Playing your first note

As with any other woodwind instrument the first step is the toughest. You will need a lot of patience initially and you might have to put in a lot of effort to play your first note properly. Once you are able to do that, then the fun begins.

The first step is to get a clean tone out of your flute. I'm sure, at some point or the other, you would have tried blowing into a bottle or a pen cap; Blowing into a bamboo flute is exactly the same. So try that out - just blow into the blowing hole and see if you are able to produce a sound.

Remember that you cannot get a sound by blowing straight into the hole, you have to blow at an angle in such a way that some portion of the air goes inside the flute and some of it goes outside. It is a personal thing and I have seen that this comes very naturally to some people and some people like me have to struggle with this. Personally, I spent about three months just blowing into the flute and trying to get the correct tone out of it.

I suggest you do not worry about how you are holding the flute at first and concentrate only on getting a clean sound without covering any holes.

Here is a simple trick that I learnt when I was starting out. This is what helped me. I could not explain this in words so I asked my cousin to help me take it on video...