What is after the basic scale?

​What’s after the basic scale?  
By Terry Mack, Intuitive Player of the Native American Style Flute

Explore, explore and explore more to see, hear and feel how the sounds seem to work together.


​Playing a flute has a lot to do with controlling your breath and controlling your fingering of the holes. My experience with newer players is they often want to go fast before they have mastered slow and they take on playing too many notes and get lost along the way as the musical and muscle memory is just developing.


​Experiment with 3 to 4 notes:

• Play them in different sequences
• Play them slow
• Play them fast
• Play them short and choppy
• Play them smooth and flowing
• Mix up long slow notes with short choppy notes
• Play them like you are asking a question or having a conversation
• End a note with an exclamation point
• End a note with a sigh
• See if you can the ending of a note to just hang in the air and pause a bit longer before you start the next note
• See if you can make them sound happy or sad or any other emotion you can think of.
• Start with the softest breath you can on each of the notes and then push more breath through to go past the sweet spot and make the sound crack
• Lift your fingers off the holes two or three at a time

When you play around with the tips I suggest you will begin to connect more intimately with how you and the flute produce these beautiful sounds and begin to add more texture and colour to the sounds and songs you are creating. 

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