How to form your flute embouchure?

Throughout my teaching career I’ve seen many kinds of students embouchures. I’m a strong believer that the embouchure one forms is a direct result of the way the player uses their air: poor air usage will lead to poor embouchure and good air use will help to naturally form a better embouchure.

Very often, we start our flute journey with poor understanding of how to control the air pressure and therefore we compensate with strange embouchure position – in order to get some success of getting a sound. But that can lead to years of bad playing habits, and one of the most common of them is the smile embouchure.

Do not fear: you can change this habit in a matter of few days if you know how to deal correctly with the air and how the new embouchure should feel like, and today I’d like to speak a bit of how your embouchure should more or less feel:

Imagine you have a tasty milkshake in front you and you drink it through a straw. The milkshake is still half frozen and therefore quite thick and dense and it’s pretty hard to drink it through the straw. Try to imitate this drinking feeling now without the flute and really feel how relatively small your lips aperture is when you try to suck the milkshake through the straw. The lips create a lot of resistance because the hole you allow is quite small, like with a real straw.

Try that and continue with the further instructions below.

Do that few times, basically sucking air in like a vacuum cleaner. Then freeze the moment and catch yourself in action: which muscles are you using for that?
After the action freeze, turn the air direction and now blow air out, holding your lips in the same way you just did while sucking the air in.

Try now to do the same with the flute and see how you sound. You might need to figure out how to redirect the air better into the flute, but this can be easily done with small adjustments in the jaw position (change slightly back and forth to find the right position that will allow the air to get into the flute in the most ideal way.

You are very welcome to leave your comments and questions,

Ory

Ory Schneor is a principal flutist with the Munich Chamber Orchestra, Tongyeong Festival Orchestra and member of the Geneva Camerata. He is teaching masterclasses around the world and he is the founder and instructor at FLUTEinWIEN – Intensive Masterclasses in Vienna.