Virtual Studio
About This Space
The Virtual Studio is my spot for approaches to learning and practice, as well as a repository for materials and resources.
If you’re interested in lessons and would like access to the Virtual Studio , you’re very welcome to get in touch !
Foundations
The Instrument Within
The Instrument Within takes an in-depth look at the five foundations of wind playing (posture, breathing, embouchure, articulation, and movement) through the unique lens of a multi-instrumentalist. More than just a breakdown of the fundamentals, it explores what players can learn by crossing between instruments: the insights the flute can offer the saxophonist, and what the saxophone brings back in return.
The Invisible Instrument
Resonance and Sound Production reveals the secret that transforms good wind players into great ones: your body is not just supporting your instrument, it is the instrument.
This guide demystifies the art of resonance, showing you how to consciously create richer, more projecting, and colourful sound. Drawing on voice science research and acoustic principles, it explains what's actually happening inside your body when you produce beautiful tone.
The Invisible Instrument, part 2
The Overtone Atlas
High notes
Why should the tongue exercise such tyrannical authority over the loftiest notes of the instrument? Why should a chill in the air conspire against the altissimo? And why do forked fingerings function at all?
This method, addressed primarily to the saxophonist but by no means indifferent to the flautist or recorder player, proposes to rescue technique from superstition. It proceeds from first principles: the sober discipline of standing waves, the tyranny of boundary conditions, the subtle collusion between the vocal tract and the air column. The altissimo, that much-feared and often brutalised register, is here revealed not as a daredevil stunt but as a mechanical negotiation, governed by resonance and constraint rather than courage.
Technique
Against Autopilot
Scale practice: the hands dutifully scamper along their accustomed routes while the mind, bored stiff, absents itself entirely. One might as well polish the banisters. This method reclaims the scale as an object of thought. Drawing on cognitive science, on the austere discipline of Renaissance instrumental practice, and on many years of obstinate refinement, the method insists that practice should once again be mental labour.
The means is constraint, that unfashionable but indispensable ally of intelligence. Abandon articulation. Dispense with the printed page. At once the familiar evasions collapse. The brain, deprived of its usual hiding places, is compelled to engage with the material itself.
Beginning from unadorned patterns and proceeding with methodical persistence through modes, inversions, and every conceivable starting degree, the system cultivates a fluency that is musical rather than merely digital. One learns not just to execute patterns, but to construct them inwardly: to hear them before they sound, to move through them deliberately, to transpose them without recourse to paper or panic.
Developed over fifteen years across recorder, flute, and saxophone, this is not a miscellany of clever exercises but a complete method for wind players who are genuinely curious about how practice functions, and why so much of it is wasted. The conclusion is unfashionably severe but entirely sound: limitation is not the enemy of freedom. It is its precondition. The fingers, rest assured, will follow.
Against Autopilot, part 2
Five Notes to Freedom
Pentatonic Method for Improvisation
There is a moment every musician knows: your fingers are poised over the instrument, the chord progression plays beneath you, and someone says: improvise!
In that instant, all those hours of scales and arpeggios, all that technical mastery, seems to evaporate like morning mist. The gap between what you can play and what you can create yawns before you, vast and terrifying.
This method is about closing that gap.
Early Music
Stick to Your Drum
A method for the tabor, containing:
Percussion warm ups and a collection of patterns for the drum; Exercises and integration through repertoire
Built on one premise: the pipe isn't the star. The tabor is.
Through deliberate rhythmic challenge beyond what performance demands, you'll train genuine independence between drum and pipe. Cognitive strength training that makes your tabor hand develop a mind of its own.
Telemann: Twelve Fantasias for Solo Flute
This volume offers the modern player a complete guide to these deceptively demanding works, from the historical and physical world of the Baroque flute to the theoretical traditions of Figurenlehre . Here the twelve Fantasias are examined as both individual pieces and a carefully conceived cycle: twelve keys, twelve characters, twelve distinct emotional worlds.
Drawing on Baroque theories of affect, dance, ornamentation, and rhetoric, this guide illuminates not just what Telemann wrote, but what he meant, and how a performer might make those meanings audible.
Writings
FLUTES OF THE MIDDLE AGES
The transverse flute showed up from India via Byzantium and promptly got nicknamed the 'German flute'. The gemshorn had its entire moment, peaked around 1488. The recorder's ancestors were lurking around courts and banquets. And the more you dig, the stranger it gets...
The Sound of one hand piping
This ingenious contraption exploded across Europe in the mid-thirteenth century. One moment it barely existed; the next, manuscripts from England to Spain were depicting the same curious instrument combination.
Every region claimed it with a different name: the galoubet in sun-drenched Provence, the Schwegel in German-speaking lands, the txistu in the Basque hills. But the appeal was universal. Need music for a Burgundian tournament? Pipe and tabor. Street festival in a Spanish town square? Pipe and tabor. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre needed atmospheric sound effects? You guessed it.
Drumroll, Please… No One’s Listening
Medieval Europe was absolutely littered with drums. Manuscripts stuffed with tabors, nakers, bells, the whole percussive circus .
Angels banging frame drums, devils keeping rhythm, minstrels everywhere making a glorious racket. Then you open the actual scholarship and... they've all buggered off to the pub.
A Pipe out of place
The frestel, medieval Europe’s answer to the panpipe, held the iconographic high ground for a good three centuries before vanishing around 1300.
Fashioned from boxwood, with neatly convex ends and a monoxyle construction, this single-handed marvel found itself equally at home on cathedral portals and skulking in the margins of manuscripts.
The frestel quietly lost its place. What remains is a single archaeological specimen and a handful of stone and painted representations, collectively staring back at us.
Viola d'Amore
Some insomniac Baroque courtier grafted sympathetic strings onto a viol, carved a leering Cupid on the scroll, and called it the viola of love .
What followed? This baby went rogue.
It spawned a whole dynasty of sound, and a dozen offspring from Istanbul to Oslo. It survived its own extinction and utterly confounded (almost) every scholar who tried to pin down where it came from.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Genesis of a Music
Liberation Through Demystification
A User's Guide to Medieval Shapeshifting
These musical monstrosities lurked in the great cosmic antechamber: the waiting room between a pagan past and the Christian future still shifting its sacks and sorting its saints.
They embodied everything medieval society claimed to fear: wildness, mutability, things with too many limbs... and everything it secretly adored.
Because deep down, everyone enjoys a dragon with a trumpet.
The Division Flute
Born in the awkward aftermath of Puritan joylessness and continental envy, The Division Flute documents England’s rediscovery of fun via increasingly elaborate flute noises.
