Flute Mom

           I have been playing again for 6 months and I have come a long way from Twinkle, Twinkle little star . I can play my full range and I am starting to sound like myself again. I have been playing exercises from Taffanel & Gaubert's 17 Grands Exercices Journaliers de Mecanisme pour Flute . As I was thumbing through the book again I realized I actually didn’t know most of the exercises. I had only really played exercises 1, 2, 4, 6 and 10. That’s less than one-third of the book! I used to play T-G exercises literally everyday. I thought I knew the T-G book well. It turns out I know close to nothing.      Here is my New Year’s resolution: play every exercise in the Taffanel-Gaubert book. I will work on 1 exercise a week for 17 weeks. Over the course of a week I will play every suggested articulation and actually read the introductory description. My goal is to improve my technique and actually understand the book and teach my...

The problem: I don’t know how well I play, objectively speaking. The solution: Ask an expert: Emily aka the Rebel Music Teacher. It’s been almost 25 years since I started playing so I was delighted to discover my old Rubank book among my etude books. I thought - maybe I can handle this? Maybe playing exercises from the Rubank book will allow me to perform a self-assessment? Maybe I can play better than a 7th grader? This book didn’t help me determine whether or not I play better than a 7th grader for a few reasons. First, there are no metronome markings so it’s hard to know if I am playing the exercises proficiently. In terms of music theory it’s far too elementary because I can count sixteenth notes and I know the difference between a slur and a tie. It’s been a fun book for sight-reading but to know how well I play, I will need to play for someone else (gulp). Enter Emily, aka, the Rebel Music Teacher . Emily is a music educator, blogger and parent. She has been a music teacher for o...

The problem:  I have no home for my flute within my home. The solution: Creating a dedicated practice space in a corner of my living room with a bookshelf, a mirror, a white board, and a combination lock. Ever since moving out of my parent’s house, I dreamed of having a flute room. Imagine a home office with scores instead of books, professional recording equipment, soundproofing, a mirror, a small desk, a wind-up metronome, several professional music stands, and an area rug to tie the room together.  I never got my flute room for several reasons: I stopped playing for years, my kids needed rooms to sleep in and, until recently,  I was never as organized as I wanted to be. But I think the greatest hurdle between me and the flute room-of-my-dreams is the cost of real estate. I live in Los Angeles and as of this writing a single-family home in my neighborhood costs about $813/square foot. I was able to accept the fact that I have no extra rooms in my small, urban dwelling b...

  The problem: I don’t know what to play. All of my sheet music is too hard because I haven’t practiced in years and practicing scales is essential but it gets boring fast. The solution:  Play melodies from children’s songs and nursery rhymes by ear. It’s ear training while playing actual music. When I had kids, I had no idea how my life would change. I simply didn’t know what I didn’t know. I mention in my introduction that I no longer had time to practice post-career-and-kids but after becoming a parent I started singing all off the time. ALL of the time. I sang my babies to sleep. I sang to help them calm down from a tantrum. We sang as a family in the car. My kids and I sang at library story time. We sang in the bath. We sang while watching Sesame Street. And when I lay in bed too exhausted to wake up in the morning I hear my daughter singing the songs I sing to her. When I picked up my flute again a few months ago I didn’t actually know what to play other than scales...

  Where the hell is my low register?!?!? The problem: I can’t produce a note below F4. The solution: Start in the middle register and work my way down. As a flutist, I had a secret weapon: a loud, clear sonorous low register. After over a decade sabbatical, It was gone (sigh). How do I get it back? How do you produce sounds that just aren’t there? I tried harmonics starting on the low register. But the same problem: how do you leverage a sound that isn’t there? Then I realized what I need to do: Play what is actually there. I started in the middle register and worked my way down . Set my metronome down to 60 bpm I set my metronome to 60 bpm. And started at C5 and slurred down an octave then back up. I found that this exercise gave me a starting point. Rather than searching for pitches that aren’t there, I could play the notes that were accessible to me then slur down an octave to find the low register again. This exercise was my warm for months and it was also a way for me to ...

  Hi, I’m Kate. I’m a flute player and I’m a mom.  I started playing the flute when I was 11 years-old in middle school band class and it wasn’t long before I fell in love with playing the flute. I was good at playing the flute - really good, I stood out among my peers and other kids asked me “How are you so good at flute?”  I continued practicing hard through high school and I went to college on a music scholarship with the hope of becoming a professional flutist. Collegiate level musicians who are training to become professional performers train as hard as athletes. Aspiring pro-musicians' lives revolve around playing music. I practiced 4 hours a day everyday for four years - I spent 10-15 hours a week in rehearsals and every week I had a 90-minute individual lesson with my flute professor.  I practiced so long and hard that I literally gave myself a fat lip with swelling so severe I had trouble playing and talking for an entire weekend. I collected my degree and u...