Flute Mom

  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...

  So MUCH to play, so little time The problem: I have no meaningful amount of time to practice. The solution: I redefined “meaningful amount of time” and reduced my desired practice time from 1 hour on days-when-I-could-maybe-get-the-time-to-practice to 15 minutes on weekdays.  I recently organized my sheet music and etude books and finally created a dedicated practice space in my tiny, urban house. As I was alphabetizing my scores and etude books I thought about the literally thousands of hours I spent perfecting my craft of flute playing and suddenly felt angry - “Who the hell has the time to practice scales and arpeggios for hours on end?!?!” I screamed. Certainly no one with caring responsibilities. Definitely not a mother with two young kids. I don’t have time to be a flute player, I thought. I felt defeated. I didn’t practice for a few days. Then I got an idea and I said to myself, "Put practice on your calendar: 15 minutes a day. You know you will do it." Anyone who kn...