If you are nerdy/awesome enough to be into (1) the pedagogy of Irish traditional woodwind playing and (2) open-source text-based music notation software, then you may want to check out my set of symbols for Lilypond, based on the excellent ornamentation system by Grey Larsen. You can get the .ily file on GitHub (and submit your pull requests to make improvements to my code).
Cuts, strikes, slides, rolls, cranns, etc.
If you are unfamiliar with Mr. Larsen’s system and you play pennywhistles or wooden flutes, then really I must insist that you buy a copy of his The Essential Guide to Irish Flute and Tin Whistleimmediately—his ornamentation system is clear and logical and should be regarded as the standard for teaching and learning Irish-traditional ornamentation for wind instruments.
If you are unfamiliar with Lilypond, chances are good that you won’t like it even though it’s free and produces much better notation than the software you already spent several hundred dollars on.
Also, it’s worth noting that Chris Throup already had a similar idea a few years ago. Mine is a bit more complete, but his is really simple.
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My own past flute teachers gave me conflicting advice about how much the flute headjoint should press into the lower lip. One would pull on the crown of my flute while I played to make sure it came away from my lip with no resistance. Another would push the headjoint more firmly into my face as I played. (I improved under both teachers’ approaches.)
I got curious about it recently and looked up what some flute pedagogues have had to say. I’m presenting my findings here without taking a personal stance (yet).
It’s a little tricky to parse some of these, since many speak in terms of avoiding too much pressure, but don’t clarify whether that means to use as little pressure as possible or some moderate amount of pressure.
In the avoid-too-much-pressure camp:
A very important point to remember is never to force the mouth plate against the lower teeth as such forcing will limit the amount of flexibility after the embouchure has been developed.
James Pellerite: “Improving Tone Production in Flute Performance,” in Woodwind Anthology, volume I, 1999 edition. Northfield, Illinois: The Instrumentalist, 1999, p. 11. Article originally printed in The Instrumentalist in 1953.
Do not press the head joint hard against the lips. Control of the tone must come from the lips themselves, not from pressure.
George Waln, “First Flute Lesson,” in Woodwind Anthology, volume I, 1999 edition. Northfield, Illinois: The Instrumentalist, 1999, p. 25. Article originally printed in The Instrumentalist in 1957.
“The chin is, of course, an aid in support, but it must not be depended on for support, since pressure against the jaw will seriously disturb the embouchure.”
Edwin Putnik: The Art of Flute Playing, revised edition. Miami, Florida: Summy-Birchard Inc., 1970, p. 7.
In order to correct this problem [sharpness/pinching], the student should be certain that he is not pressing the flute against his lower lip, but rather thinking of the flute as resting lightly against the lip…
Mary Jean Simpson: “Flute Intonation Trouble: Spare Not The Rod,” in Woodwind Anthology, volume I, 1999 edition. Northfield, Illinois: The Instrumentalist, 1999, p. 117. Article originally printed in The Instrumentalist in 1972.
Do not press the flute too tightly against the chin because too much pressure will alter the tone and pitch.
Kathleen Goll-Wilson, “Erratic Intonation in Flute Sections,” in Woodwind Anthology, volume I, 1999 edition. Northfield, Illinois: The Instrumentalist, 1999, p. 661. Article originally printed in The Instrumentalist in 1992.
Excessive pressure against the chin should be avoided.
William Dietz, Jerry Kirkbride, Hal Ott, Mark Weiger, Craig Whittaker: Teaching Woodwinds: A Method and Resource Handbook for Music Educators. Belmont, California: Schirmer, 1998, p. 174. Note: Hal Ott is the flutist among the authors, so this presumably reflects his opinion.
…the flute should rest lightly against the chin in order to leave the lips free and flexible.
Nancy Toff: The Flute Book: A Complete Guide for Students and Performers, third edition. Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 94.
[Common problems:] Too much pressure into the lip. The teacher should be able to tap the flute off of the lip with very little effort. … [for piccolo:] Too much pressure into the face, especially upper register. Excessive pressure makes high notes much more difficult if not impossible.
Charles West: Woodwind Methods: An Essential Resource for Educators, Conductors, and Students. Delray Beach, Florida: Meredith Music Publications, 2015, p. 17.
These are the ones I could find that seemed to advocate for at least some pressure, although neither is explicit about how much:
Students should keep in mind the three points of pressure… [including] the lips pushing out against the flute…
John Knight, “Flute Intonation,” in Woodwind Anthology, volume I, 1999 edition. Northfield, Illinois: The Instrumentalist, 1999, p. 529. Article originally printed in The Instrumentalist in 1989.
“Keep a relaxed embouchure, but place the flute firmly on the chin.”
Michel Debost: “Basics of Flute Playing,” in Woodwind Anthology, volume I, 1999 edition. Northfield, Illinois: The Instrumentalist, 1999, p. 632. Article originally printed in The Instrumentalist in 1991.
John Knight is the only author to speak in terms of the lips putting pressure on the flute, rather than the reverse.
In any case, among the sources I consulted, there seems to be some consensus that pressure of flute against lip should be light, or at least not “excessive.”
Many doublers start out as clarinetists or saxophonists, and many doublers would say that the flute is particularly challenging as a double. These phenomena are related. Let’s look at some of the issues woodwind doublers have with the flute. I’ll offer a sort of glib, inadequate tip or two for each situation, but the real solution here is to learn the flute right, with lots of patience, years of dedicated practice, and a well-qualified and longsuffering flute teacher.
Lightheadedness, inability to play long phrases, fuzzy tone, weak low register. These are products of a too-large aperture (the opening in your lips). Single-reed players tend to have a mental image of a relatively large clarinet or saxophone mouthpiece held in their embouchures. Think instead of the actual opening between the tip of the reed and the tip of the mouthpiece—this is much closer to the size of opening you need to create in your lips. (Think especially of a high-pitched instrument like a clarinet or soprano saxophone, and a mouthpiece with a narrow tip opening.) Or try this: close your lips and relax them as much as possible, then blow gently until a tiny “needle” of air pokes through the center of your lips. That’s how much smaller your aperture needs to be.
Thin/shrill tone, weak low register. The saxophone uses a medium voicing, and the clarinet uses a high voicing, but the flute uses a very low voicing. (Flute doublers coming from a double reed instrument or even a brass instrument have an advantage here.) Keep your airstream very warm, even in the highest register, to give your tone depth.
Uneven intonation and tone. If you are counting on similarities between flute fingerings and clarinet or saxophone fingerings, then you are likely committing a number of flute crimes. F-sharp uses the right third finger, not middle finger. And you must master the ballet between the left index finger and right pinky finger, especially in the transition from first to second octave. (If middle-finger F-sharp and a lazy right pinky sound fine to you, it’s because your tone production technique and tone concept aren’t well developed yet.)
No dynamic control. The typical problem is loud third octave, medium-loud second octave, and very soft first octave. This is a sure sign that you are trying to change octaves by blowing harder or softer. Your “octave key” on the flute is your flexible, well-trained embouchure. Instead of cranking up to gale force for the higher octaves, try pushing gently forward with your lips. (As a side note, if you find in doubling situations that your embouchure is tense and swollen when switching from reeds to flute, that’s a sign that you are playing reeds with too much tension.)
Sluggish technique. There are two main problems here that doublers bring to the table. The first is the habit of moving relatively large, heavy, stiffly-sprung keys. A flute’s keys are small, light, and move with a feather touch. The second issue is insecurity in holding the instrument. It can be hard for a beginner to get the instrument properly balanced (laziness about fingerings can contribute to this, too), and that will slow you down. If the flute keeps trying to roll out of your hands, rotate it a few degrees so the bulk of the keywork sits right on top of the instrument.
Sight-reading disasters in the third octave. Flutists play way up in the ledger lines as a matter of course. If you want to hang in the flute section, it’s time to learn to read those notes fluently. Stumbling around above the staff is also a sign that you haven’t really payed your dues technique-wise yet: you’re getting by within the staff because the fingerings are similar enough to saxophone and clarinet, but above the staff is a different story. Practice your scales and arpeggios.
Good flute playing doesn’t come from casual “dabbling.” Take the flute seriously, study it diligently with good instruction, and it will be a joy to play and a boon to your doubling career.
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Every so often I hear from people about what I call the E-flat contrabass clarinet (or “contrabass clarinet in E-flat”), such as in my woodwind doubling in musicals list or in my woodwind methods book. Some prefer the term “contra-alto” or even “contralto,” but I find “contrabass” to be the most accurate and useful description of the instrument.
(One disadvantage of this terminology is always having to specify the key to differentiate it from the larger contrabass in B-flat.)
First, let’s dispense with “contralto,” which describes a low female voice, typically in an opera setting. That misses the mark by a wide margin for an instrument whose range dips considerably lower than the lowest male voices.
The use of “contra-alto” (with or without hyphen) seems to be based on the questionable idea that the prefix “contra-” means “an octave below.” My best guess is that this is a back-formation from the names of some other instruments, such as the contrabassoon (which happens to be pitched an octave lower than the bassoon). In any case, following this logic leads to the term “contra-alto” clarinet because it is pitched an octave below the alto clarinet (an instrument whose waning popularity makes it a questionable choice for a frame of reference). This logic then produces “contrabass” for the B-flat instrument, as it is pitched an octave below the bass clarinet.
Various music dictionaries that I have at hand agree that the prefix “contra-” means “lower than,” but do not specify an octave lower, and most use contralto voice as an example. (If you have a counterexample from a published, music-oriented reference, I am interested to hear about it.) Based on this, “contra-alto” seems inapt—a contra-alto/contralto instrument should be just lower than the alto, and higher than tenor or bass.
Problematically, of the three major current manufacturers, Buffet-Crampon and Leblanc list “contra alto” clarinets on their websites, and Selmer uses “contralto.”
Here are some published usages of various names, listed from oldest to newest. Send me others if you know of any. It does seem to me that “contra-alto” becomes more common in the last quarter of the twentieth century, a trend that I consider undesirable (cf. “flautist”).
The author makes a case that the instrument would be better called an E♭ bass clarinet (and the bass clarinet would be better called a baritone clarinet).
The author allows that it is “sometimes called the ‘contra-alto’ clarinet.”
Page, Janet K., K. A. Gourlay, Roger Blench, and Nicholas Shackleton. “Clarinet.” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Edited by Stanley Sadie and J. Tyrrell. London: Macmillan, 2001.
Randel, Don Michael, ed. “Clarinet.” The Harvard Dictionary of Music. 4th ed. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2003.
Contra alto clarinet in E♭
Payne, Tim. “The Contrabass Clarinets.” In The Versatile Clarinet, edited by Roger Heaton. New York: Routledge, 2006.
When I hear my students playing heavy, thumpy accents, I ask them how they are playing the accents. The answer is usually the same: “tongue harder?”
But when the tongue is properly understood to release the reed (or release the airstream on the flute), the idea of tonguing harder doesn’t make much sense. (How do you release harder?) Unfortunately, for many developing woodwind players, it translates to a larger area of contact between the tongue and the reed, causing unwanted percussive sounds.
Accents are better understood as what they appear to be on the page: small decrescendos. An accent is a note shape: louder at the beginning, softer at the end. It is produced by the mechanisms of volume/dynamics, not the tongue. Often, but not always, the note starts louder than the baseline dynamic level and decrescendos back to it.
As with most aspects of musical interpretation, this leaves a great deal of room for variation; accents can have many characters and shades. But none of those should include thuds or thumps (unless, I suppose, called for by the composer). Practice beautiful and stylish accents by slowing down the music enough to give each accented note a graceful decrescendo.
The problems with my original technique are that you have to determine your precise tempo ahead of time, and you don’t have any flexibility to change it on the fly. You also can’t easily change your mind about the sound that you want—if you decide you really wanted something flutey instead of something brassy, you have to edit another sound. If you want to play several pieces or movements at different tempi, you need to dedicate a separate voice to each one. You also get a maximum of 1.27 seconds of echo. For my recent recital, I wanted the flexibility of playing multiple movements and changing my mind about sounds, and I needed a longer delay time for a slow movement.
At the time of my original tutorial, I assumed that the external device needed would be some kind of looper, but upon further exploration I have actually found a digital delay pedal to be the best way of accomplishing the effect. I am using the ubiquitous Boss DD-7, used by many electric guitarists, but presumably these instructions can be adapted to other similar gadgets (you are on your own to work out the details). I also used an auxiliary pedal, the Boss FS-5U. This simplifies things slightly on stage if you want to be able to turn the echo on and off quickly, but it’s totally optional. I’ll tell you how to make this work with or without it.
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Be sure to check out my recent interview with Trent Jacobs, the inventor of the Little-Jake bassoon/woodwind pickup.
During the past year I got myself a Little-Jake to experiment with some electrified bassoon playing. I didn’t know much about using electronics in this way, and it took some research and trial-and-error to figure out exactly what I needed to use the Little-Jake with my bassoon. I thought others might find it useful to see that information all in one place. Here’s a kind of minimum setup:
A bocal that you’re willing to have altered. I had an old one that I liked but wasn’t using much.
The bocal needs a small hole drilled in it and an adapter soldered to it. A skilled instrument technician can probably make you an adapter from scratch, or you can buy one pre-made. Forrests Music has one, and so does Midwest Musical Imports. I bought Forrests’s (cheaper) version, plus the threaded plug in case I want to use the bocal without the Little-Jake. I shipped my bocal to Forrests and they installed the adapter for a very reasonable fee.
Brass adapter visible just above whisper key pip
Adapter with plug
The Little-Jake pickup. It’s a thin cable with a 1/4″ plug on one end, and a little threaded connector on the other. The threaded end connects to the adapter on your bocal.
A preamp. The 1/4″ end of the Little-Jake connects to the preamp’s input jack. The preamp works some electrical magic to get the electronic “signal” ready for amplification. You can buy an inexpensive one made from an Altoids tin, or this L. R. Baggs one that Trent recommends, or there are other options if you know what you’re doing. The L. R. Baggs is handy because it clips to your belt and provides a volume control.
An audio cable, like the ones used for electric guitars. One end plugs into your preamp’s output jack.
An amplifier. The other end of the audio cable plugs into an input jack on the amplifier. There are many options at many price points. I use a small Mackie PA system for practicing or small venues, or a keyboard amplifier if I need more volume. Keyboard amps and PA systems are usually designed for a relatively “clean,” unaltered sound, whereas guitar amps tend to add their own character. This is a personal choice depending on what you want to sound like, but for me the keyboard/PA-type amp seemed to make sense as a starting point.
Assembled system: bocal → Little-Jake → preamp → audio cable → amplifier (in this case, a small PA system)
That’s enough to start making some fun sounds, but refer to Trent’s interview and an article on his website for some thoughts on adding effects pedals, which really make things interesting.
My current pedalboard setup
The Little-Jake can be used for some other instruments, as well, with the same setup (except the adapter must be attached to a saxophone or bass clarinet neck, clarinet barrel, etc.).
Thank you! You are awesome for doing this!