Introduction

Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life. This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new. At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable. Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.

Rabindranath Tagore

The reader might reasonably inquire why the already groaning shelves of music pedagogy require yet another contribution to their sagging weight. After all, we live in an age where every half-competent clarinetist with a YouTube channel considers themself qualified to dispense wisdom on embouchure formation.

The answer lies not in what these volumes contain, but in what they do not: the brutal honesty about what it actually means to coax beauty from a tube of metal, wood, or plastic.

I did the conservatoire thing. Twice. Memorised études, genuflect at the altar of the same dusty dead guys. I learned a lot, sure, but the real education began once I escaped that mausoleum. Here’s what happened: I cheated on my recorder with a flute. Then the flute introduced me to her dangerous cousin (the one that keeps you out too late and makes you do things you regret in the morning) the saxophone.

One of my first real ‘ah, screw this’ moments came wrestling with a renaissance flute tenor, in D. If you’ve been there, you know the E and F naturals are limp and pathetic in the low register. I tried leaping two octaves up, stubbornly chasing ghosts. It was a mess. But in that failure, in going back to the Boehm flute and rethinking how air and lips and resonance actually work (while at the same time tangling with the saxophone) I stumbled onto something no single book I’ve encountered mentions: these instruments bleed into each other. They share secrets. That’s when I started mapping the hidden connections.

And this was extremely useful information to duct-flute players. I looked further into the connection between the voice and the instrument, and developed my own means of approaching my lifelong obsession with improvisation along the way. 

But, this isn’t some kumbaya self-help manual for blossoming into a doe-eyed multi-instrumental prodigy. I’m just not about to churn out three separate sacred scrolls for recorder, flute, and sax just to spoon-feed the same recycled crap in different wrapping. Life’s too short, and I’ve got better things to do than write the same chapter three times with ‘sax’ instead of ‘flute’ for the most part.

What hooked me on this mess in the first place was listening to wild, irrepressible multi-instrumentalists like Jiří Stivín and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Their sorcery made me wonder how they managed to command such arsenals of instruments when I could scarcely corral one.

Turns out the trick is understanding that every instrument you pick up teaches you something about the others. Even dabbling helps: my half-baked detours into organ and harpsichord ended up fuelling my playing like gasoline on a bonfire.

Of course there are a lot of differences between the recorder, flute, and saxophone. And where certain information concerns one alone, that will be made clear.

The techniques in this book work across multiple instruments because they address fundamental physiological and acoustic principles. Whether you’re playing a plastic recorder or a vintage Selmer, your body remains the primary instrument. Master that relationship, and everything else becomes possible.

So let’s be clear: this isn’t another polished ‘method’. This is the compilation of my notes from years of busted embouchures, fluorescent-lit practice rooms, and the peculiar humiliation that comes from squeaking one’s way through a solo passage while one’s betters look on in poorly concealed horror. It is a ‘method’ only in a far as it presents, as I see it, the basic techniques of an instrument in a certain order of importance in the first part.

The real problem? We’re walking tension factories. We pick up bad habits like tourists collect shot glasses. Your shoulders creep north. Your stomach clamps down. Go for a high note and suddenly you’re tighter than a smuggler in an airport bathroom. So I say ‘basic’ because they are not something a beginner will learn and be done with, but rather, places where bad habits might be picked up throughout one’s development, and returning to each at different stages is a necessary part of practice. By ‘basic’ I do not mean something for beginners alone, but something all players should continue to explore and develop throughout their time with their instrument(s).

Playing any instrument is fundamentally screwed up. You’re forcing your body to do things that evolution never signed off on. You twist and torque yourself into postures that would get you kicked out of yoga, all in the name of beauty. Everything that can go wrong will, usually spectacularly, and in public. And there’s nothing natural about jamming a metal tube in your face and expecting Mozart to ooze out the other end.

Look at any violinist if you want to see what I mean. Wind players aren’t much better, we just hide our dysfunction. Actually, that’s the biggest issue we have as learners and teachers: we need to understand what’s going on inside the body. Such things are not visually perceptible, neither are they possible to describe from an objective viewpoint. Different subjective experiences of the same formulae will lead to different explanations, and physiological differences in people mean that different things work for different people. The real frontier is internal.

Most importantly, this work it is a guide to understanding your own body as the primary instrument, an instrument that, unlike a Stradivarius, comes with no certificate of authenticity and precious little instruction manual, and how to do something unnatural, as naturally as possible. 

And why? Because your sound is your signature. It is the only thing that can compel an audience to stop fiddling with their phones and actually listen. The task is to find a voice that is yours, not a conservatory clone, and to do so without apology.

Who is this for?

This work is not for beginners. If you require instruction on which end of the instrument meets the mouth, you will find better elsewhere. This is for the musician who has already laboured, who has plateaued, who cannot quite ascend to the high register of the flute without strangulation, or who longs to make the saxophone’s low Bb something other than a foghorn.

Every player, every horn, every body is different. Trial, error, and more error. A good teacher is priceless, but what follows may provide the supplement, or the corrective, that even the best teacher cannot.

The advice offered does not attempt to replace a knowledgeable teacher but might supplement or reinforce what they have to say.

My own debts are considerable: to the works of David Liebman, Robert Dick, Bob Reynolds, Hans Ulrich Staeps, Mark van Tongeren, Walter van Hauwe, and others. If this work contributes anything, it is only by building upon what they wrote.