The Irish Flute Tutor

These thoughts are directed primarily at Irish flute beginners, and just plain music beginners.  These opinions are offered in response to M and E Irish flute beginners that express a need for some kind of guidance on how to get started (i.e., I was taunted into writing this!).  I really am anxious to hear from those with more well founded opinions than my own.  Thanks!

Mark Polczynski

    If you don't already have a pennywhistle (also called a "tin whistle"), get one right now.  Get a cheap one, shouldn't cost more than, say, $10 or so.  There's plenty of places on the web to get one.  Get a pennywhistle tutor book, too.  It could end up costing more than the whistle, but it will be good for learning flute tunes later.
    In fact, if you haven't already purchased an Irish flute, hang on to your money for a few more weeks while you wrestle with the pennywhistle for a while.  (This may lose M and E a few sales, but you'll thank us for this someday).  If it's already too late, just put your Irish flute down for a bit and start learning to play the whistle.
    Hold on!  Say WHAT?!  You've waited so long for your flute, why should you NOT play it right away?  Why should you start on a pennywhistle?  Several reasons:

• If you don't play any instruments yet, best to start on a real inexpensive instrument to see if learning to play is actually compatible for your lifestyle (time, manual dexterity, attention span, and, what was I saying?). Then go out and spend the big bucks on a nice flute.  An Irish flute is a terrible thing to waste gathering dust on a shelf, even if you have the money to blow on one (hah!).
• A pennywhistle is much lighter, easier to grasp, and easier to cover holes on than an Irish flute, but still has essentially the same fingering as the flute.  Playing an Irish flute can be awkward at first and requires building up some strength.  You'll have enough problems to contend with at first, so why ask for more?
• The bottom line for any transverse flute is getting a sound by blowing over that miserable little hole on the side.  It can be a frustrating experience, just when you're all geared up to play all of those cool tunes you've heard a hundred times over on your favorite CD.  If you start on the pennywhistle, you'll be playing simple tunes in no time.  Then, as you start up with the flute, you can also be building up a repertoire of tunes on the whistle that you can convert directly to the flute later on.

    OK, pull the head/barrel section (the part you blow into) off the rest of the flute (the part with all the finger holes).  Now, with just the head/barrel section, start blowing into that miserable little embouchure hole until you get a sound.  If you are like my son, you'll get a sound immediately.  If you're like me, you'll find trying to make any kind of  whispery chirp to be one of the most humbling, nay, humiliating, experiences in your life.
    Try it like this.  Make a small hole between your lips like you are whistling.  (What, you can't whistle?  You are aware of our full money back guarantee, right?)  Then place the flute right up against both of your lips, with the hole between your lips directly over the hole in the flute.  Now, blow right down into the hole in the flute.  Next, continue to hold the flute against your lower lip, but roll the flute away from your upper lip, so that there is a slight gap between your upper lip and the flute.  Keep blowing while you roll the flute away.  If you keep rolling the flute slowly away from your upper lip, you should eventually hear a sound.  If you can lock onto that spot, keep blowing with minor rolling adjustments to strengthen the sound.
    Depending on the size and shape of your lips, it may not work to start with the hole in the flute and the hole between your lips lining up perfectly.  You may have to adjust forward or backward a bit before you roll the flute away.  But try with the holes lined up several times before giving up.  It really helps to stand in front of the mirror when you do this to get some visual feedback.
    At first, your lips will probably be kind of loose as you do this, but as you consistently get a sound (may take a few days!), start pulling the corners of your lips back, kind of like a tight smile, but don't raise the corners of your mouth.  The idea is to make the hole between your lips as small as possible.  This lets you direct the airflow better, and will help you hit the high notes easier later.
    This also conserves your breath.  By the way, expect to be always out of breath, even dizzy, when you first start.  You will learn how to conserve your breath and breathe at appropriate times later.
    In the end, what you are trying to do here is to direct a thin stream of air at the BACK EDGE of the embouchure hole.  That's the edge farther away from your lower lip.  This is where the mirror helps.  Just aim the air at the back edge.  It's the splitting of the air stream at this edge that sets up the air oscillations that makes the sound.
    Now if you were smart and followed the instructions for Day 0, you'd be learning tunes on your whistle and JUST practicing getting sound out of the head/barrel section of your flute for the first week.  That's right, no flute playing, just blowing into the embouchure hole for a week.  You'd be doing this for maybe 5 minutes at a crack, four times a day, then playing your whistle the rest of the time you have available for practice.  Take the head/barrel with you wherever you go.  If you can use a car phone safely, you can do this during drivetime.  After a week, you'd put the flute together and start playing some of the simple tunes that you had already learned on the whistle.
    Once you can consistently get a tone on the head/barrel section and you've put the flute back together to play, then the second hardest part for beginners is to get good, solid coverage of the fingers over the holes.  If you just can't seem to get a note out of the whole flute, it could be because air is leaking around your fingers.

    Traditional musicians, like other cult groups such as golfers, beer brewers, etc., often spend as much time debating the sport as actually doing it.  One thing that traditional musicians like to debate is whether you should learn music by ear, or learn from sheet music.
    I've learned to play instruments both ways.  There are definite advantages to each, otherwise the debate would have died out long ago.  And the answer, of course, is that if you are really serious about your music, you will learn to do both.  But there's one thing about which I feel very strongly.  Regardless of how beginners learn a traditional-type tune, your goal must be to play it from memory.  This may not apply to concert musicians playing all four hours of Handel's Messiah,  but I believe it is true for Irish music.
    Playing from music is a part aural and part visual experience.  Playing from memory is all aural (fortunately, since this allows the (male or female) flute player ample opportunity to eye-up the adoring crowd of hero/ine-worshiping flute groupies crowded around the session corner).  If I first learn a tune from written music and then force myself to memorize it, I never fail to hear things that I missed when playing from the written music.  It's usually some interesting sequence of notes that sound so cool together that they end up being my favorite part of the tune.  You've got to memorize the music to really "become one" with it.  (Hanging some crystals from the end of your flute helps, too).
    Now, as you probably know, ornamentation is a major characteristic of Irish music.  But it's not just ornamentation, it's variation of ornamentation that really counts.  And that variation comes from hearing what you are playing, not seeing it, and even hearing ahead of what you playing, and then responding spontaneously to what you hear yourself (and others) playing.  I think that you have to memorize the basic tune to do this.
    This may all be a bit much for someone that has just picked up a flute for the first time, but in my opinion if you start with written music, you simply must discipline yourselves right from Day 2 to memorize tunes as soon as you have the basic melody in your head.  Do not put this off, just do it!  It really does get much easier if you start off this way.
    One more comment on learning tunes.  Music comes in nice, easy to recognize phrases.  When we learn and memorize tunes, it is convenient to chew and swallow the pieces in phrase-sized chunks.  Now, there may be some awkward sequence of fingerings within a phrase that you'll have to go over time-and-time-again.  But what we often pay less attention to, and what often gives more problems, are the transitions from one phrase to the next.
    So, for example, one thing that you should practice over and over is the last few notes of the tune followed immediately by the first few notes.  In fact, if you are just starting to memorize a tune, start by memorizing this end-to-beginning transition.  Then find the other transitions between phrases and memorize these.  I bet if you do this, you'll be amazed at how fast you'll be able to pick up the tune.

Yeah, I know, it sounds more like a Sousa march.  This problem can be very easily solved.  Just surf on over to our Irish Flute Poser web page.

So, these are some opinions on questions that I seem to get a lot from beginning M and E flute players.  As implied in the disclaimer, I am not a music teacher by any stretch of the imagination.  These things just seemed to help get me over the beginner stage.  Hopefully they can help you, too.  Looking forward to your thoughts.