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The BlogHow to avoid cracking notes on the flute?
Ory’s Flute Tips
How to avoid cracking notes on the flute?
I’m sure you are familiar with the next issue:
You are playing a passage and you seem to not be able to hit certain notes – you crack them: you get a different note than the one intended. It could happen in the first moment of the note (the attack moment) or it could happen in the middle or the end of the note as well.
How many times for example has that happened to you with the first note of either the G or the D Major concerti by Mozart?
Cracking a note is a result of various potential problems and if you crack notes often, I can highly recommend you to invest the time needed to explore why it happens and find out the solutions to solve it and reduce the chances of it happening.
🌰 Better crack nuts, not notes
Basically, cracking a note is playing a different note (higher or lower) than the one you wished to play. There are few main reasons for it to happen:
- The air stream you blow hit a too high/low point on the wall of the embouchure hole
- The air stream/pressure you blow is too strong/weak
- Your attack changes your aperture too much
- Your lips aperture is too far away from the embouchure hole
- Your fingers are not well coordinated
- The flute is leaking and not sealing well
In general (besides when the flute leaks and the coordination issue with the fingers), the cracked note is happening when something you do affects the air stream you blow and make it hit the wrong place inside the flute’s embouchure hole. If you imagine your air stream as a laser ray, you move the placement of your laser ray on the embouchure’s wall and very suddenly the laser ray hits another place on the wall.
I remember myself struggling with this issue as a young pupil/student. The advice I mostly received was ‘simply blow less and it won’t crack’. Today, many years after, I can tell you this is in fact only a small part of the real solution. If I only had received the right advice back then, it could have saved a lot of time and frustration…
Become the Flutist You Wish to Hear.
Quickly and Efficiently.
👨‍⚕️ Play as a medical surgeon – it’s all about stability and precisionÂ
Imagine for a moment you are a medical doctor and you’re about to perform a very sensitive surgery. There’s a very small point where you have to make the cut and there’s a nerve just next to it. If you cut in the wrong place, you’ll hit the nerve and the patient will jump from the sudden pain. Your hands should be extremely stable and nothing should be able to prevent you from achieving the highest precision needed to cut exactly in the right spot.
With the flute it works exactly the same. Stability plays a very important role when it comes to cracking. If your flute is moving too much, if your lips are moving too much and ruining your aperture, if your air stream is interrupted, if the air can’t hit precisely how and where it should hit, then the chances are that you are going to crack the note.
The precision is needed in order to make sure your air stream hits exactly where it should hit and the stability is needed to make sure nothing interferes your air stream to hit that spot.
The good news are that you can learn developing such stability and precision. Your warm-up routine should allow you to build up your awareness and control over your muscles. Naturally, the cracking problem could result from a mixture of issues and only when you learn how to address each one of these topics and practice it separately, will you be able to gain the stability and control needed to avoid the cracking from happening. In my Intensive Masterclasses these are exactly the topics you’d be able to work on intensively and you’ll learn a powerful warm-up routine that addresses all of these topics.
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.
I am an 83 year old amateur studying flute about 5 years. I was a pro sax player in my youth and middle age. I know music well, jazz and classical. My main problem on flute is developing a well controlled and musical vibrato. On the sax my vibrato is fine and musical, and pretty well controlled. And I use everything to make it happen, lips, jaw, diaphragm, throat etc. But on the flute, not so. I don’t know how to engage my throat or glotis (or whatever) to control the vibrations I can vibrate the sound pretty smoothly with my diaphragm (only), but cannot synch it well, or with a good-sounding frequency or wave width with the piece I’m playing. I sound mechanical this way. Not enough control. Awful.
Can I get a few (or several) lessons from you on improving and controlling my vibrato, making it worthy of the music (and me)? and what will be the cost?
Sincerely
Dear Joe, thanks a lot for your comment. I’ll send you an email with all the details regarding the classes, where we can surely understand better what’s going on with your vibrato and suggest new ways for you to practice and improve. The problem might be originated in some lack of pressure, as you are used to the sax and as you probably feel by now after some time with the flute, there are surely differences. We’ll check it all during the classes, maybe even worth going through the warm-up routine course, which will address all the basics needed for the flute and will help solve many other issues that might exist.
I like what you said. I too am a long-time sax/clarinet player trying to make more robust headway on the flute! Playing high level stuff, my fingers are fine, timing pretty good (as with sax/clarinet), but I keep CRACKING the notes!!! One day I’m great, next day so bad some of the notes I blow don’t even come out AT ALL in the middle of a passage!!!
So thank you for what you said about the surgeon – I know my embouchure is good, but from what you’re saying I “wobble” around WAY too much (my main instrument is Bari Sax which is rock sold firm and heavy – no movement!!!)
Thanks for taking the time to post this. I was getting so frustrated!!!!
Thanks Steve for your comment. Happy to read you found the article useful. You might want to consider taking my warm-up routine course, in which we’ll make together 3 classes and work and the very basics that will help you avoid cracking the notes. You can find more information here: https://www.fluteinwien.com/warm-up-course
Is “cracking” the same phenomenon as splitting. The latter term is used in one of Trevor Wye’s tone books I’m using.
Hi David, yes, I believe he meant the same. What does he say about them?
Thanks for your response! There are a number of exercises in which he sort of encourages the student to push the envelope–as it were– before a note splits. He seems to presume the student already has an understanding the phenomenon. For example, consider this passage when he is discussing the progression from G natural to E natural in the middle register: “For most people, this area…has its problems. This is due, once again, to the tube width n relation to its length. This narrowing ‘tightens’ the notes and causes them sometimes to split, It is during these exercises you can find out how far you can push a note before it splits.”