Top Ten Piccolo Tips

By Cindy Ellis 

Cindy Ellis

• Play piccolo and love it! One of the first things many new piccolo players do is try to hide the sound.  The pitch range of the piccolo is higher, therefore perceived by our ears as louder, than the flute. It is a mistake to ‘hold back’ because this causes fundamental problems with support and air speed. It takes a bit more courage to play realizing every note is quite audible to all: use this to your advantage in developing your musicianship. 

• Get to know your tuner!  Intonation is critical for all musicians, even more so for piccolo players. The instrument is so self-pervading that it is simply harder to hear others when you are playing too. It is essential to work often with a tuner so that you are aware of your own tendencies and can be adjusting constantly to produce the best results.  It never hurts to check passages with colleagues back stage before a rehearsal so the two of you can hear in a more isolated acoustic environment. 

• Invest in a Reliable Instrument!  Manufacturers today are producing high quality piccolos at all price levels.  Invest in a quality instrument with a good scale: that is, a piccolo that plays well in tune with itself.  Because the piccolo is a secondary instrument, it is tempting to spend the least amount of money possible. This can be rather short-sighted thinking. A good piccolo will hold its resale value better and serve you well in your performances.  Take your tuner with you to try instruments, checking the pitch of each D on the piccolo. The three octaves should play well in tune without a lot of adjustment.  I feel it is better to purchase an instrument pitched at A = 442 rather than A = 440 as many orchestras are tuning at the higher pitch level today.  Make sure the pads are nice and flat, and that they do not protrude down into the tone holes. Overstuffed pads are poorly designed:  Intonation can be severely affected if they are hanging down past the key cup into the tone hole.

• Adjust your Embouchure! Roger Stevens played flute and Piccolo with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra for 31 years, 16 years in the piccolo Chair and the remainder as Principal Flute.  He used to remind his students that the piccolo is a compromise. In his book “Artistic Flute Playing”, he says: “ The flute embouchure is of a size that is quite normal for the average human being: theoretically, the piccolo embouchure should be approximately half the size of the flute embouchure.  Since one doesn’t find ‘little people’ especially designed for piccolo playing, the player’s responsibility then is simply one of accustoming themselves to playing within the limits of the compromise.”  Downsizing the aperture, then, would be the appropriate adjustment needed to match the smaller size of the embouchure hole for the piccolo. Note the angle of the piccolo also: you do not need to hold it straight across, in ‘marching band’ style. A slight descending angle, echoing that of most flutists, is desired to keep the piccolo parallel to the bottom lip.

• Place the Piccolo Higher on the Lower Lip!  As a result of the smaller size of the instrument, it is helpful to place the piccolo higher on the lower lip than your flute position.  Most of us place the flute on the edge of the lower lip, where the pink skin of the lip meets the flesh colored skin of the chin. It helps to place the piccolo just north of this intersection, on the lower lip, so that the air column will be projected slightly higher at the back wall of the piccolo’s embouchure Hole. 

• Loosen Up! Many new piccolo players tighten up their lips, almost spitting the notes out as if they were trying to dislodge an errant piece of popcorn stuck in their teeth! Although the piccolo embouchure is firm, it is not overly tense: and absolutely no squeezing from the center of the lips or the corners of the lips! The embouchure only directs the air to the instrument: it does not produce the sound. AIR produces tone.  I think of coming forward at the point of the aperture, almost like you were blowing a kiss across the room.   This helps to decrease tension in the embouchure. 

• Alignment!  It helps to align the embouchure hole slightly forward, rather than directly in line with, the center of the keys on the instrument. This helps keep the player from covering too much of the embouchure hole, again, due to the smaller size of the instrument. 

• Low equals Flow, High equals Compression!  You will actually use more air blowing into the flute: it is a longer, bigger bore instrument. Low equals flow: Just think back how you have never seen a tuba player get red in the face when he or she plays: they just need to keep feeding air thru all that tubing: lots of air flow. Think again of our friends in the trumpet section: many of them seem to have a problem controlling too much air, and they can turn all kinds of interesting crimson shades just by compressing the air. Piccolo players frequently overblow if they try to use the same quantity of air as they do when playing flute.  Tone production on the piccolo is based on using stronger support but less quantity of air than flutists use. The tone will be harsh and brassy if you use too much air to produce the tone. Think of using a firm, concentrated air stream, thinking of speed and support (compression) rather than using a large quantity or volume of air.  Lifting the rib cage and sternum at the ends of to phrases to control the air helps keep the pitch from dropping. 

• Get to Know Alternate Fingerings!  Alternate fingerings provide a wealth of opportunity to adjust pitch and change the tone colors of notes.  There are many great books (Steven Tanzer’s  and Jan Gippo’s come to mind). These are an absolute must if you are serious about becoming a piccolo player. Try to incorporate a new fingering every week until you become able to easily remember your choices for a given note.  It also helps to remember several choices per pitch, so that you have options from which to choose. 

• Keep it light!  It often helps to keep the spring tension lighter on the piccolo than on the flute.  Keep your finger pressure light as well:  remember the hands are positioned closer together than you are used to on the flute. This can trigger the ‘grip reflex’, which is part of our hard wiring: when we become apprehensive about something, (sixteenth note runs perhaps) it is natural to grip the piccolo more fiercely in the hopes that this will give us more security. In fact, more finger tension will hinder our playing. Keep the fingers close to the keys and stay relaxed and supple in your motion.  Move the fingers from the knuckle joint down, don’t ever move the hands.  

Learning to play the piccolo is a wonderful extension of your skill as a flute player, and often leads to more opportunity in the job market as well.  Make it part of your daily practice  routine.

CYNTHIA ELLIS
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For more of Cindy, visit her website and Powell profile page:
http://www.cindyellisflute.com/
https://powellflutes.com/academy/masters/cynthia-ellis 
 

Enhancing Private Lessons with Everyday Technology

By Morgann Davis

Morgann Davis

While it’s easy to view some of today’s amazing technology as a distraction, there are many ways we can easily use the devices and services that have become so commonplace to quickly improve and enhance the private lesson experience. Odds are good that you or your students own at least one of the following: smart phone, iPod, tablet (iPad, Nook, etc.), desktop computer or laptop with a camera and microphone, hand-held video camera, or a digital camera with video capabilities. The odds are also great that there are more ways to use these devices than you realize to help your students improve quickly!

Apps are perhaps the most obvious way we can utilize our smartphones, iPods and tablets. There are amazing music teaching tools available for private and classroom instruction that are very detailed, but there are also great, sometimes simple, freebies that are easy to incorporate. YouTube has a free app that easily allows you to search for videos you’d like to share with your students. Links can be emailed directly from the app, or cut and pasted directly into a text message to the student. There are also lots of excellent, free tuners and metronomes available. I particularly enjoy using insTuner with my students, as it gives them simple guidance on whether they are sharp or flat, and which way to tune their instrument. It is also gives a more stable reading of the pitch than some other free chromatic tuner apps, and will play pitches in different octaves if you want to tune to a drone. There are also great apps for learning or referencing scales, like Scales & Modes (although this one costs $1.99, it provides a wide variety of scale types). Many more apps are available beyond those listed above, including ones that help with ear training and theory (some of these are free as well!), but I find these to be particularly useful. Now, every student has access to things like a metronome or tuner, even if their parents forget to take them to the music store!

As a student, I was told to record myself more times than I can remember (and I hate to admit, more often than I actually found the time to do!). Now, there’s very little excuse for a student not to record audio or video of a portion of their practice time. Even without a smart device, anyone with a computer that has a video camera can record themselves. For example, if you have any type of apple computer, you have a camera and a program called Photo Booth. Although the quality is a bit crude, this free program that is included with the computer more that serves the purpose of providing an outside ear and eye during practice. Students are never far from their phones, so I frequently encourage mine to set their iPhones or iPods to video instead of camera and place it on the stand. If viewing themselves from this vantage point makes them feel nervous, they can face the camera toward the stand. They’ll get a decent quality audio from this to use in analyzing their playing.  My favorite way to use video in lessons, however, is to record a problem spot in a piece or exercise using my phone and then email it to the student and their parent, asking them to watch the video and make notes on what they noticed before their next lesson. I have also done this with recital performances. My students are often shocked by what they observe (both good and bad)! For those of us wishing to make higher quality recordings for ourselves or our students, there are microphones that can be attached to your smartphone from companies like TASCAM that come with apps to operate them and edit the audio you record.

There is also an amazing wealth of resources beyond YouTube that can aid with performance practice and preparation. As a young student, I had no access to music libraries or catalogues of recordings, but today’s students can hear almost any musician from the comfort of their own homes. Beyond tutorials that have been recorded by flutists such as James Galway and Emmanuel Pahud (many of which are available on YouTube), there are free “radio” resources that allow us to access countless recordings. Even iTunes provides free radio where we can listen to classical, jazz or world music. My current favorite program for listening in the context of lessons is Spotify. Unlike Pandora, which generates playlists based on the genre of music or type of artist you searched, you can search for a specific artist or piece in Spotify’s enormous data base, then create and save playlists, even in the free version! For a small monthly fee, you can access your playlists using any device that’s logged into your account. The feature I find most valuable, however, is the ability to share your playlists. Gone are the days of burning CDs for students and hoping they don’t get lost before they make it home. Instead, you can share playlists with a student (even via their parents, if you prefer) with specific recordings you want them to hear through email (once someone has an account they can also opt to follow or subscribe to your playlists). I’ve made an example playlist that I might give to a young student that displays a variety of flutists and styles so you can try it out here: Teach Flute.

Another favorite performance enhancement tool for my studio is Smart Music. For just $40/yr and the one time purchase of a microphone to go with the program, you have access to a wealth of accompaniments. Using the microphone, you can play along to a set tempo (which you can adjust to your liking), or set the program to follow you. While this is obviously no replacement for a real pianist, it has been a tremendous help preparing my students for the first rehearsal with their accompanist when the piece is too difficult for me to play along.

A fun website that my students access often is flutetunes.com. Just like the name implies, there’s lots of free sheet music on this site as well as scales, staff paper, a tuner, and a glossary of musical terms!

From a business perspective, there are a multitude of ways technology can easily and instantly upgrade your teaching experience. Social media used the right way can actually be very effective for networking with other musicians, and for staying connected to your students and their parents. I think most people have become aware that it’s best to keep your personal life and business separate, so if you go this route you may want to create a twitter handle or facebook page specifically for business purposes. I use a Facebook page for my studio (DavisFlute Studio) to post resources, information about recitals and auditions, and the dates of classes for my students. Programs like GoogleDocs or Doodle can be used to help ease scheduling events like classes and recitals. You can even allow tuition payments by credit card for a minimal fee using your smartphone and devices like Square. There are also amazing sites like Weebly where you can easily make a sharp looking website for free. I paid just $40 for a yearly subscription to Weebly Pro so that I can tailor and update my website, MorgannElyce Davis, flutist, however and whenever I like.

These ideas are truly just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how technology can enhance lessons for both you and your students. The key is to have fun discovering what’s available and to carry the creativity you use in your teaching into the way you use technology!