Well, I finally got my Dixon 3 Piece a couple of weeks ago and it’s going pretty well. Within a couple of hours I was making sound on it and I’m now at the point where it makes a nice solid note every other time I put it to my lips! I’ve even started to try some very simple tunes. However, one thing is kind of tripping me up. I can’t seem to figure out how to tongue notes at all. I asked a concert-flute-playing friend of mine and the best she could do was to tell me that breath vibrato is key. Can anyone here offer me advice? Or is this one of those things I’ll just pick up with lots of practice?
Irish music sounds terribly unIrish when tonguing is used on the flute.
Play with your fingers, huffing and glottal stops instead.
Even vibrato in Irish music is done with the fingers. Breath vibrato should mostly be avoided.
Classical techniques just do not work in IrTrad music.
Our flute player is now starting to sound Irish, in spite of her classical training, but it seems as if it takes forever to get her to stop the breath vibrato (sometimes, she even uses it when she is tuning up?!?)
I keep asking her, why make it wander around when tuning? Push it to the edge of the octave jump and keep it there to tune.
Whew! I just got back from the search and is there ever a lot of discussion on the topic! Thanks again! Looks like I’ll have to strap down and practice after my Dynamics test this afternoon.
You may want to look into Grey Larson’s new book on playing Irish trad flute. It’s due to come out any time now, and from the description it sounds like it’ll be a great resource for the beginning flute player. I have one on order with Grey currently, and am anxious to see what it has to offer, since there are so few written method resources out there for wooden flute players.
Many Irish flute players do, in fact, tongue occasionally in difficult passages like this. If you listen to solidly traditional players like Catherine McEvoy, you’ll find that they use glottal stops 99% of the time but will tongue occasional notes when a glottal stop is just too awkward.
Of course, there are some very good Irish players who do tongue all the time, though not with the same effect as the way classical players do it. Deirdre Havlin does a good job of tonguing without making it sound “untraditional,” and of course there’s always the pyrotechnical tonguing of Brian Finnegan, which (as he would be the first to admit) is not traditional at all but sounds cool. I think the other discussions on the board about tonguing versus glottling have mentioned other players who use tongue articulation.
I’m a glottal-stopper myself, but tongue occasionally, especially in the upper notes of the second octave and on the rare occasions when I stray into the third.
Be patient. You don’t break habits like that overnight. Coming to Irish music from other styles is difficult, even when they’re folk styles. Playing blues helped me a lot with microtonal intonation variation (but only because I employed the technique very subtly in blues and jazz.) It would take me ages to unlearn playing saxophone with vibrato. Because that aspect of saxophone technique doesn’t carry over directly to whistle or flute, I had nothing to unlearn on those instruments, even though breath vibrato would be easy if I wanted to use it. But a classically trained flute player would be in the same position as I would be if someone asked me to play Irish music on saxophone. It seems highly unlikely I’ll ever be asked.