Where the hell is my low register?!?!?

 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 familiarize myself with tempos. I find it helpful that once you have 60 bpm memorized (without a clock) you can use 60 bpm to figure out other tempos. But that's a whole different post entirely.