When to switch to alternate middle C

[FencingFlute]

Hi folks,

I'm a newbie on the forum, please to meet you!

I'm an adult teaching myself and I've been going for about three months so far. I'm working through a couple of study books one being 76 Graded Studies for the Flute book one.

I'm up to study 13 which has some fairly fast (for me) passages going through middle b,c, d,e, that sort of area. Up to now I've been using the basic fingering for these notes and I'm pretty clunky still with my note changes. I've seen that there's an alternative fingering for c (1--|123) which makes for a smother switch to D in these passages.

My question is, would a teacher expect me to persist with basic fingerings and use the exercise to gain facility with those or would they use this as an introduction to the alternative and I'm wasting my time with the basic in this particular case as no one would really use them in practise for this piece?

Thanks,

Chris.

[pied_piper]

Welcome to Fluteland!

At three months, you should continue to concentrate on the standard fingerings for all notes. Alternate fingerings can be useful, but it is far too early in your flute playing to use alternate fingerings. At this point, the idea is that you should be repetitively using the standard fingerings with the goal of becoming more fluent with them. There is usually a downside (i.e. poorer tone or the note is slightly out of tune) to most of the alternate fingerings and until you have at least several years of playing experience, you probably won't be ready to appreciate the difference.