The Long Game: 10 Tips on Transformational Practice

After a significant flute practice break, it can sometimes be rough to get back into the groove of things. We might find tone with more fuzz than core, intervals too wide and an embouchure that seems to have forgotten how to facilitate a smooth, steady airstream. Perhaps there’s even a bit of temporary amnesia related to knowing how much oxygen your body is capable of breathing.

If your practice break has been only a day, you might be moments away from rediscovering the beautiful center to your tone, intervals that make way more sense and remembering that your body is your instrument (with that fancy silver tube you play just making you sound like a flutist). If the break has been two or three days, you could be only a couple of great practice sessions away from finding your way back. If the break has been long however, perhaps due to illness or injury, you will need (at least) three solid practice days or maybe even a couple of weeks before the flute begins to make sense again.

Just like “getting back in flute shape” takes anywhere from a few moments to a few days or even weeks, transforming yourself to a higher level of flute playing is also a long game. It is a game you could call a quest, a journey or even a mission. It is more treasure hunt than to-do list and more devotion than discipline. I’ll even go so far as to say that it’s more discovery than achievement.

It’s tempting to think that a regiment of Moyse long tones, T&G and a daily flute to-do list is a guarantee to the next level, right? Not necessarily. There is a huge difference between autopilot “shoulds” vs. practice filled with presence, curiosity and true listening. One flutist could feel quite virtuous checking off flute playing tasks, unaware (or painfully aware) that they are programming in physical tension, mental stress or mental avoidance while a different flutist could allow themselves plenty of time and space to focus on “just one thing for today” or even rebel against “shoulds,” playing only music that they feel like playing. What if the second flutist experiences a dramatic epiphany today that transforms their tone or elevates their technique? What if they ignite or reignite their love of flute and music as they feel the groove, have fun with the high notes and notice things they never noticed before? Repetitions and routine are always essential of course, but the second flutist could have allowed themselves a sense of wonder, the freedom of play (as in “child’s play”) and consequently been more available for practice and repetitions that involve engagement of the spirit. What if “just showing up” to practice your flute is actually the most important thing?

In my 25 years of teaching and interacting with all types of flutists (of every age, level, personality and learning style imaginable), I find it is quite rare to run across a flutist actually satisfied with their growth path, even if they are as diligent as possible with traditional “old-school” routines. Unfortunately, flutists dissatisfied with their own growth are often missing the musical x-factors (sparkle, shine, flash, colors, emotional depth and more). If this describes you or your students even a little bit, the following 10 Transformational Practice Tips could be quite helpful. They might just help you (and/or your students) join the small club of flute students actively feeling excited about their current and future flute progress!

1. Make FUN a top priority. All work and no play is not conducive to consistency. As human beings, our willpower is finite and feeling bound to uninspiring rules will sooner or later prompt procrastination, avoidance or flat out rebellion. Always include music and exercises you really enjoy early in your practice routine or, even better, as the first thing you play each day! 

Side note: The only exception to this tip has to do with tempos. Passion or no passion, it’s not helpful to rush ahead to tempos for which you are unprepared. If faster feels more fun, play small sections that are actually accessible one beat at a time, working up to one measure at a time, one line at a time, etc.

2. Invest in tomorrow and tomorrow. Forget needing results today. Do exploratory practice filled with curiosity and experiments. Don’t worry about getting all your reps in until you find something worth repeating. The experiments you do today will lead to your aha moments tomorrow and the day after that. Next week’s passionate reps will be based on the discoveries you made this week and next month’s thrilling progress will be a direct result of the delayed gratification you were willing to experience this month!
3. Allow yourself to play badly. It is often the insistence on fictional perfection and/or the desperation to avoid mistakes that adds too much pressure to the practice equation. If you are already inspired and motivated, feel free to utilize the old model of “if you never make a mistake, you never make a mistake” (taking great care to never make an error as you slowly work through details). If you are NOT currently inspired and motivated, however, try the complete opposite strategy! Make big, beautiful, passionate mistakes creating a gorgeous mess that you can then clean up one detail at a time. The x-factors will only ever show up when passion is present, so you might as well start with that first!

Side note: Keep in mind that repetitions themselves often yield aha moments, just don’t load up on pressure for them to create results too quickly.

4. Ditch the old advice. Over the course of years, you will have collected hundreds or thousands of pieces of flute advice (some big and a lot small) that clutter up your mind like a hoarder’s stuff clutters their house. Any advice that still resonates? Keep it, treasure it and expand your knowledge about it. Any advice that doesn’t currently apply or make sense to you? Toss it out! Purge! Weird advice from your trombone playing band director in 8th grade should not affect your advanced flute solo practice today. Clear the path for new discoveries, aha moments and a personal connection with flute and music that couldn’t have happened in the context of a cluttered mind.
5. Take frequent practice vacations. A practice vacation doesn’t have to be a break from practicing. Give yourself rejuvenating breaks while you practice! Put a YouTube video of the ocean waves rolling onto a beach in Hawaii on your TV screen while you play your flute. Buy luxurious gourmet tea to sip during your practice session. Dress up like you’re performing a concert or going to a fancy gala just to do an hour of warm-ups. Play pop music as your metronome and/or tuner while practicing etudes. Sky’s the limit when it comes to creating a fun “vacation” and/or new practice locations for yourself. Making practice special improves the emotional quality of the hours spent and your progress made will show it!
6. Rebel actively. Scan your psyche for any perceived expectations that are stressing you out. Any worries about what you or others will think about your playing count. Set an intention to rebel against those expectations just for fun! If a past teacher was never satisfied with your volume, spend an entire practice session playing as quietly as you like. If a conductor calls you out for playing too loud, enjoy a day of playing everything fortissimo just because you can. If intonation has been driving you nuts, run amok playing out of tune for a while to blow off some steam. Opposites are a catalyst for growth, so rebelling may yield surprisingly good results that worrying about expectations never could.
7. Surprise yourself! Journal out a third person description of yourself as a musician. Be honest, yet objective (rather than overly critical). You might write, “Jane feels confident with technical passages, but is not sure what to do with long, lyrical phrases,” or “Michael shines in the high register but is often frustrated with his low register.” Cover as many flute playing topics as you can. Then … surprise yourself! Instead of avoiding the insecurities and discomforts, dive head first into the deep end with them! If you are Jane and tend to avoid lyricism, begin a new quest to learn as much about phrasing as possible. If you are Michael and have hated your low register for years, dedicate the next month of practice to finding the most badass, powerful, core-filled low register you’ve ever heard! Facing weaknesses instead of avoiding them can be surprisingly liberating.
8. Count listening as practice. Do enough warming up to stay in flute shape, but then give yourself radical permission to lie on the couch and spend time listening to great music instead of metronome practice for today. You may choose awesome flute players as your listening selections, but your radical permission slip will include ANY genre or type of musician. Listening to the entire soundtrack of The Nightmare Before Christmas has the potential to teach you way more about being a great flutist than forcing yourself to do practice tasks that you don’t currently feel like doing. Going for a drive with the volume cranked up on your favorite playlist has more potential to awaken your musician’s spirit than an uninspired practice session ever will.
9. Master the art of “no deadline” mentality. Even though deadlines are a reality in most musicians’ lives (auditions, competitions, lessons, rehearsals, concerts), practicing with a deadline mentality can often do more harm than good. Rather than an all or nothing approach (either being “perfect” and planning ahead or, if not, feeling like you’re scrambling around in time scarcity), create baby buffers that offer you increased relaxation. If your lesson is on Thursday, rather than trying to practice enough Wednesday night and Thursday morning to feel ready, try completing your lesson prep on Tuesday. Each time you start to feel pressure, remind yourself there’s an extra day! Instead of giving yourself an hour to work on a tough section of music, double the time allowance and enjoy notching up the metronome extra slowly while you have plenty of time to take breaks and try different practice techniques. After you get good at baby buffers, start giving yourself more and more luxury time so that there is a “settle in and watch a good movie or read a good book” feeling to your practice, rather than a “never enough time” feeling flavoring everything you do. Luxury practice yields luxury results!
10. Realize that personal growth IS flute playing growth. All too often, a flutist can try to compartmentalize life and practice. They may feel frustrated with the same flute playing issues week after week, never realizing that their physical tension is directly related to the fact that they haven’t been swimming or weight lifting in weeks, either. They could be chasing seemingly unreachable tempos, breathing endurance or tone expectations, not understanding that their weary, overworked spirit is just craving some downtime. A flutist could even be completely unaware that their inability to fulfill their current potential is directly related to trauma from which they have not yet healed. Moyse, T&G and a daily flute to-do list will do little for growing to the next level if a flutist’s body, mind and/or heart are feeling stuck. It is amazing what exercise, self-care, journaling, counseling, inspiring books, helpful YouTube videos and any kind of investment in personal transformation can do for your flute playing. Take time to nurture yourself and your growth as a flutist and musician will come along with you.

If you are feeling ready for a complete transformation and want to incorporate all ten of these Transformational Practice Tips, it will not be long before you catch glimpses and then real proof of their benefits. If you’re skeptical and/or not able to make huge changes yet, try just one or two of the tips as personal experiments. Ultimately, only you can decide to transform yourself into a higher-level, more artistic flutist. Keep collecting ideas, but remember to clear out the old and make way for the new. You have unlimited potential, and the way to gain more and more access to it is to find ways of flute practicing that make sense to YOU. Experiment endlessly until you are on a satisfying path of growth that you are sure will yield beautiful results along the way!

After a significant flute practice break, it can sometimes be rough to get back into the groove of things. We might find tone with more fuzz than core, intervals too wide and an embouchure that seems to have forgotten how to facilitate a smooth, steady airstream. Perhaps there’s even a bit of temporary amnesia related to knowing how much oxygen your body is capable of breathing.

If your practice break has been only a day, you might be moments away from rediscovering the beautiful center to your tone, intervals that make way more sense and remembering that your body is your instrument (with that fancy silver tube you play just making you sound like a flutist). If the break has been two or three days, you could be only a couple of great practice sessions away from finding your way back. If the break has been long however, perhaps due to illness or injury, you will need (at least) three solid practice days or maybe even a couple of weeks before the flute begins to make sense again.

Just like “getting back in flute shape” takes anywhere from a few moments to a few days or even weeks, transforming yourself to a higher level of flute playing is also a long game. It is a game you could call a quest, a journey or even a mission. It is more treasure hunt than to-do list and more devotion than discipline. I’ll even go so far as to say that it’s more discovery than achievement.

It’s tempting to think that a regiment of Moyse long tones, T&G and a daily flute to-do list is a guarantee to the next level, right? Not necessarily. There is a huge difference between autopilot “shoulds” vs. practice filled with presence, curiosity and true listening. One flutist could feel quite virtuous checking off flute playing tasks, unaware (or painfully aware) that they are programming in physical tension, mental stress or mental avoidance while a different flutist could allow themselves plenty of time and space to focus on “just one thing for today” or even rebel against “shoulds,” playing only music that they feel like playing. What if the second flutist experiences a dramatic epiphany today that transforms their tone or elevates their technique? What if they ignite or reignite their love of flute and music as they feel the groove, have fun with the high notes and notice things they never noticed before? Repetitions and routine are always essential of course, but the second flutist could have allowed themselves a sense of wonder, the freedom of play (as in “child’s play”) and consequently been more available for practice and repetitions that involve engagement of the spirit. What if “just showing up” to practice your flute is actually the most important thing?

In my 25 years of teaching and interacting with all types of flutists (of every age, level, personality and learning style imaginable), I find it is quite rare to run across a flutist actually satisfied with their growth path, even if they are as diligent as possible with traditional “old-school” routines. Unfortunately, flutists dissatisfied with their own growth are often missing the musical x-factors (sparkle, shine, flash, colors, emotional depth and more). If this describes you or your students even a little bit, the following 10 Transformational Practice Tips could be quite helpful. They might just help you (and/or your students) join the small club of flute students actively feeling excited about their current and future flute progress!

1. Make FUN a top priority. All work and no play is not conducive to consistency. As human beings, our willpower is finite and feeling bound to uninspiring rules will sooner or later prompt procrastination, avoidance or flat out rebellion. Always include music and exercises you really enjoy early in your practice routine or, even better, as the first thing you play each day! 

2. Allow yourself to play badly. It is often the insistence on fictional perfection and/or the desperation to avoid mistakes that adds too much pressure to the practice equation. If you are already inspired and motivated, feel free to utilize the old model of “if you never make a mistake, you never make a mistake” (taking great care to never make an error as you slowly work through details). If you are NOT currently inspired and motivated, however, try the complete opposite strategy! Make big, beautiful, passionate mistakes creating a gorgeous mess that you can then clean up one detail at a time. The x-factors will only ever show up when passion is present, so you might as well start with that first!

Side note: The only exception to this tip has to do with tempos. Passion or no passion, it’s not helpful to rush ahead to tempos for which you are unprepared. If faster feels more fun, play small sections that are actually accessible one beat at a time, working up to one measure at a time, one line at a time, etc.

3. Invest in tomorrow and tomorrow. Forget needing results today. Do exploratory practice filled with curiosity and experiments. Don’t worry about getting all your reps in until you find something worth repeating. The experiments you do today will lead to your aha moments tomorrow and the day after that. Next week’s passionate reps will be based on the discoveries you made this week and next month’s thrilling progress will be a direct result of the delayed gratification you were willing to experience this month!

Side note: Keep in mind that repetitions themselves often yield aha moments, just don’t load up on pressure for them to create results too quickly.

4. Ditch the old advice. Over the course of years, you will have collected hundreds or thousands of pieces of flute advice (some big and a lot small) that clutter up your mind like a hoarder’s stuff clutters their house. Any advice that still resonates? Keep it, treasure it and expand your knowledge about it. Any advice that doesn’t currently apply or make sense to you? Toss it out! Purge! Weird advice from your trombone playing band director in 8th grade should not affect your advanced flute solo practice today. Clear the path for new discoveries, aha moments and a personal connection with flute and music that couldn’t have happened in the context of a cluttered mind.

5. Take frequent practice vacations. A practice vacation doesn’t have to be a break from practicing. Give yourself rejuvenating breaks while you practice! Put a YouTube video of the ocean waves rolling onto a beach in Hawaii on your TV screen while you play your flute. Buy luxurious gourmet tea to sip during your practice session. Dress up like you’re performing a concert or going to a fancy gala just to do an hour of warm-ups. Play pop music as your metronome and/or tuner while practicing etudes. Sky’s the limit when it comes to creating a fun “vacation” and/or new practice locations for yourself. Making practice special improves the emotional quality of the hours spent and your progress made will show it!

6. Rebel actively. Scan your psyche for any perceived expectations that are stressing you out. Any worries about what you or others will think about your playing count. Set an intention to rebel against those expectations just for fun! If a past teacher was never satisfied with your volume, spend an entire practice session playing as quietly as you like. If a conductor calls you out for playing too loud, enjoy a day of playing everything fortissimo just because you can. If intonation has been driving you nuts, run amok playing out of tune for a while to blow off some steam. Opposites are a catalyst for growth, so rebelling may yield surprisingly good results that worrying about expectations never could.

7. Surprise yourself! Journal out a third person description of yourself as a musician. Be honest, yet objective (rather than overly critical). You might write, “Jane feels confident with technical passages, but is not sure what to do with long, lyrical phrases,” or “Michael shines in the high register but is often frustrated with his low register.” Cover as many flute playing topics as you can. Then … surprise yourself! Instead of avoiding the insecurities and discomforts, dive head first into the deep end with them! If you are Jane and tend to avoid lyricism, begin a new quest to learn as much about phrasing as possible. If you are Michael and have hated your low register for years, dedicate the next month of practice to finding the most badass, powerful, core-filled low register you’ve ever heard! Facing weaknesses instead of avoiding them can be surprisingly liberating.

8. Count listening as practice. Do enough warming up to stay in flute shape, but then give yourself radical permission to lie on the couch and spend time listening to great music instead of metronome practice for today. You may choose awesome flute players as your listening selections, but your radical permission slip will include ANY genre or type of musician. Listening to the entire soundtrack of The Nightmare Before Christmas has the potential to teach you way more about being a great flutist than forcing yourself to do practice tasks that you don’t currently feel like doing. Going for a drive with the volume cranked up on your favorite playlist has more potential to awaken your musician’s spirit than an uninspired practice session ever will.

9. Master the art of “no deadline” mentality. Even though deadlines are a reality in most musicians’ lives (auditions, competitions, lessons, rehearsals, concerts), practicing with a deadline mentality can often do more harm than good. Rather than an all or nothing approach (either being “perfect” and planning ahead or, if not, feeling like you’re scrambling around in time scarcity), create baby buffers that offer you increased relaxation. If your lesson is on Thursday, rather than trying to practice enough Wednesday night and Thursday morning to feel ready, try completing your lesson prep on Tuesday. Each time you start to feel pressure, remind yourself there’s an extra day! Instead of giving yourself an hour to work on a tough section of music, double the time allowance and enjoy notching up the metronome extra slowly while you have plenty of time to take breaks and try different practice techniques. After you get good at baby buffers, start giving yourself more and more luxury time so that there is a “settle in and watch a good movie or read a good book” feeling to your practice, rather than a “never enough time” feeling flavoring everything you do. Luxury practice yields luxury results!

10. Realize that personal growth IS flute playing growth. All too often, a flutist can try to compartmentalize life and practice. They may feel frustrated with the same flute playing issues week after week, never realizing that their physical tension is directly related to the fact that they haven’t been swimming or weight lifting in weeks, either. They could be chasing seemingly unreachable tempos, breathing endurance or tone expectations, not understanding that their weary, overworked spirit is just craving some downtime. A flutist could even be completely unaware that their inability to fulfill their current potential is directly related to trauma from which they have not yet healed. Moyse, T&G and a daily flute to-do list will do little for growing to the next level if a flutist’s body, mind and/or heart are feeling stuck. It is amazing what exercise, self-care, journaling, counseling, inspiring books, helpful YouTube videos and any kind of investment in personal transformation can do for your flute playing. Take time to nurture yourself and your growth as a flutist and musician will come along with you.

If you are feeling ready for a complete transformation and want to incorporate all ten of these Transformational Practice Tips, it will not be long before you catch glimpses and then real proof of their benefits. If you’re skeptical and/or not able to make huge changes yet, try just one or two of the tips as personal experiments. Ultimately, only you can decide to transform yourself into a higher-level, more artistic flutist. Keep collecting ideas, but remember to clear out the old and make way for the new. You have unlimited potential, and the way to gain more and more access to it is to find ways of flute practicing that make sense to YOU. Experiment endlessly until you are on a satisfying path of growth that you are sure will yield beautiful results along the way!