8 Flute Practise Hacks: Save Time and Improve Faster

In other words,  you can work very hard, but not make much progress.

For example, if you practise diligently for an hour a day but continually use the wrong flute fingerings, you’ll encode this into your muscle memory. You'll get more and more familiar with the incorrect action, as well as how it sounds. 

An encoded practise mistake like this can cause future playing problems that are really hard to correct. It's every flute teacher's nightmare!

(Do a quick self-assessment right now.

Do you recognise any of these 13 common beginner mistakes?)

So how can you avoid encoding failures or bad habits?

Start by reducing the complexity of exercises and intentionally practice ‘bit by bit’.

Cognitive science has found that people actually learn the fastest by making small, steady leaps. Tackling a piece too difficult all in one go, means the rate of failure shoots up, and motivation and enjoyment plummet.

Use this as a guide… if you start a piece and encounter significant and frequent errors, redesign what you’re doing and temporarily simplify it.

Work on just one aspect intentionally at a time before recombining...

• Slow it down 
• Play only a few bars at a time
• Clap out the rhythm
• Remove articulation  or dynamics  temporarily

Apparently less is more.

So what are the "20 percent of things" that are most important for a beginner player to include in flute practise?

I asked a group of experienced flute players that question, and got resounding agreement with these core skills

• scales
• breathing and breath support
• embouchure
• long tones  

The idea is that you continue to practise these things until they are automatic.

They don’t become less important to practise or less valuable as you come to master them. They actually remain the most important as they allow you to play with consistent excellence.

Keep the practise of these core skills engaging by making small variations to exercises. (Here's some ways I change up practising my scales....)

And this mastery of these core skills leads to the next point…

When your teacher plonks a sheet of unseen music on your stand and says ‘play it’ your initial reaction could be to ‘freak out.’

There's so much to process at once - several key changes, new rhythms, tempo dynamics and articulation markings.

But… if you’ve been practising your scales as one of your core skills, you'll already  have encoded the muscle memory and ear training needed for that key signature.  

Your active cognition is then free to engage in something ‘extra’, like exploring the more creative and emotive aspects of your playing such as adding vibrato and tonal colours.

So if you want to work at your most creative at certain moments, identify what playing skills you need to use. Then practise automating them to free up more processing capacity for creative play.

An example might be a beautiful cadenza where there's a short run of the chromatic scale. You can automate learning the fingerings which then allows you to focus on building the atmosphere with a grand crescendo and luscious tone.

Cognitive science has shown that leaps of understanding and inspiration are helped along by expending as little capacity as possible on the ‘little things’.

Drilling (practicing a skill in isolation repetitively) doesn't actually diminish creative thought. It actually helps players to be more creative player when under performance pressure.

 But isn’t too much repetition boring? Not if you understand why you're doing it.

One powerful and under-leveraged practise tool is to maximise your strengths, so that they overshadow some of your weaknesses.

Start to recognise the aspects of flute playing you are good at!

Practising bright spots in a group setting can also be particularly valuable as not every player shares the same strengths.

Having playing peers that can each demonstrate their own bright spots to other players is a great way to help everyone continue to strive for excellence, and learn too.

What’s the difference?

A drill deliberately distorts the setting in which a player will perform to isolate practising a skill intentionally and with maximum concentration.

Drills are a ‘dense’ technique for completing the most number of productive iterations per session. Its by this ‘rote’ repetitive learning we’ve discussed in the previous points, that we can encode success to become automatic in the fastest method possible.

A scrimmage is designed to replicate the complexity of the performance situation. 

A scrimmage usually doesn’t allow you to go back and fix mistakes, but rather replicates key aspects of a performance’s flow, such as the sequence of events, the time frame allowed, the location you’ll play in, or the distractions you might face.

Their purposes differ as well - a drill focuses on skill development and a scrimmage on evaluation and final preparation.

A scrimmage is like a full dress rehearsal that answers the larger questions of “Am I performance ready?”

The body’s neural circuits can be reprogrammed quickly. Shortening the time between the wrong action, and then correcting to the right one will help to erase the error. Repeating that correct action several times will help to overwhelm the wrong memory with the right one.

Implementing feedback (whether its your own self-correction or that of a teacher or peer) and not just receiving feedback, helps the encoding process.

Old-fashioned practise - efficiently run, planned out and intentionally executed has the power to achieve great things in your flute playing.

There’s a common misconception that at some point we shouldn’t need to practice. That we eventually achieve a point of mastery that can’t be added to.

But the very best flute players recognise that habitual practise, approaching playing as a humble 'expert beginner' and being a dedicated life long learner are the keys to becoming not just good, but great.