Start your pursuit of the flute!

Welcome!

If you've journeyed to this page, I'm pretty sure you're interested in learning a bit about playing the flute.  Hopefully you'll find something useful that can help you maneuver your river of creativity!

I teach students of all ages and hope to provide something above and beyond my private and small group flute lessons. Because of this, especially if I'm keeping a particular student in mind, you may find that I'm writing to readers of different levels.  I hope the topics, tips, and things to try and think about will still help you.

Are you new to flute-playing?  Are you a continuing flute student?  Have you just dusted off your flute and are now trying to remember how to play the thing?  Sometimes our initiative, our energy, and our desire just isn't enough when we've got SO many other things to do. Sometimes there's no time to practice.  Sometimes we just don't feel like practicing anyway.  So here's a pep talk.

Play flute more to have more fun!

To enjoy playing the flute, you have to develop basic skills.  The more skills you develop the more pleasure you'll get out of playing the flute. 

But for many people, working on some things is, well...work. 
And not play.

So you have to trick yourself into making the time to practice.

Try these flute practice tricks:

1. Play flute every day.  You should play often to feel good about playing flute.  This practice time might be very short or long, simple or complex, but you need to attempt to play everyday.
2. If you don't play every day, don't fret.  Start now.
3. Tell yourself you will only play 5 minutes and stop if you can't go on.  Do your five minutes and push yourself to do five more.

(One step at a time.)

Now try this when you don't feel like playing the flute:  

1. Once you have your flute together choose something you enjoy playing. Check the clock or set a timer.  Play that fun thing (or fun things) for  five minutes. 
2. When that time is up, go for five more minutes.    This time, choose a small something to work on:  
• more fun things
• long tones- just play different tones as long as you can in one breath
• a small, challenging part of your fun piece- play it slowly, play it with different rhythms, play it with different articulations
3. When that time is up, check yourself.  Do you feel like you have the mental energy and mood to continue?  If so, great! Go for five more minutes. If not, there's something to do before you put your flute away:  play through your fun thing again.  Listen to yourself, make it as beautiful as you can, have fun.
4. Finally, write a brief list of things for you to practice tomorrow.  

At this point you probably completed about fifteen minutes (or more!) of flute practice.  Congratulate yourself!  If you're still not in the mood to be doing this, congratulate yourself anyway.  That practice time that you "forced" yourself to do will make it easier next time.  And more fun!

Now- do something else and see if you can squeeze in more time later today.  

Then start again tomorrow.

You can do it!