Rain and Flutes

So last night and today were a surprise, it was raining! At about 5 plus yesterday it was raining quite heavily at Santa Monica. And probably most parts of LA but hey, I'm not super man. I left the office about 9, and it had already stopped. However, on my way home, it started up again, and thankfully I managed to be within a 100 metres of my apartment before the rain started again. It's nice to feel the rain again, after being used to all the rain back home, but not with the freezing sea side breeze! Brr!

Anyways, so just another blog on my flute. I've been having the flute for a while now, but only practice when I am not distracted by work. Now I have been having a very hard time with the flute, and unable to get the low C to actually play. Yesterday, I received in the mail a book called "The Flute Player's Book", written by Mr Vernon Hill. I am not certain what level of flute player it is catering too, but the book seems to assume we already know all the keys combinations! Which kinda threw me off since I thought it was a beginner's book. Which I think it is - I mean, posture and how to blow?

But in any case, the 3rd chapter was about tonal qualities (the first two were about how to hold the flute and how to blow it), which struck me as quite odd. Why would we be developing tone so early in the game? Shouldn't we be able to like.... play at least an octave of notes before anything else? But the very simple exercise, aided greatly by the included CD, actually allowed me to play all the way down to low C!!! Dang, and that was with barely half an hour of work. I can't wait to see how the rest of the book is. I happened to get the Second Edition, it's a great spiral bound book perfect for putting on a music stand (which I don't at the moment have the funds to cater to). Five stars! Buy it n00b flute players!

I also have How To Play the Flute by Howard Harrison, it's a real nice guide to slowly learning the different fingerings for the flute, so I think both of these books in combination are pretty good. These of course, I read off Ms Jeniffer Cluff's homepage.

http://www.users.bigpond.com/vkhill/ (USA people, you can get it off fluteworld.com
http://www.jennifercluff.com/

Blog later, very excited right now and going to do more practice.