Forum of the Saxes

Kym · Joined: 13 Aug 2005 Posts: 35 Location: England

Hey Jobboe, i play flute and picc also, talking of flight of the bumblebee, do you play it often. I tried it on Picc the otherday and for some passages i find it considerably easier to play on Picc than Flute, weird i know but hey lol

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'Of all musicians, Flautist's are obviously the ones who know something we don't!'
Paul Jennings

saxfreak · Joined: 08 Aug 2005 Posts: 5 Location: No. Hollywood, CA

I picked up flute as a double in college, after I had already played clarinet and sax. I'm not qualified to try to teach you anything about embouchure, but I can relate some of my experiences as a woodwind doubler. Flute was the toughest double for me to learn (of the instruments that I continue to play - I didn't stay with double reeds). The initial challenge on flute is mostly in the embouchure and tone production. From the beginning I was playing long tone exercises from the Moyse book on tone. It still took me a looooong time to get a focused sound. The other thing that happens is getting dizzy from blowing the air - especially on high notes. This is a stage that you can expect to go through, but it does go away. Eventually, your air stream will become more concentrated and you won't have so much lost air. Blowing from the diaphragm is important.
Once you have a developed flute embouchure/sound concept, the next challenge you'll meet is to be able to achieve a good flute tone right away when you go to it from a reed instrument, particulary clarinet. This is a big challenge and can be very frustrating. This skill is absolutely necessary in pit orchestra doubling, so it's important. I don't know how I got past that hurdle, but eventually I started to sound good on flute right away instead of needing to play it for five minutes to get my embouchure working.
Eventually, you will encounter the "lovely" top register notes, with their complicated fingerings. That was also a lot of work for me. I found that after I learned how to play recorder, suddenly the top octave flute fingerings weren't as hard anymore. It's still hard to play anything technical in the upper register.
Flute was a lot of work to learn, but I love it. It was worth all the bother to learn flute. I probably play as much flute in performances now as clarinet or sax - flute is particularly well suited to church services and weddings. There seems to be a lot of call for flutists.
If you are serious about learning flute as a double, you should make a serious commitment to it. You'll need lots of patience because things don't come very fast or easy (at least for me). If you can find a teacher to help you, that's a great idea. Good luck, and have fun!

Louis Scuderi · Posted: Fri Aug 26, 2005 3:11 pm Post subject:

Check out "First note from a flute" by Gordon Palmer at www.saxontheweb.net. Gordon was originally a flute player and he doubles other woodwinds. He is a columnist at SOTW.
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Louis Scuderi
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Kym · Joined: 13 Aug 2005 Posts: 35 Location: England

I know where your coming from saxfreak, but for me it was the other way round. Flute is my first instrumen and i've started doubling on Alto and i found it so hard to start with switching in gigs. My flute embouchure is set in stone and going to sax was ok as long as i hadn't been playing Piccolo or top register flute before because i found it hard to relax my lip enough to get the correct embouchure for sax, i always ended up tightening my lip too much and i still find it hard to fill the sax sometimes. It's not until you experiment with sax after flute that you realise that flute is nothing to blow through and your right about the tone, many people produce there flute tones in different ways either with the throat, lip, tounge ect ect and some are frowned upon but it takes ages to get used to. As for clarinet Batman

i get angry! I think i'll stick with flutes and saxes! It's nice to hear of more people doubling flute though and playing sax and clarinet will give you a huge advantage with the top register and playing fff on flute!
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'Of all musicians, Flautist's are obviously the ones who know something we don't!'
Paul Jennings