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5 Things You Can Start Doing Today to Be More Successful At Playing the Flute

Despite the fact that you are good at the flute, you might feel like you still need to improve your flute-playing skills. There are certain things you might do to change the way you play it. Here are the five top tips that will help you improve your flute skills.

Improve Your Posture

This is perhaps the most important thing you need to do while playing the flute. Proper posture is simply the best foundation for playing the flute. This includes your form, the way you hold yourself and the way you hold the instrument. Remember, posture alters the sound, the fluidity of technique, and your ease of breathing. Sit with your back straight or stand with your head looking up and forward. The flute should be parallel to the floor and one foot should be in front of the other one with your weight properly balanced between your legs.

Check Your Aperture

The aperture is the space between your lips that constitutes the opening of your air stream. A large aperture will create an airy tone that is normally quite difficult to control. Try to create a smaller aperture if you do not do so already. You can do this by practicing long tones. With faster and more concentrated air, you will achieve a clearer sound.

Check Your Embouchure Alignment

If you are like most flutists, you probably hold your flute higher on your lips, which is not necessary. Align the flute to your lower lip so that the edge of the tone-holes aligns with the edge of that lip.

Air Support

Tense air will always lead to tense sounds. Take a proper breath and support your tone with a steady sir stream, which will center your tone and add some appropriate depth to the sound.

Practice Outdoors

What most flutists do not realize is that it is quite easy to fill up a small room with sound but not so much outside. Playing outdoors will help you develop your sound projection and you can play as loud as you would like to play. Playing outdoors will help you improve your ability to project sound over a large distance.

Finally, you should record yourself for you to know how well you are playing this instrument. The tone you hear up-close is not usually the same tone you will hear at a distance because your ears can deceive you. Record what you play and then listen so that you can hear yourself up-close. Doing so will help you discover tendencies that you did not know you had.

Keep reading: “3 Famous Musicians You’ve Got To Know: Classical Singers”>>

Read on: “Inspiration from the Life of Ludwig van Beethoven”>>

For more questions, contact us at info@willanacademy.com or 646-838-3990. Willan Academy of Music offers violin lessons, guitar lessons, and more in NYC, including Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens.

Home > Guitar Lessons > Blog

What To Do When Your Guitar Playing Isn’t Getting Better

See if this sounds familiar: to learn to play guitar at a very high level, you may have been practicing various guitar skills and techniques for months or even years. After all this time practicing, you still get lost when improvising, playing in front of others, or trying to record music. Even though you keep studying and learning new things, it seems it doesn’t solve your problems. So why aren’t you getting better at guitar despite having so much determination? Here is what to do when your guitar playing isn’t getting better.

Simply put: you haven’t achieved guitar playing fluency. This means that you might understand and even be able to use many different skills on guitar, but you aren’t able to blend these skills together. The main mind why this happens is that most guitarists always practice guitar exercises just to get it right once and then want to move onto something “new.” This hurts their ability to integrate guitar skills together and play fluently.

Compare this with the average student taking an exam at school. Instead of studying the material and learning from it, many students merely attempt to “pass the test” and quickly forget everything once it’s over. Don’t be this kind of student. Until you fully understand how to practice guitar to get the best results, you’ll always struggle with mastering individual skills in your guitar playing.

Guitarists Who May Fail To Be Great Fall Into These Two Categories

The first group is composed of guitarists who don’t focus on mastering any single skill – they constantly hunt for new things to learn. This kind of approach prevents you from getting better at guitar since it does not integrate your guitar skills together

The second group is that of guitarists who are perfectionists. They attempt to master every single individual aspect of a certain guitar skill before moving on to practice a different one. The truth is, you will NEVER master any guitar skill by practicing it in total isolation.

The best you can hope for when doing this is ending up with a bunch of guitar skills that you can’t use it when it counts. After realizing how much time you spent practicing skills in isolation, you will only end up frustrated.

Now that you know what does NOT work – the following is the exact guitar practice process that every great guitarist goes through when mastering any new skill:

1. Learn a new skill in isolation. Application or fluency is not the goal at this point, so don’t worry about it yet. Most guitarists do this step… but they never move on from it.

2. Take the skill you learned in the previous step and practice applying it. Imitate a real-life playing situation. For instance: as soon as you learn a new guitar lick, apply it by improvising with it over a backing track – creating many new variations of the lick using all the techniques you are familiar with.

To finally achieve guitar playing fluency you MUST practice integrating guitar skills, regardless of which level your guitar skills are at. Not having the ability to integrate guitar skills together is one of the biggest and most limiting problems holding most guitar players back from becoming much better.

3. Measure and improve your new skills. Return to the first step and practice the skill in isolation (again) but now with a deeper understanding of which areas of the skill must be improved. Then go to step 2 and 3… Then repeat the cycle over again. This will help you improve your guitar playing fluency at a faster rate.

Keep reading: “Inspiration from the Life of Mauro Giuliani”>>

Read on: “How to Utilize the Learning Style of a Child to Your Favor”>>

For more questions, contact us at info@willanacademy.com or 646-838-3990. Willan Academy of Music offers piano lessons, singing lessons, and more in NYC, including Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens.

Home > Singing Lessons > Blog

5 Things You Can Start Doing Today to Be More Successful At Singing

As a singer, you probably admire the vocal artists that seem to have everything under control. These artists seem to control their sound effortlessly i.e. without any strain or discomfort. You probably want to know what their secrets are and how you can use those secrets to improve your singing skills and become a better singer. Here are 5 things you can start doing today to be more successful at singing.

1. Believe That You Can

The very first thing you need is to believe in yourself and your capabilities. To sing in your best voice, you need to be confident about it. A confident singer has a sound that is richer and better projected than one who doubts his voice.

2. Conduct Serious Warm Ups

Warm up properly and be serious about it. All singers do it, even the professional ones, because it prepares your muscles for a bit of strain. Set up a warm up routine, especially if you intend to perform for a long time.

3. Larynx Manipulation Helps

This trick transforms the way your vocal sound passes through your throat. Moreover, it increases your vocal range. Remember, the larynx is the voice box. So, how do you lower it? You should use the yawn technique. Creating a yawning space will carry oxygen to your lungs, it will drop your diaphragm, and it will relax your larynx.

4. Breathing with an Open Throat

Most singers do not realize that breathing is a subset of singing. You must actively think about it and foster it in order to master your control over it. Most singers tend to inhale the same way they do while they are talking or walking i.e. through their nose without using the full capacity of their lungs. This will hinder you from using all your vocal tools to the best of your ability. Always focus on your breathing during your warm-ups and to maximize inhalation, you need to open your mouth in an “awh” shape while opening your throat in a yawn-like fashion.

5. Diaphragm Engagement

Using the diaphragm is another overlooked aspect of singing. The diaphragm plays a vital role in breathing because it inflates the lungs. Strengthening your diaphragm enhances your vocal output.

Singing can be easy but you need to practice and you need to do it in the right way. You are bound to become a better singer if you use the tips above, and will be on your way to achieving your ideal sound.

Keep reading: “3 Famous Musicians You’ve Got To Know: Classical Singers”>>

Read on: “Inspiration from the Life of Ludwig van Beethoven”>>

For more questions, contact us at info@willanacademy.com or 646-838-3990. Willan Academy of Music offers violin lessons, guitar lessons, and more in NYC, including Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens.