Improve your sound with daily exercises inspired by your orchestral excerpts

With a FREE PDF with exercises – simply download and play

In the end of October I joined once more the Tongyeong Festival Orchestra in Korea, in which I play as the principal flutist since 2013. This time we accompanied the Isang Yun Cello Competition (the competition’s solo instrument rotates between cello, violin and piano).

Among the pieces we played were the major cello concerti – Shostakovich, Schumann, Elgar, Isang Yun and of course the Dvorak cello concerto – which is absolutely my favorite to listen and especially to play.

This concerto includes many wonderful flute solos and can provide a great opportunity to be expressive and incredibly musical with various tone colors, various ways to use the vibrato, beautiful legato and big intervals playing and much more.

In particular, there’s one solo that provides you the possibility to practice all these skills if you transform it into an exercise.

Here’s the original phrase:

You can listen here my performance of this phrase with the Tongyeong Festival Orchestra:

For the exercise I’d choose to use only the second half of the phrase (from bar 5 and on). I’ve transposed the phrase to a lower scale and will play it up chromatically (as well above the original phrase’s scale).

The targets of the exercise are:

• Maintain a homogeneous tone color throughout the whole phrase
• Improve your coordination of the vibrato with the notes changes
• Adapt the air pressure and lips position before the big intervals

🔐 Maintain a homogeneous tone color throughout the whole phrase

This probably one of the most important aspects when it comes to tone development exercises. This exercise in particular is very useful for testing and improving your ability to maintain the same tone color while changing registers from middle to top and low register.

🕕 Timing is everything – coordinate the vibrato with the notes changes

I’ve written already a short article (with an exercise) about how to coordinate your vibrato and improve your legato. This concept can be extremely useful here.

Your aim is that each change between 2 notes will be timed precisely with the vibrato waves. Otherwise your phrase will sound interrupted and the changes between the notes won’t be as smooth as they should sound.

🔜 Adapt the air pressure and lips position before the big intervals

Changing between the registers will require some changes in your air pressure and lips position in order to have the most smooth notes changing without any unwanted accents.

Make sure this adaptation happens before the actual changing of the notes. If it happens together with the note changing, it’s too late!

You can find out here how to play intervals smoothly.

Try it out and let me know how it feels.

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