A tongue ram is an interesting technique. And it does sound pretty cool when you do it. I’ve been working on the Tongue Ram for a piece that I played at the National Flute Convention in Orlando, Florida (#NFAFlute2018) called On a Poem, Harvard Square by Miho Nonaka composed by @ShawnOkpebholoMusic. This piece has a number of different tongue rams. So, I had to learn how to do them. The object for a tongue ram is to ram your tongue into the hole and stop the sound.
Most of the mistakes in learning how to do a tongue ram is that you blow too much air. You have to really just not blow air at all. Then, you cover up the hole, the entire way and you just barely blow and stick your tongue into the hole and it stops the sound. So, I’m going to cover up. I’m going to finger a C#. I’m not just going…
I could do it but it’s a little bit harder to just cover and put your whole mouth on it. So, if I’m playing like this, these tongue rams occur pretty quick and I can’t change my embouchure too much. So, I’m just going to go down and cover, blow a little bit and then stick my tongue into that hole.
So it’s really stopping. And make sure you just you’re not actually I don’t know sticking the tip of your tongue down in there that’s not going to cover. You need to make sure that when you’re ready to ram, that you’re covering the entire hole. Like that sound would be, that’s what you’re doing with your tongue to make sure that that sound just stops immediately. So, I’ll demonstrate that again. I’m just covering the hole, breathing
and then I stick it in now also when I stop that with my tongue I’m giving a little bit of a stomach thrust in there and that helps me to really give it a good anchor stop buuh daah and it ends immediately. So, tongue rams are really fun things. There not that scary. Practice them. You can figure out how to do them.
Have fun!
Doctor Flute
Watch me demonstrate this:
FluteTips 50 Tongue Ram Extended Flute Technique
On a Poem by Miho Nonaka Harvard Square for solo flute Composed by Shawn E Okpebholo
