MysteriousPickle

Hi! Classical Flutist here.

Flute isn't so much 'taxing' on the lungs. By that, I mean that you're not hurting yourself by being out of breath. Think of it as an athletic exercise - many athletes train at high altitude for several weeks before a competition in order to train their bodies to deal with decreased oxygen. Playing the flute is a very similar type of training. At first, you're likely to be in a state of perpetual light-headedness because you're not breathing at a rate your body is used to. However, with practice your body becomes accustomed to that style of breathing.

Long tones are the best exercise you can do to learn how to produce a rich sound. You can also use long tone exercises to train your lungs as well. Start off by picking a note in a middle register that you know you can attack with a good tone. Keep an eye on the second hand of a clock and see how long you can keep the tone pure and steady before you're forced to stop. Do this every day, and you'll find that at first you have to stop because you get light-headed. Every day try to last a little longer. Fairly quickly, you'll have to stop because you run out of air, but not because you're light headed. Eventually, you'll find that you can easily hold a note for 30-60 seconds or more.

I know it doesn't sound fun, because you're not playing the music you want to play. But I promise you, playing the music you want to play with a beautiful tone and clear projection in every register is so worth the hours that you put into playing long tones.

Good luck!

It's all quite silly, really. And completely steeped in the history of instrument construction.

First, to get it out of the way, wind bands tune to Bb because it's much easier for the brasses to tune to a note with all of their valves open. Strings tune to A because (all?) strings have an open A string.

The reason some instruments are 'transposing' instruments goes way way back. Old brass instruments could only play certain notes because they didn't have valves or keys. So they just made horns of different lengths so that they could play in other keys. Once woodwinds and valved brass instruments became popular, they started to be build in all different shapes and sizes. Because nobody likes to learn a whole new set of fingerings for each instrument, they just standardized the fingerings to represent certain notes, and forced the composers to transpose the music so that it all comes out ok in the end.

tl;dr instruments are wacky and singers don't use their fingers.

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