Hey guys.

I need your advice about what books might be helpful for me to progress from where I'm at on the flute. I realise you can't hear me play! But I'd appreciate some advice.

I'm hoping after Christmas to get some lessons from a good teacher, as I should have some sort of independent transport (YAY!).

I've been playing the flute for about 13 years, but I am mostly self-taught. I had a year of lessons in school when I was 17 (I'm now 26) with a teacher who mostly taught me very bad technique :-( but fortunately my music teacher decided I should do my A-Level recital on the flute, so for about 6 months I had lessons with a teacher who's a local legend (she has got more than a few people through grade 8 with distinction in school lessons of half and hour shared between 3 pupils - she's a very talented teacher) who basically took my technique apart and rebuilt it till I played 3 grade 6 (UK) pieces with style and success in my recital, from being a rather shaky grade 4-5 with some really awful habits.

Fastfoward to now: I'm so very behind on scales. Apart from a few lessons in the last year, I am back to teaching myself. For quite a few years during uni and afterward I just didn't have the time or inclination to practice enough to get better. Recently I have been more disciplined, and I know objectively (with the help of being video'd at a couple of service I played it) I have really really improved. Pieces-wise I can still manage most of the G5 -G6 stuff I did with Suzanne, but my scales are lagging because I never worked on them. I just did AB grade 4, and boy did I have to work on those scales! I came out with a distinction, 136, and I hope to do grade 5 in the summer (I already know my G5 scales better than I knew my grade 4 scales this long before the exam!! hehe!) after having some lessons (if I can find a willing teacher!) and making sure my technique is really solid, as well as working on my dynamic and tonal range.

I have the Trevor Wye practice books, the Paul Harris ed. study books, the Thomas Filas Top Register Studies. I try to work hard and I'm very dedicated to my practice....

Are there any books, exercises, resources online, that anyone can recommend as a good "next place to go"? I know I need to work on breath control, and on having a good range of expression that is really under my control... I need to work on getting my technique better (knowing the top reg. fingerings really well, and not lifting my fingers so high from the keys, and also my tonguing). I'm a bit long in the tooth to ever be a virtuoso, but I really want to get as good as I have it in me to be. I am not aiming solely at getting through exams, though I find them useful in terms of checking progress, and I would like to achieve at least grade 8 with distinction ONE DAY! (I teach a few beginners, and would like to do more teaching, so the better I get, the better for my pupils, too, and having the bits of paper saying I can play helps as well...!)

Any ideas would be much appreciated. I don't have a specialised store close by, so it's hard to browse through music - the limited selection in the local store is OK but not great, and I can't get to a specialist store where I could have a look and see for myself what's good, so I have to rely on mail-order and hoping I get things right a lot of the time!

Thanks in advance... :-)

Hi
I have to say that you seem very clued about what you need to do in order to progress. I certainly think that finding a teacher would help tremendously.(I did pass grade 8 in the 6th form(1977!)followed by some lessons but hadn't done all that much since then) I have been having lessons with a young musician (almost half my age!) for the past 15 months and she has introduced me to lots of material and ideas. Unfortunately she has just given up all of her teaching to do some travelling in the New Year. However she has left me with lots of stuff to work on and I shall have less guilty pangs re when a lesson is due and I haven't practised enough!
I have bought the Taffanel and Gaubert "Daily Exercises for flute"and Moyse's"Tone Development through Interpretation" amongst other things-I already had the Wye books.
Regarding scales she taught me to go "all the way up and down " for each scale.Apparently they practise them like this at music college.So for G Major you carry on all the way up to top C and then down to bottom C and finish on G.Any scales with a C# in them would require C# at the top and the bottom.
I am considering trying scales like this with grade 5+ pupils who find scales easy (that's only one at the moment) as it would get them really used to using all of those top notes- I shall write them out for pupils using Sibelius 2.
There are lots of flute pages online but I can't think of any specific ones to help with improving yourself. I have done searches on many music related topics and if anything interesting comes up I print it out and keep it in a folder.I heard James Galway in an interview a little while and he was describing the amount of practice that he does. As long as you are practising useful things you should be improving.For me I think that the only way to find what is best to practise is to find a suitable teacher. My lessons over the past 15 months have given me a real boost and charged me with some ambitions.
Good luck with your flute playing.

QUOTE (sarah-flute @ Dec 23 2004, 12:35 AM)

I need your advice about what books might be helpful for me to progress from where I'm at on the flute. Fastfoward to now: I'm so very behind on scales. I have the Trevor Wye practice books

I strongly recommend Technical Flexibility For Flutists A book of organized daily practice routines by Geoffrey Gilbert, who taught Trevor Wye (and me). He was a great teacher whose business was preparing students to become the best orchestral players. This wonderful book of scale and arpeggio-based exercises is based on the teaching material he used week after relentless week and term after term, which was planned to teach us to recognise and play all manner of scales and arpeggios in a variety of groupings and with a wide variety of articulations. He wasn't preparing exam candidates, and any necessary memorising was entirely our business.

There was no book when I was studying with him, just single (big) photocopied sheets handed out week by week. The book was published in 1988 by Southern Music Company of San Antonion, Texas - he had moved to the USA in around 1969. If the preface is to be believed the only reason it got compiled at all was that he was stuck in an isolated holiday cottage during what he describes as "the disastrous summer in England in 1986", for which every serious flute player should be eternally grateful.

For those of you not within easy reach of a music shop I can also recommend from happy personal experience over many years June Emerson Wind Music <JuneEmerson@compuserve.com>, based in Ampleforth, Yorkshire. You can now buy your wind music online at www.JuneEmerson.co.uk. She has an absolutely enormous stock (many thousands of items), and I think you can browse the catalogue on line.

Da Capo
How does the Geoffrey Gilbert book compare to Taffanel and Gaubert's daily exercises for flute?
I find that I only get to use a small amount of the T&G material (I don't have hours to practise!).
Is the Gilbert in "smaller chunks". I think that the T&G exercises must average about 8 pages in length.
Thanks

Thank you! I was wondering why no one had responded, and it turns out I forgot to subscribe to my own thread... d'oh...

That gilbert books sounds interesting.

Does anyone have an opinion of the 6th Trevor Wye book? is it worth getting? or should I wait till such time as a teacher tells me to get it?

thanks for your encouragement that I'm "on the right track!"

QUOTE (JRBailey @ Dec 27 2004, 10:01 AM)

Da Capo How does the Geoffrey Gilbert book compare to Taffanel and Gaubert's daily exercises for flute? I find that I only get to use a small amount of the T&G material (I don't have hours to practise!). Is the Gilbert in "smaller chunks". I think that the T&G exercises must average about 8 pages in length. Thanks

I've just had a look back at T & G (I've got the whole tome). Their Daily Exercises include more varied forms of the scales and arpeggios but covering a smaller range. Gilbert, writing some 60 years later, extends the range to the high D throughout, and in the last couple of pages recommends some books to extend still further, with a "NOTE: The following exercises are for the adventurous". They are arpeggios climbing ginormous ladders of leger lines to exceedingly high F!

Gilbert gives scales and arpeggios (major, both minors, whole tone, chromatic, dominant and diminished 7ths, augmented triads) in simple form with key signatures, in several sequences, the first with notes grouped in fours. Each sequence has a number of different articulations to practice. With very high D as the highest note included in the main body of the book each scale or arpeggio starts on the tonic, goes up to the highest note that's in that key, goes down to the bottom of the instrument then turns back up to the tonic. I think it would be much easier than T & G to use as a scale reference manual.

Now, you sound like someone who would know... those fourth octave notes, is it possible to get them on a flute without a B footjoint? because I've read claims both ways. I can't get beyond C4, but then I know that is at LEAST partly because I need to develop my embouchure. Are there different fingerings for those notes depending on whether you have a B footjoint?? Someone commented in another thread that they used D4 in a grade 8 exam, but I don't know if that exam piece was just for those with low footjoints.

The gilbert book is also the best part of a tenner less than the T&G, which I am afraid is a big selling point right now, lol. The T&G may end up being a birthday present next year, lol..... people will think I've lost the plot

Da Capo
Thanks very much for the comparision of the 2 books. I shall definitely consider getting the Gilbert book.

P.S. Ordered the Gilbert book today from June Emerson it cost £12:50 +p&p.
Thanks