The Importance of Your Throat in Tone Production

When we’re trying to get a fantastic tone, we often don’t think about the throat and how that is involved with getting a good tone. We mostly concentrate on our embouchure – and rightly so. We look at what our lips are doing, where we are on the embouchure hole, how much space we have between our teeth, and what is going on inside our mouth.

But We Rarely Think About Our Throat

Sometimes when you are on the cusp of getting that perfect tone, just figuring out what the throat should be doing is the key to getting the tone that you are looking for. Sometimes you can only get so far with your tone, but you just cannot get over that hump. That is when you should consider this a throat issue. Because once you have figured that out, your tone will just blossom.

So, let’s just talk about the throat for just a bit and about what should the throat be doing.

When I played in high school and even at the beginning of college, my throat was really tight, but I never knew it. I had no idea that my throat was tight and that this would negatively affect my tone. Furthermore, I did not even know about opening my throat or how to do it.

An Open Throat is the Key

What does it mean to play flute with an open throat? Well, an open throat is when you take a yawning breath that opens your throat. That is, you just open up as if you were going to yawn – then you keep it open when you play. When you open your throat and breathe, you sound like a bag of wind. There is no loud breath sound. When you hear a sound like a gasp, that is from a tight throat. That sound means the throat is tighter together. When you open up your throat it is like a hollow tube that sends your tone out.

So, the first thing that you need to think about is having that open throat which will let your tone out and help it to blossom. If I play with a tighter throat, I can play with a nice sound, but I will most likely also have a tighter embouchure. When my throat is tight, my embouchure tends to tighten.

I can hear the difference when I open my throat up, as opposed to playing with it tight. You should be able to hear it too. A tight throat may give you that buzzy edgy sound. But if you want a resonant sound with a beautiful tone you need to open your throat and find another way to sound edgy.

An Open Throat Enables a Relaxed Embouchure

When I open my throat, then I am not relying on my lips to get all my tone to come out properly.

Opening the throat opens up the embouchure which allows you to have more freedom with your embouchure because when you are tense in one part of your body, you are tense in other areas as well. Ask a massage therapist or a chiropractor to explain how that works. But if you are tight in your throat, you are probably tight in your embouchure. It is harder to maintain a relaxed embouchure when you have a tight throat.

I have students that are working on their embouchure. Sometimes I can get them to loosen up, to relax their embouchure, but there is still something not right. Usually all they need to do is to learn to open up their throat with a yawning breath, and WHAM, their tone comes out beautifully.

You do have to work to achieve a fantastic tone. You need to relax your embouchure, increase your teeth spacing, and work on your support. But opening that throat to improve your tone is sometimes the last key that you need to achieve the tone that you are looking for.

Open Your Throat Up to Your Sinuses

To take this one step further, think about opening your throat all the way up to your sinus cavity. That is, when you take that yawning breath, and you think about what does it feel like in there? Is it open all the way up when you yawn? You are not closing off anything. You need to take the soft palette, that is just the top of roof of your mouth and raise it while you lower the tongue, or in other words bring the back of the tongue a little bit forward or lowered. This movement stops clogging up your throat.

If you want to have an edge of your sound, there are ways you can do it and still have your throat open all the way up into your sinus cavity. So, experiment with opening the throat because it’s the best way to give you that final push you need into getting the tone that you are looking for.

Have fun!

DoctorFlute

Watch me demonstrate this idea:

The Importance of Your Throat in Tone Production – FluteTips 157