Metronomes can be boring! Why not practice your tunes with your favorite booty-shaking beats?😅

Tonight at 7pm CT we're practicing the most common chord change of all time: the I-V! We'll jam along with "Achy Breaky Heart," Flourish (by the Cosmic Butterflies),and maybe a few others at 7pm CT! Also, especially for our members in Europe or who work on weeknights, add THE GREAT HOLIDAY QUIZ GAME🎄🎅 Collaboration with the Flute Nerd Lab on Saturday Dec. 13th at 12pm CT!

Here's another chance to win a private duet session with me & show your personality... Imagine: Santa's naughtiest elf took your flute and hid it! Post a picture of where you'd find it... Funniest or most unexpected location wins by the most👍likes!

Tuning to a drone is more accurate than using a visual tuner. If you want to develop the muscle memory to be in tune quickly when you play the flute, looking at the "green light" or the 0% mark on a visual tuner can hold you back. This is because a visual tuner sets the green light or 0% at the same location in Hz as the piano - which is equally spaced out in Hertz to closely approximate the notes found in the harmonic series. What sounds and feels most in tune to us may be a little bit off from center. The note a major 5th away from the drone, for example, will look a tad sharp on the visual tuner and the Major 3rd will look a tad flat. Our ears & bodies can naturally feel the most "in tune" harmonics, though it can take practice to learn to identify and name the most common intervals. And with practice & training we can learn to quickly match them on the flute. But if your perception of what's in tune is skewed by lots and lots of time with the visual tuner without using your ears, you may sound out of tune when playing with others. Don't be that guy or gal with a tuner on your stand who stands strong on the green light and refuses to budge on your tuning to the rest of the band, even if it would result in an overall better sound. Don't get me wrong: visual tuners are a powerful and useful tool. However, use them with the knowledge that one day you will need to tune with your ears. You can listen to one of my favorite drones here - Tanpura on C. Make sure to use the Transpose extension to practice with it in other keys or look for other drone tones on other notes so you can practice all 12 scales!

Click here to spin the Christmas Tunes Wheel.... Can you play the tune all the way through without stopping??? You can play this like the Chromatic Guess-It Game with yourself, like player 1 is the flute voice in your head, and player 2 is the flute voice in your body! Can you match up the notes you're physically playing with the melody you hear in your mind? Go as slow as you need to! But then, as you get more comfortable... can you speed up the chromatic scale segments to be so fast that the original tune can be clearly heard? When you can do this, you'll be well on your way to using chromatic scale segments as a jazzy technique!