1) Your flute. Check out Instruments for tips on buying a flute.
2) A music stand.
3) Your music.
4) A pencil to mark the music.
5) A flute cleaning kit. This should have a cleaning rod and swab, a polishing cloth, and pad paper or cigarette paper to clean the pads. A clean flute will play better and need fixing less often.
6) A tuner. It's good to always play in tune.
7) A metronome. It's hard to practice without a steady beat.
With these tools, practicing will be easier and more efficient.
Sample Practice Schedule
Note: This schedule is based on two hours of practice per day. Some people will practice much more than this, others much less. This is just a sample schedule.
10 minutes- Warm-ups, tone work, long tones, etc.
10 minutes- Scales
30 minutes- Etudes
60 minutes- Solos
10 minutes- Sight reading
If you play piccolo, you could add 30 minutes of piccolo at the end. It is a good idea not to practice piccolo first because after practicing piccolo for 30 minutes, the flute feels as heavy as several elephants. This is a good thing to avoid, if possible.
Practicing Tips
Here's the routine I follow to learn a new solo or etude. Hopefully it will be helpful to you.
1) Sight read through the whole piece, not stopping for anything.
2) Sight read again, this time stopping to circle all the hard parts to work on later.
3) Set a starting tempo, a tempo that you can almost play the piece already, without practicing that much. Then, set a performance tempo.
4) Work on getting all the right notes and rhythms at tempos closer and closer to your performance tempo. Concentrate on the parts you circled.
5) Once the notes and rhythms are good, add dynamics and interpretation. Studying a recording of the piece can be very helpful to figure out the style.
6) Polish the piece, and run straight through several times before performing.
Practicing Ruts
Everyone has them- the days when we just don't want to practice at all. These days are a normal part of flute playing, but they are a pain because they always seem to happen when we really should be practicing the most. Here are some tips for what to do when you get into a rut...
1) Look at it from a different perspective. Is there a different way you could practice something to make it more fun? For example, if you are sick of practicing scales, you could change your scale pattern/rhythm, or try to play them all (correctly) as fast as you can. If it's that one etude that's got you down, you could practice it backwards- play the last measure, then the last two measures...
2) Try something different. Start your practice session with five minutes of something that you love to play, then put that music away until you've done everything you need to do. At the end of your practice session, you could play that music again.
3) Take a break. Everyone needs a day off once in a while.
4) Bite the bullet. You know that you have to practice at some point, so just go do it, and set a reward for yourself when you are finished.
Good luck- I hope these tips helped you!
1) Studyscheme- Practcing Tips from Belgian Flute Pages.
2) For a Good and Useful Practice- Lots of useful practice tips, including practicing with braces. From The Flute Place.
3) So, You Want to Become a Flute Player?- Practicing advice from Larry Kranz.
4) PracticeSpot- An awesome site!