I've got a great mini-lesson for you today on how to progress faster with your flute playing.

How to progress faster on the flute!

I explain how every little thing you're trying to do on the flute can be broken up into smaller parts, making it easier on your brain to learn.

When your brain tries to do 3 new tiny things at once, it achieves none of them. I love the analogy of throwing 3 tennis balls for a Labrador, and (just like your brain), it gets none of them! 🐶

When you practice the flute, do you ever feel frustrated, overwhelmed, or defeated?

You might not realize it, but all of these three feelings have the same cause. And I'm going to show you today, the secret to overcoming it. I'm Jane Cavanagh. And I took my flute business online because I want to show you how breaking up complex techniques on the flute is how you get a clearer sound, faster fingers, smoother playing,  breath control, ease of playing.

See how I just break up flute playing into a few different parts?

Well, the secret to overcoming the frustration,  overwhelm or feeling of defeat when you're practicing is to do exactly the same thing with the thing that you're practicing a the time. You break it up into smaller parts.  You might not know how to break it up into smaller parts, but that's what I'm here for.

How to practise the flute

That frustration, overwhelm or feeling of defeat is caused because your brain is doing, trying to do too much. You are loading your brain up with too many things to do at the time. It might not feel like it.

You might just think that you're doing more one thing, but every one thing can be broken up into smaller parts as needed. And you might be thinking right now. Yeah, but if I break this one simple thing that I'm trying to do up into smaller parts, I'm going to progress more slowly. It's actually not true. You will progress much quicker.

How to learn the flute more quickly

Let me explain if we give you your brain less to do, it's going to learn quicker. What's actually going on is it's like you're saying to your brain, do all these five things at once, do all these five things at once and you keep trying harder and harder and harder to force these five new things on your brain. And you ended up getting frustrated, overwhelmed, or feeling defeated.

But if you can work out how to break something, anything up into smaller parts, you'll be saying, Here brain do the first thing and your brain goes, okay, fine. I can do that. Do the second thing. Okay, fine. Do the third, fourth, fifth. And you've got it. It's so much quicker learning like this.

Learning a scale on the flute

Here's an example. Let's say, you're trying to learn it as scale. This is just F major.

But you keep fudging the notes and you keep running out of air like this. So that was me pretending to fudge notes and pretending to run out of air. I dunno how convincing that was, but I'm sure you know what I mean? If you're running out of air and you keep tripping up on your notes.

So let's break this down. We're going to isolate the fingers, the speed and your breathing.

So in this example, if you were having trouble with this F major, you would do it slower and tongued. And that isolates those three things. And back down.

Isolating notes of a scale on the flute

To isolate control of your notes, you do it slower, which you probably guess, but you also do it tongued. It takes breathing off the table. And all you have to think about is your fingers.

In this example, once the student has control of their fingers and they can do that faster and faster and faster, then we add the slurring back in. And because they have control of their fingers and they can go faster, it means that the breathing is no longer a problem.

If this person had kept practicing it, the way that they were practicing, Maybe it wasn't that bad.

But if they'd practicing it with fudgy fingers and running out of air, that's what they would be teaching their fingers and their brain to do. They would be reinforcing the wrong way of playing, breaking something down into smaller components means that you are creating building blocks of good technique and good habits. And you layer them on top of each other so that you keep getting better.

Each one springboards you up to the next level of your playing ability and it gets you to where you need to be with your playing or where you want to be with your playing so much more quickly. It's kind of counterintuitive. You have to go slower to actually accelerate your progress.

Learning proper flute technique

This is actually the foundation of how I teach the flute to get a little taster of how I teach, come and do the three day free minicourse that I've got to instantly improve your sound, www.flute.school/free. You can sign up for it there if you haven't already.

Improve your flute tone in 3 steps

I'd love to show you this three step process to instantly improving your tone, because it really shows you what you can do if you know how to break up a concept into much smaller components. All right. Hopefully see you there.