Bending Your Pitch UP

Have you ever practiced pitch bends? This is an extended technique that is utilized in contemporary music. Composers put pitch bends in their music for a particular effect.

Pitch bends aren’t necessarily difficult to execute although bending up is trickier then bending down. It’s pretty easy to bend the pitch down because we can use the roll forward with our embouchure and bring the air down into the flute. It can create quite a dramatic sound.

It’s a lot trickier to make the pitch go up. The same principal applies except in the opposite direction. You want to bring the air up and out of the flute. Generally, what happens is that when we need to bend up, we leave the embouchure right where it is. The result is that there is nowhere to go. If your embouchure is in the normal spot then when you try to move the air up there is only a tiny amount of distance to go before you don’t have any sound at all.

The key to bending the pitch up is to start low. You need to start with the air down in the flute even at the expense of sounding flat. Now you have somewhere to go. The pitch will go up nicely because the air is so low.

In a piece such as American Suite by Bruce Stark. His second movement is the bird in the Canyon and he has a nice bunch of pitch bends both going up and down. It’s a really nice piece to work on. All the movements are fantastic.

In looking at this movement, you see that he has up and down bends. When I approach the up bend I will set my embouchure to blow the note low and then bring it up as in the example in the video.

There are pitch bends going both directions in many pieces. Another piece I’m working on is Autumn in Homeland, by Anže Rozman and it’s a great piece for flute alone with some really cool pitch bends.

The next time you’re playing a piece by a contemporary composer that has some pitch bends going up remember start low to go high!

Have fun!

DoctorFlute

Watch me demonstrate this:

Bending Your Pitch UP FluteTips 86