Your First Song on the Flute

Your First Song on the Flute

At this stage, you might be wondering, when are you going to learn to read music? Well, you certainly will, but it’s going to come later. When you’re a child, you learn to speak your language first, and then a few years later, you learn to read. With music, you’re not going to wait a few years, you’re only going to wait a few weeks before you learn to read music. First, you concentrate on understanding the sound, hearing the sound.

You probably agree, you've got quite enough to think about, blowing, standing, fingers, changing fingers. It's plenty to think about, without also having to learn to read music at the same time, so I'm going to get you confident playing notes, playing songs, and in the next video series, you get to learn to read music. I have a really easy way of teaching people to learn to read.

How did you go working out Mary Had a Little Lamb? Did you get any of it yourself? You probably got the first three notes, because they are the three notes that you know, B, A, G, in that order. Mary Had a Little Lamb is in two sections. The first section goes like this, B, A, G, A. Can you play that? Then, three Bs, three As. Finally, three Bs. If you put that all together, B, A, G, A, three Bs, three As, three Bs, you got the first half of the song.

The second half of the song is similar. It goes B, A, G, A, which is the same, three Bs, which is the same, and then it goes two As, then back, B, A, G. So, B, A, G, A ... Three Bs ... Two As ... BAG. Once you're rewound the video, and picked up that, so that you can do that off by heart, you'll eventually have the whole piece together, and it's going to sound like this when you play it on your flute.

Now, if I do that faster, it’s going to suddenly sound like more of a real piece of music. You don’t need to try and do it this fast yet. It’s not your aim at all. Your aim when you play your flute is to get a good sound, good posture, and learn your first piece, but just as an example, this is how it sounds when you do it quicker.

Congratulations. Once you’ve watched this video a few times, and mastered that piece, you’ve learned your first piece on the flute, so well done. If there’s anything that you need to watch again, go back to that video. Spend a couple of days, morning and night, practicing it and it will all become much easier. Well done. This is the very first step to you learning to play the flute.

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