Chinese Flute Basic Course Level One

• Hi everyone,

This is Yong Seng, your Chinese bamboo flute teacher. Chinese bamboo flute is also called dizi（笛子） in Mandarin. It's not pronounced as "dizzy",  please watch my introductory video and listen to how I pronounce the word. For your first lecture, you will learn how to paste a paper-like material called dimo (笛膜）that will create a vibrant sound after you have pasted it onto your dizi. After that, you will the first three notes that are sung as do, re and mi using numbers to indicate unlike the Western musical notation. 1 is do, 2 is re and 3 is mi. Once you learn how to play these three notes, I will teach you to play a simple but well-known Chinese musical piece and you will be able to play it after this course.

I have been teaching for more than 30 years and I'm currently teaching at the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore as a dizi instructor. I'm also a Yamaha flute instructor teaching the concert C flute. I have a BA(Hons) in Music and I was a part-time lecturer teaching at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts for modules such as World Music, Concert Management and English. When I was 18 years old, I won the 1st prize for the national music competition (Singapore), open category, for the dizi solo performance.