For any house or building to stand strong, it must rest on a solid foundation. Mastering the flute is no different. When your foundational flute skills are in place, making progress on the flute becomes that much easier. Here, we break down 6 important flute fundamentals that are vital to your playing.
Much like building a house, these skills build on top of each other. It’s no good laying the cement for your foundations if you have not even dug them out! So, as you go through this process, be sure to assess these foundations in the correct order.
Mindset
Let’s start with thoughts and your attitude, or what is commonly known as mindset. Mindset is powerful because it influences your thoughts, behaviors, emotions, and ultimately, your learning outcomes.
Adult learners tend to struggle with this more than children. For example, if you constantly worry that you’re too old to learn, not good enough, or feel silly for even trying, you will quickly find yourself believing those things and acting in ways that agree with these beliefs.
I often say to my students: Your biggest problem is what’s between your ears! 😆 Being aware of your thoughts is a good first step in solving this issue. The next step is to develop an open, curious approach to your playing. Rather than creating impossible standards for yourself, try things out and see what happens. Approach your practice time almost like an experiment – even if that means you sound ugly at times. It’s all part of the process!
Body
Contrary to what some may falsely assume, playing the flute is a full-body experience! Almost every part of your body plays a role in what you ultimately sound like. That’s why it’s so important to address issues like correct posture, how your flute is angled and even the position of your feet. Everything matters – from our toes to our embouchure!
Let’s talk about body alignment. When you look at yourself in the mirror, you should be able to draw a straight line from top to bottom. Your feet, hips, shoulders and head should be nicely stacked on top of each other.
Things like jutting your neck forward, locking out your knees or even just having tension somewhere in your body can all have a detrimental effect on your sound. Try checking in a mirror and looking at your side profile to see whether it’s aligned. Also, pivot your head slightly to the left when you’re playing so that you are looking over your left shoulder and your flute is 30 and 45 degrees from your shoulders and body.
If you’d like some more information on how to balance your body correctly, check out this video:
Breath
Closely connected to your body is your breath. When there is an issue with your body (for example twisting your upper body or locking out your knees), this also immediately restricts the breath.
When we breathe, our diaphragm contracts and drops down and works with our intercostal muscles to open up our rib cage. This creates space in your chest cavity and air comes rushing in to fill the space. As our diaphragm drops, our organs move down and out. When you allow this process, you should feel movement down to your pelvic floor.
Rather than sucking your stomach in or lifting your chest, let your belly release and flop out. When you feel that lovely expansion in your abdomen, you know you’re doing it right! Work with your natural breath – don’t force anything.
Throughout the years, I have seen massive improvements in students when they’ve just learned to breathe calmly and work with what their body is already doing anyway. If you’d like to dive a little deeper into breathing, check out my comprehensive video on this:
Tone
Tone is another critical aspect of playing the flute – we all want to achieve that beautiful singing sound.
To start with, it’s helpful to know how tone is formed. The air hits the edge of the tone hole of the flute, splitting the airstream in two and creating a note. The exact pitch and quality of that note are controlled by the speed and angle of the air. The higher the angle and speed, the higher the pitch; the lower the angle and speed, the lower the pitch. So to get a good clear sound on any given note, we need a focused airstream to hit the tone hole at an exact angle and with the right amount of airspeed.
A relaxed and flexible embouchure is critical for creating the angle of air you need. It is, after all, your lips and jaw that will move that air angle higher and lower. So one of your most important skills to develop as a flutist is a supple embouchure. A simple exercise to help with this is to blow air up and down on your hand. If you can do this, you’re halfway there!
You will also want to check that your lips align with your tone hole, that you are not covering too much or too little of the tone hole with your lower lip, and that you are placing the flute in the optimal space on your lower lip. Also, having a well-balanced body and free and easy breath can solve so many tone issues, so make sure you check those things too.
For more on tone, check out my video on this:
Hand position
Do you struggle to play from C to D in the middle register? Does your flute feel a little shaky and unstable at times, especially when you play those notes? Chances are, this can be traced back to faulty hand position.
One of the first important aspects of getting this right is how you hold the flute. Instead of being held up, your flute should be pinned in place. This means it gently rests against your lower lip while your left-hand index finger and right-hand thumb apply opposing forward and backward pressure as you secure the flute in place.
There may be some other issues that you struggle with when it comes to hand position too, like stiff or tight fingers or just lacking finger speed. If this is you, I recommend investing your time in exploring the concept of hand position and seeing how you can improve this. We have many resources available to help you, for example, this blog post on hand position as well as our popular Faster Fingers course.
Articulation
When it comes to articulation, this is a broad term for how a note begins and ends. Remember, the air creates sound, your embouchure controls the sound and the tongue gives the sound definition.
One problem I see a lot when it comes to articulation is the position of the tongue. The correct place for it is behind the back teeth, where you would say the English words “two”, “new,” or “do”. We do have one other option, which is the so-called French tonguing, where we start the note from between the lips, but unless you have learned to do this already, I recommend the traditional articulation for most students.
You can practice your tonguing at any time by saying “tu tu tu tu” as fast as possible, making sure that you are keeping the tongue in the correct position. You may also want to try gently biting down on the sides of the tongue so only the front part of it can move. This helps train your tongue for playing the flute – since we don’t move our whole tongue, just the front part.
For more on articulation (which includes tonguing), check out our blog post on improving articulation here.
Some last words
I’ve given you a brief overview of the 6 fundamentals of flute playing here. If you’d like to listen to these explained in more depth (along with plenty of practical demonstrations and a handy resource!) I encourage you to check out our free workshop called Flute 101: Your 90-minute Blueprint to Mastering the Basics by clicking on the link below:
Happy practicing!
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