Etudes Are Your Vitamins
I am a firm believer that etudes are to flute playing what vitamins are to life. A healthy etude practice will lead you to be able to play almost anything you put your mind to. Every etude you will ever play has a specific technique it is trying to get you to master. Not all etudes are meant to be fast. Some are for tone production and focusing on beautiful long phrases. Play an etude meant for tone too fast and one's tone will not be helped.
Every etude is different. Some are all slurred and melodic while others are staccato and double-tongued. No matter what the etude calls for, I believe the following steps are a great way to learn the etude and what lessons it is trying to teach you.
Break the etude down using four steps:
1. Finger Exercises: Turn small groups of notes into finger exercises. If, for example, your etude is in 4/4 time with constant 16th note patterns, start with the first measure and play the first beat (first four 16th notes) slowly with your best tone. Gradually speed up your fingers (keep the rhythm even and tone beautiful!) each time you play that set of 16th notes until it is as fast as you can play it. Continue this with each set of 16th notes. Do this for several measures (maybe the first eight measures). Do this everyday with a different set of measures than the days previous until you have done this finger exercise for the whole etude (but you don't need to do the whole etude this way in one sitting, unless you really want to).
Use a metronome for the rest of the steps.
2. Dynamics practice: (Set the metronome to either the tempo the etude suggests, or to the tempo you are aiming for.) Play the entire etude three times slurring everything; ignore the articulations written. The first time you play it, play it fortissimo (ff). The second time you play it bring the volume down a bit to mezzo forte (mf). The third time should be a nice quiet piano (p). Practicing dynamics in your etudes will make them much easier to do in your solo pieces.
3. Articulation Practice:
A. Play through the piece staccato-ed with no tongue. It sounds impossible, but really you will just be supporting a tonguing sound with your diaphragm by making a “hoo-hoo” sound for each note instead of tonguing it. In other words, put a breath accent on every note with a small space in between (much like a tongued staccato). Set your metronome much slower for this. My metronome should be set at mm=108 for my etude, but for this step I will only be going at about mm=80. Keep in rhythm though! It can be very hard to get all your notes to speak, I notice my top of the staff F and last space E are extremely difficult to maintain.
B. Keep your metronome at a slower tempo, but set it faster than it was with the “hoo”s. In this step you will be using the “ka” syllable of your double-tonguing (ta-ka). Practice the entire etude on this syllable. Find a metronome marking that is not out of control fast, but put it at a speed that is challenging. The whole point of this part of the exercise is to strengthen the “ka” muscles. This in turn evens out your double-tonguing and makes it sound less clunky.
C. Set the metronome back up to the tempo you were aiming the etude to be when finished and double-tongue the entire piece. By now, I'm sure your tongue is pretty tired, but I promise it is worth it!
from Andersen etudes Op. 21
4. Play the etude as written (dynamics, articulations, and up to tempo).
Now for the hard part: play all of your old etudes once each before you begin a new etude. This gets tricky when you have a whole book of them, so it would be OK to divide them in half and play one set one day and the other set the next. But keeping up to date on your etude skills will make practicing your solos much easier because it is very likely that in your solo, you will come across something you learned in an etude!
After doing all of these steps every time you play your etude (which should be every day), your flute playing will have all of the vitamins it needs to take on your solo pieces with confidence.