The third and final beat from Greg Pattillo's "Three Beats for Beatbox Flute" is a culmination of all the other beats before it, with extensive amounts of new techniques that were not previously introduced. This piece is quick paced and filled with excitement, and really stretches the capabilities of the performer.
This movement is particularly demanding and very exhausting to play. When you start to learn this movement, I must absolutely suggest learning little chunks at a time and slowly piece it together, as it is very exhausting, and you might end up losing progress if you perform it for too long.
Now that we have gotten used to reading the staves and performing the beatbox techniques, it is time to learn the first movement. The main focus in the first movement is on the actual flute melody itself, and the beatbox is now merely an accompaniment to the melodic line.
In order to be fluent in this particular Beat, you must be able to do the inhaled Ps sound really well for this piece to come off well. Most of this piece uses the three main beats (the B, K, and inhaled Ps), which makes it much easier than the third movement.
I suggest learning the second beat ahead of the first beat. The second beat has a lot of percussive flute notes that are aeolian in nature. These notes are much easier to produce than the notes that require flute tone in the first beat. The whole second beat focuses mainly around the beatbox factor, and focusing on the beatboxing aspects will only help improve your beats for the first and third movements that follow.
One of the strangest factors in the second beat is the introduction of three staves. The top stave is what you play on flute, the middle stave is the beatbox techniques, and the bottom stave is what is performed with your voice. Reading three staves at once is very foreign as a flute player, as we only ever have to read off of one staff. Once again, learning how to read three staves makes the other two beats that much easier to read the two staves that are present.
I have included my performance of this second beat.
As I mentioned in one of my earlier blogs, it is best to focus your time on learning Beatboxing techniques properly, than it is to spend a whole bunch of time learning it improperly.
When you are learning beatbox flute, there are steps you should take in order to properly learn it the first time. The steps which I found to be the most helpful, as well as the combined input from Greg Pattillo I suggest learning only the beatbox portions first. You should start with what you are most uncomfortable with and ease your way into it.
Your next step is to learn the flute line by itself. When you feel very comfortable with the two of them separately, you can add them together in small sections. If you are having troubles you can improvise to find a solution. In the performance of Greg Pattillo's "Three Beats for Beatbox Flute" you will not be allowed to improvise, but it is perfectly acceptable for practising.
Once you have smaller sections completed, you can slowly add sections together, until you eventually have the endurance to play all three movements together with no break!
Once you have mastered the B and K, and hopefully have gotten some good progress on forming the inhaled Ps sound, you now have to start learning the rest of the beats. Greg Pattillo has done a wonderful job in codifying a notational system that is used for Beatbox flute today.
The important thing to remember in learning these auxiliary techniques is to remember what the sound you are mimicking. If you are mimicking a high-hat, then make sure that your beat sounds like a high-hat. You must be able to hear what you want to produce, and be able to feel it.
I have described how to do these in my YouTube video here:
My original exposure to sounds like the B and K were very easy to learn at first, but there are many of the beats that don't make sense forming, and take a while to get. Any percussive technique was easy for me to produce at first, but there were certain inhaled techniques that I just could not wrap my head around.
One of the most amazing things about listening to Beatbox flute is that there is no break in the sound; there is always something going on to amaze you. This leads into the first problem of learning Beatbox Flute too. The fact that there is always something going on, means that there is always another chance for you to screw something up.
Beatbox Flute is very tiring and demanding, and at first you shouldn't spend too much time on it, or you will wear yourself out! If you do this, your practise time will just be ineffective anywase. It is best to take your starting time to do it correctly than to spend a whole bunch of time on it and doing it improperly.
Your first experiences with beats should be the B, the K, and the inhaled Ps sound. The inhaled Ps is one of the hardest to achieve, and there are not many resources out there explaining how to properly get it. Once you feel how to produce it, you will be able to reproduce it afterwards.
In this blog I will describe my ethnomusical enculturation into Beatbox Flute. In order to do this I must first talk about why I chose to focus on Beatbox Flute.
When I was in high school I was absolutely obsessed with Greg Pattillo's pieces. I would listen to his version of the Mario Bros. Theme almost every day!!! It was so innovative and so cool, and I could never imagine beatboxing on the flute myself. In my first year of University my entire flute studio went to one of his concerts, in which Greg Pattillo himself held a masterclass on how to Beatbox Flute!!! I was so excited, and I had a natural talent at extended techniques, including percussive techniques, so naturally I was called out for being really good at Beatboxing even though it was my first time!!
When I found out that I could do this, I was ecstatic! My entire studio had a blast that whole year trying to improvise and jam out together.
When my friend told me that Greg Pattillo wrote a piece for Beatbox I was obviously more than just intrigued, I had to know more about it; I had to learn it!!!
Over the years I have attended Greg Pattillo's concerts and met up with him afterwards in order to have informal jam sessions on the beats that gave us the most problems.
When I started my ethnomusicology course and I had to focus on learning a musical genre, I knew it had to be Beatbox Flute right away!!!
