Monday, October 3, 2016

The Challenges of Producing a Good Tone on the Flute


An alumna of Southern Illinois University, Heidi Scott is a practicing lawyer and certified public accountant at the Law Offices of Heidi Scott in Mt. Sterling, Illinois. She focuses her practice on estate planning, tax law, and real estate. Before pursuing a legal career, Heidi Scott took up the flute and taught advanced flute classes in the 1990s. She even ranked in the National Flute Association Annual Competition.

Through the years, the flute has maintained its popularity as an instrument. The main reasons behind the instrument's enduring popularity are its portability and accessibility. However, there are many challenges to playing the flute.

The primary challenge is achieving a good tone. Unlike in other wind instruments where the mouthpiece fits into the player's mouth and thus immediately helps create the tone, in the flute, the embouchure hole is only part of what produces sound. Flute players need to focus their airstream on an exact spot to split the air stream in half. One-half helps create the tone while the other half goes in front of the player's mouth. As a result, flute players need twice as much air in producing the same tone produced with other wind instruments. On top of that, flute players need to coordinate their abdominal muscles, lungs, and diaphragm together with their lips and jaw in order to get a good tone.