I took up flute and clarinet at the same time, in December of 2004. Flute came to me largely intuitively, I had no teacher for my first year pursuing the instrument, save one lesson with my sax teacher who is a very fine woodwind multi-instrumentalist. Clarinet, on the other hand, has been a much more difficult road, and still does not feel natural to me, even after a similar amount of practice time spent on both instruments in the past two or three years.
On the flute I am playing repertoire by Bozza, Ibert, and Sancan to a pretty decent level. On the clarinet I am barely able to play the Mozart. Different strokes for different folks, it seems. When I started taking serious legit flute lessons in September of 2006 with a very fine player, she had to make very few corrections to my technique, embouchure, and air use. I have a feeling that with the clarinet, the process will be a bit more difficult once I start pursuing serious legit lessons. "Too similar to be different" regarding clarinet and sax, or something to that effect: they feel so similar in the mouth at first that it can be hard to mentally differentiate and adjust your embouchure and air speed accordingly; whereas putting a piece of silver against your lip with no reed completely changes your mindset over to something else. Something to think about.
Another thing to think about: if you want to pursue musical theater type work, the clarinet is FAR more important to know how to play in most cases. It is the "ticket" to getting a lot of pit orchestra gigs, and around here that translates to a lot of $$; whereas the flute is, obviously, required to be played to a high level on these types of gigs, it is not as popular in the reed books for many of the more oft-played shows.
I'm not alone in my experiences. Most woodwind players whose first instrument was sax that I've spoken with have found flute to be a lot more natural of a change than clarinet. It seem to come more readily to sax players these days, especially in a jazz context, where in modern music it is usually more appropriate than a clarinet.
I think that you will have a lot of fun with the flute and be able to pick it up and do a good job as long as you play it EVERY DAY. Do NOT give up ONE day while you are learning this instrument, even if you feel a little dizzy that day, play for five minutes and see how you are and if you can keep going. Just keep blowing away, playing fairly loud at first, to get the feeling for putting air through this instrument and learning to "Finesse" the sound out of the instrument. It demands greater control of air pressure and speed than the saxophone and you will just have to keep at it in order to start getting good at that. And of course, Gordon's online correspondence is of great value and was very useful to me in the beginning as well. Good luck!
