I thought you might get a chuckle out of this very modern comic of the Beatles! Tomorrow night at 6:30pm CT we'll play some Improv Games then do a highlight on Let It Be. Check the calendar & join us!

Don't give up on practicing a song until you've practiced it at least 100 times! Ideally listening to your recordings all the while. The first 10 times? Probably kind of 💩 The next 20 times? Probably awkward By the 30th time? You're starting to feel better By the 50th time? You're starting to reach cruising altitude By the 100th time? You've discovered most of the small problems that can occur. This applies to most areas of study, not just flute or improvisation! My next 💯 goal? going Live on YouTube. Now that I'm going Live every day (Sun-Wed) for the Atomic Flutist and sometimes after Improv Games for a mini-livestream-concert, I'll reach 💯 before the end of April. Things are starting to feel smoother! This rule of 100 is why I've chosen a limited number of songs to focus on each week/month. From my perspective, if you master playing along with 4 classic rock songs, you'll be well-prepared to improvise with nearly any song. How will you master it? Through guidance, trial and error, and mostly: repetition! So if you came to Wed Night Improv Games every week and stick around for the play-along with Let it Be, Hallelujah, House of the Rising Sun, and Hotel California, and you don't practice at all on your own, you'll still reach the goal of 100 after two years! I want my sessions to empower you to improvise just by showing up and participating... even if you rarely practice on your own. Of course, the more you practice and listen to your recordings, the faster you'll improve! 🤓 I will sprinkle in some Cosmic Butterflies songs and new songs occasionally for novelty. 😎 So... who wants to come to Wed Night Improv Games? Tomorrow we'll focus on Let It Be!

Don’t you think this chart from Atomic Habits applies to most worthwhile endeavors? When I was a child, somewhere I got a set of juggling balls. I thought it was so cool what the jugglers did at the circus!! But I gave up trying to juggle before I ever even got close. I tried and dropped the balls. I tried again and dropped the balls again. I lacked understanding and persistence. I succumbed to the disappointment of failure. I was in the valley of disappointment. It wasn’t until about a year ago that my interest in juggling resurfaced. At the Play It Again Sports store I picked up a microfiber hacky sack spontaneously. I began to love its texture, and I realized the first of two critical principles when it comes to learning to juggle, or any other challenging hobby: 1. You have to love it. I realized that it was important that, if I ever wanted to become proficient at juggling three balls, I needed to have tools that I really loved. This is like having a flute that you really like. Or improvising with songs you actually love. So, when I saw someone on TikTok playing with FlopBalls, I thought, “ah! I will love these toys. Let’s give it a try.” Then, I took a leap of faith and bought a set of 5, setting my intention to be able to juggle at least 3 of them at a time one day. I thought, “Playing the flute is HARD. If I can learn to play the flute, I can learn to juggle, right?” Then I had another revelation: 1. Chunk it. Some of my best flute teachers taught me that, when I wanted to master a challenging technique or section of music, it could be done by breaking it up into small, digestible chunks - and then practicing those chunks separately until they became natural, and THEN combining them. I thought, “how can I break this juggling skill up into chunks, like when I learn something new on flute?” That’s when I watched a 3-ball juggling video in slow motion until I could see what each ball was doing individually. I realized they work together in a unit like a musical triplet! And with a triplet, what happens when you remove one? We get the long-short pattern we find so frequently in jazz.

People tend to panic when thinking "what notes do I play?!" when improvising. But a beautiful improvised line has more to do with the other elements of music: dynamics, articulation, phrasing. Don't forget about those - if you do, it will sound like you're stuck in your thoughts just worrying about which note names to play next. Instead, choose just a few notes and focus on playing them beautifully, expressively. As a listener, I enjoy listening to two notes played with lots of intention more than I like listening to dozens of notes played without a creative direction. Have you fallen into this trap? I sure used to. But when I listened to my recordings I started noticing what sounded beautiful and what sounded stressed.

Wouldn't it be a cool party trick if you could play flight of the bumblebee in ANY KEY? Get all 12 keys here. Being able to play it at all - even the first line - is a major accomplishment on flute! in the original key! But my music teacher Philip said, "Any song you truly want to master? You should learn to play it in all keys." Wow, was he right - what a great way to train your ears!! I've never performed Flight of the Bumblebee. But I did study it for a while in high school - and I found that my chromatic scale was rapidly improving!! The challenge of playing it made it more fun to practice my chromatic scales. Watch out for those whole steps in there!! It's a really great study all on its own in the original key - starting on E... But since I was thinking that I want to further improve my full-range chromatic scales this year, I thought: what would happen if I transposed it to all keys and practiced each one a few minutes each month??? So I did!!! I found it in the MuseScore archives and was able to relatively easily transpose it to all keys!! And I'm sharing them with you - you can access it here!! Who wants to try it with me?? How many minutes can you handle per week? I might even incorporate this in some of the Atomic Flutist sessions. PS - Made a version with markings indicating when to go down and up and colored brackets to indicate those pesky non-chromatic intervals hoping it might expedite the memorization process!!