I played whistle ages ago but never got very good. Then started it up again 8 years ago with more focus. Five years ago I started learning flute and have barely touched the whistle since. What a joyful journey.
I finally feel like I’m getting somewhere with the flute; obviously, it is a lot more complex than the whistle, which is a great challenge. In particular, it takes a darn long while to develop embouchure and articulation.
Challenges:
Tone quality
High notes; low notes.
Embouchure consistency
Articulation speed.
I feel like I am starting to meet these challenges, but still have a long way to go before I can be a “real” musician. So, I ask whether it is possible to for someone to get really good on flute in 5 years, or maybe the question is, “How can one get good in 5 years?”
I can think of two situations where I’ve seen people learn remarkably quickly:
(1) Younger kids with flexible brains.
(2) A master musician coming from a different instrument.
Depends on what you consider really good, but the answer is yes: IME one can become good at nearly anything in 5 years if one devotes oneself to it with sufficient focus, vigor, and quality tutelage.
Yes. It’s not an amount of time from when you start, it’s an amount of time you spend on it. A person who devotes 1 hour a day to practicing/playing will get farther quicker than someone who devotes 30 minutes to practicing/playing, but not as much as someone who devotes 2 hours a day, so on and so forth. That’s a huge oversimplification, obviously; someone who practices the same bad habits over and over, for example, won’t really do well. But broadly speaking, the more focused, productive time you put into the better you will become. Instruction will help, as will listening, watching, reading, and general absorption of knowledge about the music and technique.
To take an extreme, someone who moves to a trad-rich area with a flute, gets a great teacher, and spends their time outside lessons doing nothing but practicing and going to sessions and performances would get up to speed rather quickly. They might also burn out fairly quickly, but I know a good few people for whom trad is a “way of life” like that; they can never get enough, never mind too much! Taking a more reasonable/relatable approach of an hour or so a day, a lesson once a month, and plenty of listening, I’d say in a few years you can get to be quite decent.
You’ll also generally have a head start if you’ve played another instrument, especially a wind instrument, before. After an abortive attempt at accordion with a fantastic teacher (I just couldn’t wrap my head around it), I settled into whistle and then flute simply because they felt quite intuitive to my fingers, which spent their high school years working a clarinet. I’m not Matt Molloy, but I do just fine at just about any session I walk into at this point, 7 years after picking up the flute for the first time.
It may not be true of everyone; aptitude comes into it, too. I do believe there’s great advantage in having a good teacher - to emphasize, somebody not merely having top-shelf chops (ideally a given), but who is good at teaching, which is another matter altogether.
How do you know if you have a good teacher? Sometimes it’s just the fit. But it’s worth weighing how much a teacher inspires or confounds you. I’d go with the former.
Agreed that playing another instrument before taking up flute is helpful. Even if it’s not another woodwind, there are other things like developing a good sense of rhythm that may help with the transition to flute.
Also, if you’ve been playing Irish trad on another instrument, then you already have some memorized repertoire. You can focus more on the mechanics of embouchure development and fingering, without the need to refer to sheet music or audio recordings. The tunes are already in your head.
I had played Irish/Scottish trad on mandolin for something like 8 years before learning flute, with 30+ years on guitar before that. It took a few years to develop a reasonable embouchure and get the mechanics of ornamentation down, but after the initial steep part of the learning curve, I’m gradually moving more of my mandolin repertoire onto the flute. I’m no Matt Molloy either, but as a “later in life adult learner” and not a kid spending all day practicing, I don’t think I would be where I am right now without experience on another instrument, and experience with this genre of music before I first picked up the flute
Depends on what ‘learn’ means. Play 50/100/>250 various Jigs/Reels/Hornpipes/Polkas at full, normal or slow session speed? With ‘proper’ ornaments? In sets? Should you have mastered a half dozen slow-airs? Able to pick up tunes by ear?
I’m approaching Year 5 anniversary (ITM/started whistle) and 4 for flute. Lots of classes, workshops, sessions, practice. Still feel like I have a plenty to learn.
Definitely tone/embouchure takes 3-4 years to get solid and stable.
It seems like it takes about 1000 hours of practice to gain competency* in a musical instrument. So at an hour a day, six days a week (fingers need rest) it takes maybe four years (it takes time to work up to being able to practice an hour a day).
That’s assuming you have good instruction. Most people aren’t good self-teachers. It’s hard to know what you need to work on the most, especially when you’re just starting out. When i was taking lessons on bagpipes I had a great teacher. At each lesson she would tell me what I needed to work on and provide me with goals for the next lesson. The assignments were always challenging, but also always attainable. They were just hard enough that I could get them done if I practiced about an hour a day.
Without good instruction you can waste a lot of time working on the wrong things. That’s true 10x over if no one has taught you how to practice efficiently. Without good instruction you can spend a lot of time baking in poor technique or poor phrasing.
No, I’m not going to have a specific definition for competency. Maybe something like you could give a recital and people who heard you would enjoy it.
Learning the guitar definitely felt easier . But back in the day I was still in school, didn’t much care about my grades and played 3-4 hrs a day. Managed to play in a band after a half year and did that for the next few years till I more or less stopped when going to university – band split up and I never really found anyone, I wanted to play with after that or form a new band. But I did in fact have a teacher back then when I started.
Nowadays I am lucky when I can get a half hour to an hour practice time in. Life just gets in the way. And I’m getting older – so the neck hurts faster, the fingers, too. I don’t think I’d be even physically able to practice the flute for 3 hrs a day like I did with guitar.
But apart from that, I guess some competency can be achieved in 5 yrs when putting the hours in, and, yes, maybe getting a teacher, even though I am mostly self-taught on the flute. Might explain, why I do have a hard time. Especially with rhythm and phrasing. Consistency could be better. Sometimes I think, “now that was nice”, next moment, “will I ever get this right?” .
Being hard to satisfy is part of the price of excellence, IMO. And the better and deeper one gets, the more one realizes one doesn’t know. It’s been nineteen years of two hours a day and I feel like I’m at the beginning.
That’s something I keep wondering about… mostly because kids start playing flute in school all the time. And they don’t wait years before they’re playing in the band, and I doubt 10-year-olds are practicing 1-3 hours every day. (I mean, I don’t know. I wasn’t in band; I played violin. So I didn’t pay that much attention; maybe school bands all essentially have a nearly-nonexistent flute section in terms of sound/good sound for the first few years while the flute kids work out their chops on the instrument? And I suppose it’s a matter of selecting for those who have some aptitude-- I remember when we were choosing instruments, they’d have you try the wind instruments. I couldn’t get a sound out of the flute, so it was assumed that was right out, so maybe the learning curve is also longer for those learning on their own because unlike in school, some do start from not being able to make a sound at all?)
For sure. You can become a pretty decent player in 5 years if you focus and learn the right way. In my opinion, the best option for most people is The Online Academy of Irish Music -https://www.oaim.ie/. If you follow their progression, and you’re disciplined about actually doing it, you’ll be flying before you know it.
Yes
But it would need 2 hours a day of focused practice, not noodling.
Recording oneself, listening critically , refining
Listening a LOT ( all the time to other good players )
Start with Tone/Embouchure/Embouchure/Embouchure/ Rhythm/Feel/Finger-work/Ornaments/Breathing/Supported breathing/Tune learning ( the latter the least important IMO )
As Bigscotia said, you might burn out.
You would need to manage the physio side ( cramp/RSI/OOS muscle distortions from long periods playing )
I’d say 2 hours minimum a day ( 7 days a week ) would do it.
The challenge is that’s quite hard to maintain. ( I can do 2 hours a day solid practicing, for a few days max )
One hour a day is sustainable, and once the topics I mentioned above are mastered, an hour is good ( and necessary to maintain playing “fitness”)
Good luck and do some exercises to counter any posture mal-results.
Pat
Is an improver apt to make more progress in these 5 years with one main or singular flute? Is it setting me back to be bouncing around between several flutes?
Controversial. There are flute monogamists, who advocate playing just one good flute. They maintain you will get a better sound and understanding of the flute by steadily playing a single flute. There are flute polygamists (I plead guilty) who say that there’s nothing wrong with monogamy and playing different flutes is no worse and may even help, because allegedly the different challenges of different flutes improve one’s embouchure. Also polygamy is a way of getting acquainted with different flutes, different voices, different makers and acoustic strategies and, like real polygamy, is fun.
My opinion doesn’t really weigh much, considering I’m still a bit under the 1 year mark, but I find that using my “hardest to play” flute as my primary seems to help with my keyless which typically stays untouched most days, but these two are very similar in terms of their hole sizes. I have another flute with much smaller holes which I pull out every week or so and find my progress doesn’t really apply there. I’m starting to think it’s probably best to sell that one to someone who will play it regularly…
One vs. many for a relative beginner is a conundrum for sure. You’d want to make sure that the flute you’re playing as the “only one” isn’t holding you back, but how can you know when you’re a beginner?
My solution was just to do as much research online as I could, here and on thesession.org, and choosing a maker that seemed in good standing with this community. It was a keyless Windward bought new, and I played it for the first two years of climbing the learning curve. A very nice flute.
I’m sure it wasn’t “holding me back,” but when I later decided I wanted a keyed flute, I got a secondhand Aebi that happened to fit me much better. Easier to play in the second octave, not quite as loud as the Windward, but it just felt better and played better. The Windward was a wonderful flute, I’m sure someone else might have stuck with it for a lifetime. I had to sell the Windward to be able to afford the Aebi, so I’m still in the one flute camp as I continue to learn.
So in the end, I guess I’m someone who believes it might take a few flutes to find your best fit for your embouchure and playing style, and I was lucky to find my keeper on the second try. I still want to get a second keyed D flute as a backup one of these days, so I can occasionally send the Aebi out for a tune-up and not be flute-less. But unless it’s a fabulously better flute (which is hard to imagine), I think I’ll be sticking with the Aebi. I would also like to fool around with a low Bb and low C flute one day, but that’s a different kind of project.
Re one or many, I have a few, they are slightly different, I don’t profess to be a ‘real’ player, but I do have my favourites when I feel like a tune.
Learning embouchure, I think, is one of, or even the most important aspect to flute playing - of course, I could be wrong, I just play for my own pleasure.
I think the topic of learning to play in 5 years has been well covered in this thread, and I agree regarding the 2 hours per day (or even just 1 hour per day) recommendation. Learning a new skill is often all about the time put into it. People ask me how I’ve learned so many instruments, implying I’m some sort of genius. Not at all, in fact I’m slower to learn music than all of my bandmates. I just put time everyday into intentional practice. So I learned the flute in what could be measured as 5 years, though I went years without playing the instrument, focusing on mandolin, pipes, etc. Recently I got back into the flute again.
Like others here, I’ve heard the comment around focusing on one flute being recommended. As someone who just recently got to what I would consider an “intermediate quality” embouchure, here’s my 2 cents. The flute itself doesn’t really matter that much as long as it is of a certain quality. And these days we are lucky to have quality options for as little as $300 pretty commonly. Over the past year or so (quarantine project) as I’ve moved from beginner to intermediate embouchure, I’ve had 2-3 flutes on hand. Recently I even bought a flute in a different key to explore another reputed maker. What I’m finding is there is basically no difference in the quality of my playing between flutes. I currently have a more R&R flute and a more Pratten flute, so there should be relative differences, but my playing is the same if I sit with each flute for 30-60 mins.
So find a nice flute to learn on, and if you want, try other flutes too if you have the money and inclination.
. But back in the day I was still in school, didn’t much care about my grades and played 3-4 hrs a day. Managed to play in a band after a half year and did that for the next few years till I more or less stopped when going to university – band split up and I never really found anyone, I wanted to play with after that or form a new band. But I did in fact have a teacher back then when I started.