Don’t Practice Bad Tone, or Everything is a Tone Exercise

Everyone wants to play with a terrific tone, right? We spend hours on ‘tone exercises,’ contorting our embouchures, trying to wrap our heads around the concept of breath support and how to make it happen, and agonizing over whether what we are doing is having any effect. Then we finish the tone exercise portion of our practice routine and promptly go back to practicing everything else the same old way with the same old sound that we are so dissatisfied with.

Here’s a little secret that can help you make a lot of progress in a short period of time, ready? Everything is a tone exercise! If you practice with the goal of making every note you play equally great, your consistency overall will improve and you will sound much, much better. If you are playing a scale and one note doesn’t sound as wonderful as the others, stop and practice it. Figure out what is making it sound different. Is it the air speed, air direction, change in embouchure, change in support, fingering bobble, etc?

As an example, for me the D and Eb in the staff have been sounding extra airy lately, so they really stand out (to me, anyway) when playing a scale or notes adjacent to them. These notes do have a special consideration because the left hand first finger is up, creating a hole in the flute tube. To even out the sound, I needed to increase the air speed just a little, to keep the air moving past that open hole and keep the flute tube vibrating. Problem solved, scales returned to being lovely and smooth, with all the notes sounding like they were coming out of the same flute, rather than sounding like an alien had taken over for a couple of notes.

If you don’t address these inconsistencies, thinking that one or two notes aren’t going to make that much of a difference, you are essentially practicing bad tone. No one needs to do that, we already know how to do that! Practice something new, ironing out those little inconsistencies. You might be surprised how much of a difference it makes, not just in how you think you sound, but in how others think you sound. And that will be: BETTER!

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