Does your flute teacher really know what they're doing?

I FINALLY GOT  THE LIGHTING RIGHT!!

As it turns out, I nearly had it right with the Trevor Wye video--all I needed to do was to turn my lights one notch brighter. Ah well, it's a work in progress...

This video is sort of the current culmination of my findings after having reviewed flutes for the Flute Center of New York for several months. The learning curve has been staggeringly steep, but I love every single challenge that's been thrown my way. The biggest challenge hasn't been actually shooting the reviews or even editing them. The biggest challenge has simply been figuring out how each flute works.

I have filming and editing pretty much organized into a step-by-step process that I can follow every time now, but each flute is so unique in the way they liked to be played that even if I try a flute over the span of a few days, sometimes nothing clicks for while. You have to put the flute down if it just does not want to be played that day and come back the next day to try again, and even then, you might still not figure it out.

It's kind of like dating. I literally have to date every single flute I review. I have to get to know what they like, what they don't like, what makes each of them unique, and in what circumstances they best like to perform. Some flutes are made for people who play with a lot of power and projection, while some flutes are made for people who want to be soft and mellow and blend in with everyone around them all the time.

If you add up all the time it takes for me to "date" each flute, it comes up to about 2-3 hours each. These flutes don't like speed dating, unless you're the "one" for them. That's the reason why you know whether or not you've found your flute within 5-15 minutes of  trial. I'm not here to just do trials on these flutes for myself though, so I have to take my time getting to know them.

This, of course, appears to complicate things in the realm of teaching. Suddenly, I realized I was actually teaching some wrong things to a few of my students whose flutes play radically differently from mine.

The weird part is that I've known in my head that each flute is different, and we need to figure out how each student should best play their own flute, but I didn't realize just how differently each flute can play. So, in retrospect, did things actually get more complicated after I started reviewing flutes for the Flute Center of New York? No, not actually. I just learned.

It's the classic case of, "The more you know, the more you know you don't know."

And that's a good thing. :)