more musically is  to focus on the so-called “skeleton” of each phrase.

Practicing with this method  involves  breaksing sections down into melodies based on the most important notes in each phrase. By practicing this way you can then add  notes back …. little by little…. onto each phrase so that you end up playing the entire phrase as  written but  intelligently and  don’t  end up playing  the written phrase randomly or worse…. not expressively. By the time you get all of the notes put back after only playing the most important ones in each phrase  first , the manner in which you want to perform that phrase will be totally clear to you! You will know how it should go. By practicing the skeleton first  we can therfore learn to play more musically! (BTW, If you have an orchestra concert coming up ( or band) I suggest that you can substitue your band or orchestra parts to this  “skeleton” section of your daily practice.) Notice that in order to do this, you cannot and definitely should not have to focus on any technicaly aspect of the piece. That should have been taken care of from your previous practice of tone excerciese, technical excerecises and etudes..  At this point you want to focus completely on how to play your piece expressively and musically. Nothing should interfer with that objective!

Also notice how much time I reccommend you spend on what I call these fundamentals… tone,technique and etudes…. and how little comparatively speaking time,  I reccommend you spend on your repertoire… whether it may be pieces, of orchestra/band parts. I firmly believe that we get better by practicing and perfecting our playing in these three technical aspects of the  flute daily rather than by playing peices only( or excerpts or orchestra/band parts.)

I also  firmly believe that when we practice in the manner desctibed above spending three quarters of our time on those tcchnical aspects of playing , the rest tends to fall into place. This is so because we are perfecting our control of the intrument  seperately from  our practice of the musical aspects of our playing……and  therefore  we can focus on the musical aspect of phrasing in the manner descibed above( the ‘skeleton” method  )  without worrying about the technical aspects of our pieces….since  we have already practiced that in our previous three segments of our daily pracice. So  by this point we are therefore ready to work on the music and it’s interpretation…

I know  that many teachers and students do not approach practicing in this manner. However, I personally have found that this is the most effective way to get better and I urge all of my students to approach their daily practice in this manner. I also teach all my lessons this way too; Starting each lesson with first  with tone studies , then technique , then etudes and only  lastly do I hear students playing  pieces.

I believe that this is not only the most effective way to divide our practice up daily, it is also the best way to end up playing musically and more imprtantly …….expressively….. Which is surely the point of why we do what we do…..that it to play expressively and communicate our love of music to our listeners!

 I am also …. and I am sure you …. are also ….. all for …..as Trevor Wye says repeatedly in his books…. wanting to “spend more time at the beach”……..AND at the same time  are all for  getting better at playing the flute ……. therefore we all need to be as efficient and as effective in our daily  practice as possbile .. and we cannot  not waste any time ….which none of us have in abundance for practicing….. so…..I hope these suggestions will help everyone to  be as efficient as possible wiht our limied resources for practice time daily (  and will also enable all of us to spend  more time at the beach this summer and at the same time also get better at flute playing!!)

 Judy