At this point, I’ve still only been playing the Native American flute for under 2 months altogether, but I thought I’d share what seems to me to be a very helpful tip while using a metronome.
If you haven’t used a metronome yet, then I’d suggest giving one a try and playing along to the beat. There are plenty of free metronome apps that you can use. I use one called TonalEnergy Tuner & Metronome and find it very helpful largely because of one feature I’ll talk about in a bit, but there are others that will help out just fine as well.
Why use a metronome?
A metronome is nothing more than a tool that produces a steady beat. So, instead of tapping your foot or something like this, you can set the tool to a specific BPM (beats per minute) and play along to this.
While I’m sure there are plenty of people out there that play nice and steady with body movements, being the beginner that I am I find the use of this tool very helpful.
If you’re trying to play some sheet music, oftentimes it will say the BPM that the song is played to. And, if not, you can always look it up online. If it’s a popular song you should be able to find the tempo.
Even if you are just improving, using one of these tools can help you stay consistent.
But, all this said, the reason I’m recommending that you give one a try has to do more with quick embellishments that can be difficult to perfect and sound a lot better when they are played at a steady tempo.
Faster fingers don’t always sound better
Runs and flourishes are nice-sounding embellishments that can give a nice transition to the next note. Some people may have different definitions for what I’m talking about here, but here’s what I mean:
- Run – when you run your fingers 1 by 1 down the flute to a lower note, often the lowest home note
- Flourish – when you run your fingers up & down (or vice versa)
Here’s an illustration to give you a better idea of what I’m saying…
Both embellishments are usually played very fast, which can be tricky even for people who have been playing for a while.
What I’ve found is that all of my fingers do not function equally. For example, my ring finger doesn’t quite have the same dexterity as my other fingers. So, when I’m running or flourishing, this finger is often my weakest link. Many times I find that, for example, if I’m doing a run down the flute, my ring finger will sometimes follow too closely to my middle finger. This will cause an uneven sound which in my opinion doesn’t sound that good.
So, what I’ve been doing to train my fingers to move at the same pace is simply using a metronome.
My metronome practice
I told you that the TonalEnergy metronome is the one that I use, and for good reason.
It’s available for IOS and Android devices. And I know that in the screenshot I show below it says $3.99, but I’m pretty sure there’s a free version. I don’t remember, maybe I did end up paying $3.99. Either way, it’s a good deal and that’s a lifetime price you see there.
With any metronome out there you can set it to play to a specific BPM and practice your runs and flourishes up and down your flute with a nice steady tempo.
However, what I like about this specific metronome is that I can set it up to increase/decrease the tempo over time.
So, let’s say that I’m going to practice some flourishing going up and back down the pentatonic minor scale over and over again. The goal is to get faster at playing this scale accurately, but of course, this is easier said than done. What I can do instead of just jumping into it at, let’s say 285 bpm, is set it up to start out at a lower bpm and automatically change the tempo by 5 bpm every 10 beats until it reaches my max bpm at 285…
So, the way I have this set up I can go from the lowest pentatonic note to the highest and then back down – 10 notes total – and it’s set up so that after that 10th metronome beat it will increase 5 bpm. In the screenshot I put above I have it so that I’ll start out at 200 bpm. You can start it however low or high you want, but this allows me to ease into the challenge, which is to increase my flourish speed, timing, and accuracy.
I’ve been tracking my flourish speed progress recently using this method and I’ve been able to make some pretty fast gains. Not only that, but using a method like this just makes sense.
The takeaway
I know some people are against the use of a metronome because they would rather feel the tempo in their body, but I’ve found this helpful as a beginner who has never played any other musical instruments before for extended periods of time.
My advice: give a metronome a try if you’re struggling with tempo, especially when it comes to quickly executed flourishes and things like this.
My progress so far using this method while playing my “Little Horse” flute has been quite spectacular.
There are plenty of other ways you could apply this method of automatically increasing the metronome bpm too, such as if you’re working on increasing double-tonguing speed or something else that is often difficult to get fast at with accuracy and good timing.