songblog

clarinet lesson #5

May 1st: I haven't actually had my next lesson yet, still there are a few things that occur to me that might be of interest to all of you so let's begin here:
I don't think I have mentioned the practice routine that Kurt has given me. There isn't much out of the ordinary here, but this is the order that I am practicing in:
1) Long tones - no surprise right? But if recall the method I am using, its actually very good, and more difficult than you might believe at first glance.
2) The long gliss - or what I have taken to calling the "gliss of death" - which I am still not making much if any progess on. All in good time I hope.....
3) B to Bb and of course what I am attempting here is to make the notes sound alike. I have realized, however, that you can cheat, in a bad way, in this exercise. So here is what I am not doing: adjusting the sound of the side Bb. This just won't do, you need, as far as I can tell, make the side Bb first then the normal Bb to match that. Otherwise you miss the point of the exercise.
4) Finger exercises: this is where it is most important to watch your fingers - you would be surprised at how much difference this will make. Also, at the slow tempos you need to work at, you can really hear the good - and the bad! - of your tone on every note. To get to where I want to with my tone, I need to have the ability to correct the tone in a granular way, tiny, tiny changes that make a huge differenece if you are listening with great care.

Here is a .pdf of the exercises (you will need Adobe acrobat reader for this, its free):
Download file
Note that I am only supposed to play up to exercise #5 at this point!

5) After this, if I was allowed at this point, would come scales. I can't wait!
6) Last but not least, I will get to whatever etude when Kurt tells me I am ready. Can you tell I am a bit impatient?
One more thing, totally out of context, but you might appreciate this: At one point in my life, many years ago, I was a very serious classical guitarist. I even passed my audition attend the university, but for a number of reasons, it never worked out.
One thing you can not change is they way your fingers are shaped. If you wanted to play classical guitar, which requires the use of your nails, the ideal finger would have a nail that came out at a right angle to the finger, and the tip of the finger would be nice and flat.
Needless to say, my fingers are exactly the opposite of this: the nails curve down, and the ends of my finger are quite rounded out; lots of cushion to hold a baseballl, but crappy for playing classical guitar. This has no effect at all on playing any other type of guitar, and since I play almost exclusively electric its fine for that.
What I realized the other night, however, is that having really rounded tips of the firngers are just perfect for an open holed instrument like the - can you guess? - the clarinet.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
May 6th: Now its Sunday, I am at work waiting for a server to finish its business so I can finish mine, so I might as well catch up with what happened yesterday at my lesson.
Lets get it out of the way, I was not what you would call a shining star today, much to my chagrin. Oine of the main problems was that I was forgetting to start each note of a phrase with my tounge, instead of just blowing. As Kurt said, you only have to do this as long as you play the clarinet, so I hope in my case that is a good long time.This was compounded by the fact that I wasn't taking a moment to get my breath correctly, set the muscles in my gut, set my embrosure correctly before I started to play. Once again my years of playing the sax are not helping me here, since the procedures for the sax are so different than the clarinet.
Its all about getting good habits, and as you all know these are very diffcult to attain. Kurt is always stressing that the energy for playing comes from the gut, and has suggested I start doing pushups every day, as he does. Man, this is getting to be too much like work!

Lets talk about the way you approach the mouthpiece a bit more by looking at this terrible illustration::
Download file

I was having a terrible time understand what Kurt was asking me to do until this last session where I did a drawing similar to the one you can see to help me understand and remember. What I want to take away from this is that my jaw is pushing straight up towards the tip of the reed, not towards the top of the mouthpiece. I hope this makes more sense now, although it is difficult to do. Of course, this assumes you have tight embrousure, with the corners of your mouth in. As Kurt explains it, its like pursing your mouth to say "voooo". Doing this for me means that my tounge is maiking a sort of "U" shape.
This led to another example of how he wants me to approach shaping the air in my throat and lips. Kurt gave the example of holding up a lens to the sun and concentrating the light beams into a single point, like you might have done as a kid when you were trying to fry an ant on the sidewalk.
So what he does is make sure that the air comes to a point like a vortex which is not at the tip of the reed, since the reed stays stationary during the breathing. So the bends simply don't come from tounging the reed at all. This may be different from what Greek and Turkish players do, and I would appreciate comments on this, and please note no one is saying one way is any better than the other, this is just the way I am being taught. Kurt knows how much I admire this style of playing, but his attiude is that if I learn to play correctly, I should be able to play anything.One last note on this: how much of the mouthpice do you take into your mouth? According to Kirt, just enough so that you can play a high C in tune. He said to use a tuner for this, but under no circumstances to use a tuner for anything else at this point, it would just distract me from what I should be doing.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This just in from Kirt:
Your quote: "...how much of the mouthpice do you take into your mouth? According to Kurt, just enough so that you can play a high C in tune." Not quite what I meant, although I understand why my explanation seemed that way.

We'll continue spending time "lining up" with the acoustics to get even and flexible tone throughout the entire range of the clarinet; we'll punish the fingers until they do what we tell them to; we'll get the tonguing in shape and etudes will reveal our blind spots.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
We also discussed the "gliss of death" and I am still not getting it. I can easily make the require shape of my mouth off the mouthpiece, but not so well on. So for the time being Kurt wants me to just gliss down from the high C to Bb, and hold the Bb as long as I can. This will develop the vortex of air I was referring to previously. At least I can actually do this, so that is much less frustrating.
That is it for now. I will have a long layoff on lessons till June 2nd since Kurt is playing a lot of gigs on the weekings until then, so I have my work cut out for me. Pray I don't go nuts playing the same dame five exercises over and over again!

clarinet lesson #4 more basics

Things are not going so well, either with my gliss exercise or with my tone. Actually, the tone is worse, it just sucked all week. It seemed as if the only notes I could squeeze out where horrible, fuzzy wooden things, that slowly emerged and floated weakly in the air, to quicky lose their way and fall lifeless to the floor. Not good.
Things are not exactly helped by the practice regime - its not like I am playing songs or anything remotely fun. I have to keep in mind what I know is the truth: that the only way to progress correctly is to get the fundamentals down to the point where I do not have to conciously think about them. It all has to get below the level on thought, and into my fingers and mouth.
This highlights one of the problems I have that Kurt pointed out to me: I have years of habits from playing the saxophone, and this is not helping with the clarinet. What happens is that I know without thinking how to make at least a passable tone - but in the way that I learned on the sax, and it is very different.
We speak at some lenght about the embrosure, and about how I am having trouble making myself make and hold the correct form, while trying to breathe as I have been instructed. What happens is that I can make the right shape and position of my tounge when I don't have the mouthpice in, but as soon as I do contact the horn, my embrosure just changes completely.
So here is the challenge: how do I possibly accomplish this, the non-changing of the lip and mouth position? One way is of course to play in front of the mirror, and really concentrate on what I am doing with my mouth. And the real challenge: according to Kurt, the keys to it are these two contrasting : have the smallest amount of lip covering my lower lips (very much unlike the sax, where you want a good cushion), and at the same time, you have to pinch in the cheeks to seal the sides of the mouth.
What this means is that you are doing two diametrically opposite motions with the muscles in your face - and doing this for any amount of time is really painful. I am told that at some point it will become easier - I just wish I knew when!
We didn't spend the entire time on the embrosure, thankfully. As like week, we spoke a bit about the gliss and I explained to Kurt the problems I am having with it. To be brief about it, I still need to work on it, since I seem to be stuck just where I was like week. Kurt did show me again that I should be chewing in an upward motion, not just biting straight across the reed toward the rails of the mouthpiece.
Here is an exercise we did: make the correct embrosure, now place the mouthpiece in your mouth. Drop your jaw as far as possible on the mouthpiece. Now, move your jaw upward to the point where you would make your normal note. The trick here is to not change the stretch of you lip across your lower teeth, or the pressure on the side of your mouth. The point again is to achive control over the muscles of your mouth, and to find the precise point of how much of he mouthpiece you actually have in your mouth, in order to make a clear tone. In my case, I was a bit too far up the mouthpice. I wish I could give you a more precise description of the exact point, but you have to experiment. And of course, your chin should be flat for this entire time, as it should be for all the playing that you do.
Kurt has me play some long tones, as I described in the last blog, and I pulled off some really good ones first try. Much better than any other tries, I might add. Also, I had spent 45 minutes practicing before I took my lesson, and this may have helped. I did have about the same amount of time before the lesson as I drove to Kurt's house, but I am still not sure if practicing just before the lesson is such a good idea.
Getting back to the long tones: As Kurt explained, its not just the notes themselves, but the transition between the notes so that you have a tone that starts at a low volume but starts cleanly. And of course, the quiet volume that you drop down to for the end of the long tone is the most important, and by far the most difficult.
Next I played throught some of the finger exercises that I was assigned. Here is another important use for the mirror: watching the exact position of your hands on the keys, and how your fingers move when fingering the notes. I am to think of the fingers as always being in some sort of combination, so that I am aware of what the other fingers are doing even if they are not being used at this particular time. The third finger of the left hand, I was told, is the most difficult, and it is most important to keep the curve on this finger. So a simple C-D consists of: keep the curve on the finger, then snap the finger up and down as needed, making certain that you are in complete control of the movement. The fourth finger of the left hand is also hard to keep curved, so one exercise to do is the C-C# with the fourth finger moving up and down. Small movements, precise.
And surprising to me, at this point, finally, I am getting some decent tone. Maybe I am playing better from trying harder from being at the lesson, but man, it felt good, I can tell you.
I had been given the first eight finger exercises, but now I am supposed to only concentrate on the first three, with the last of the three a simple C scale, one octive. Easy of course, but not easy to do with the precison that Kurt wants me to attain. Again,the fingers should snap up and down, with no excess motion.
He told me that during high school, he could easily whip through all the scales and that was that. Later, when Kurt found the teacher that taught him the method he is teaching me, he had to learn the scales all over again. Yeah, not my favorite idea of fun either - but if you could hear the results as he plays them - well, its worth it.
A last note on the finger exercises, the metornome should be set at 88/quarter note, or double when you get to that point - no faster. Like most exercises I have done on all the instruments I have studied, slow is better.
One last exercise, which is designed to strenghten the tounge: finger a high C, get as much breath as you can but don't play the note! Keep the reed closed with the tounge, and at long slow intervals slightly open and then instantly close the reed again - you with hear a choked "dut". The tounge should only move off the reed about 2 mm, no more and again, close up the reed right away. Do this several times with as much force as you possibly can.
Yes, you can give yourself a nasty headache doing this, but I am told it will very much strenghten the tounge, and the lungs.
That was it for this lesson, and its too bad you could not be there, because of course I cannot give all the detail, or perhaps give you all the information that I was give. Still, I hope this helps you in your own practice, and of course please feel free to ask questions on the GT website.

clarinet lesson #3

This last week was really trying for me. The company I work for had to lay off a fair number of people, including the guy that sits behind me in the office. We have worked together for 5 years now, and he was in there close to the beginning with me. What is the worst part is that I knew he was going to get the axe last week, and had to keep my mouth shut about it.
Its one of the curses of being a systems administrator, I always know before almost anyone when a person is being terminated for any reason.
Every night I was trying to do the clarinet gliss exercises I wrote about last week, with not much luck or really any improvment. Very frustrating, knowing that I was not understanding what Kurt had told me in such detail. I did make a bit of progress on some of the long tones, the A and the Bb that had really sounded awful to me. I mentioned this to Kurt and he told me that they sound poor on most any horn, but of course that is something we have to work on. I have to say, they sound just fine when he plays them, so once again its me not the horn.
Of course these glisses are the first thing we work on. I tell Kurt I just don't seem to get it, even to the point of making the sounds we talked about last week correctly. We work on this a bit, and finally I am able to at least make the sounds that he requests me to, without having the mouthpiece in my mouth.
What I find is that,as he described and I have in my notes, the rear of the tounge is actually hitting the roof of my mouth, and the movement is coming from the middle of the tounge. At least now I can make the pitch bends without the mouthpiece on. I still cannot do this when I am playing. I notice that my tounge almost automatically drops to the bottom of my mouth.
This may be due to the fact of playing the sax for so many years, with its much easier breath/mouth control. I mean, if you only play clarinet and not sax, pick up a sax sometime and you will see what I mean, its just so much easier!
In any event, I am now equipped to finally get the pitch bend with the horn, once I can re-train my tounge a bit. Difficult, but any teacher will tell you its much better to establish good playing techniques at the beginning, rather than try and correct these defects later when you they have become your habitual way of playing the instrument.
OK, enough of that, the lesson moves on.
From my notes, I am reading one thing that seems critical to me - that the amount of air pressure is steady, regardless of the pitch you are playing. Kurt says its like an electronic organ, where you press a key and no mattter how hard you press the key, the resulting tone is the same.
Take a moment to consider the ramifications of this: I have been having to use a lot more force to play the notes in the upper register, but if I can learn this technique, that should in theory eliminate the need to waste myself when I want to play the high notes.
The other benefit of this practice is that you can play longer on any single breath., which can only be of great benefit to any player, regardless of the style you are playing. Kurt told me that in many cases, when playing with other good musicians, he can do in one breath what they need at least two breaths for.
Kurt keeps stressing that all the breath has to be controlled from the abdomen, and that if you are really working correctly, any pain you get will come from down there in your gut. As he says, fill up the lower portion of you lungs, even expanding the stomach muscles, and the the upper part of the lungs. Your gut muscles should be as tense (or active if you will) as if you expected someone to come up and punch you in your gut. Hopefully not your teacher!
In light of this, he gives me one of my next assingments, and no kidding its more long tones. What to do: play the middle E (top of the staff) and start out at pp or even ppp if you can do that, and then get louder rather quickly and finally return to the pp or ppp. So its like the first 40% is the crescendo and the 60% the decrescendo, with the most important part of the exercise the last pp section. Its the hardest thing, when you are running out of air, to make this quiet tone, getting ever softer, and still keep the tone good. This is when the stomach wall muscles really come into play, as you try and really control the flow of air, and push out evenly so the tone doesn't go to hell.
So, the complete exercise: start on the E as mentioned, then when you are our of air, lift one finger to play the F just above it - but under no circumstances open your mouth or change your embrousure. Breathe in through your nose to get the air. If you can, complete this exercise by going back down again to the E, again without moving your mouth off of the mouthpiece.
Trust me, if you do this the right way, and really put your effort into it, you will get tired and eventually you will feel it in your stomach. Kurt does lots of sit ups to increase the amount of strenght and control he has while playing. I am the worst person in the world about exercise, which I think is the work of the devil (as if I believed in the devil!) but with my expanded middle section, it sure couldn't hurt.
Next we did some work on the Bb. I'm not sure if this is the same on the Albert system, but I would imagine there is something similar. The basic fingering for the middle Bb is of course the top A key and the key just beneath it. However there is an alternate fingering, where you use the A key and the side key Bb key, which simply sounds better to me. The thing is, Kurt stressed to me that this alternate fingering can be a bit too bright, compared to the rest of the instrument, and its normally reserved for trills.
Not a huge concept here: make the normal Bb sound indentical, as much as possible, to the alternate fingering. I don't know if I will ever be able to do this, but getting close to the brighter, open sound would be good, and since this is the preferred fingering, that is what I am aiming for.
To me, one of the payoffs of playing an exercise as simple as this, swithcing between the fingerings, is how, if I am in a good practice mood, how liberating it can be for my mind to focus my full concentration on the production of these tones. I have never been a person to have the ability to meditate, my mind is far too full of junk to do that. However, I find I can actually achieve a state of pehaps momentary timelessness when I practice like this.
I have found this to be when I am playing the best, when I can shut out the rest of the world for these brief moments of clarity. I think for me it goes past concious thought and someplace deeper, if only for a few moments.
This is why I love wind instruments so much, because if your soul is carried on your breath, then your sould is being played and amplified through the instrument.
Sorry if I got too off topic there! The rest of my lesson consisted of Kurt giving me some mechanical exercises, for developement of my fingers. He stressed that I need to monitor my finger position and to try and snap my fingers into the correct positions.
This led to a discussion of how I am to finger the clarinet. What he is telling me is that the fingers on both hands have to be at about a 45 degree angle to the stick, with the tips of the fingers pointing downward. Once again Kurt said that the difficult, critcal hand was the left hand, much moreso than right.
I mentioned last time about how you should be able to hold a piece of paper between where the thumb and forefinger meet. I was mistaken about the angle that the hand would take when doing this. I thought it would have to be very flat, almost a right angle to the horn, which is pretty much impossible. Its not anywhere near that severe, but unless I can somehow hold my horn and take a picture from the perspective of my face, I won't be able to show you what this looks like.
One thing however I can tell you is that the fingers should hit the keys with the meat, not the tips, of the fingers. Also the index fingers of each hand will lightly rest upon the closest side keys, certainly not opening them but certainly within contact. Same thing with the thumb, it should lightly contact the register key, so that when you need to change registers, the amount of movement is minimal. Kurt tells me that once I get this hand postioning down, the horn will set lightly in my hands, and it will be quite comfortable and natural.
One last exercise: staccato and slow on the high C. While doing this, keep the air going all the time; the tongue starts and stops the note while the abdomen continues its steady pressure.
Next week I get to go back to scales, thirds and arpeggios, using the classic Klose material, that has been used all over the world for what? 75 years now?
I will get back to you after that, and I hope you gained some insights from this weeks brain dump.

clarinet lesson #2 - breathe

Another rainy Saturday here in Portland, and I slog out to Beaverton to get more on how to play better.
Perhaps in no discernable order, here is what I recall from a couple of hours ago:
Starting the note, always brace your abdomen as if someone was going to take a punch at your belly. Breathe from the bottom up, fill your stomach first, which can actually bulge out, then your lungs, Don't ever raise your shoulders while breathing.
Let me preface the rest of these notes by saying this is not something I think you could learn on your own, you need to have a teacher there to watch and correct. Also I take no responsibility if you mess up your technique by anything I may write down here. Much of this technique is really subtle, and trust me I am no expert! However I need to write this down for myself, and if you gain any insight into your playing - I think thats great. Its all about making better music, for me, and for you.
Kurt spoke at some length about the mechanism of breathing, and gave me a three part exercise.
The first exercise: get your breath, make sure your abdomen is set, now close the back of your throat, just as if you were in the first stages of a cough or a yawn. Now open the back of the throat ever so slightly, making an "aaahhhh" sound like you were at the doctor. Again, at the back of the pallet, as small an opening as you can make.
I think I got this part, but its difficult, at least to describe. I think when its right I feel a small, unrestricted passage way of air as I exhale, almost as if there was a small diameter tube running from my gut up to my mouth. Like the trumpet, this is all about control and velocity.
Now keeping up the air pressure, open and close the back of the throat; consider it a valve and you get the idea. Note that at this point, your mouth is open, not closed as when you play the instrument.
The second step: the back of the tongue hugs the roof of the mouth, kind of like when you clear your throat. Remember, I am talking way way back on the tougue, not forward into the main mouth cavity.
Finally, to get to the pitch bend, which is a big part of what this is about, the middle/front of your tongue, will move up and down in a sound like a wee-ooohhh (sorry can't make any better idea of what it sounds like) as the tip of the tongue is against the teeth, and the jaw and lips not moving at all, as you lower and raise the pitch. The tongue is really moving, not huge movements but sublte and constant. For me at this stage some of the movement is like when you say the letter "d", in how the tongue moves up towards the roof of the mouth. Of course when you are playing the notes, your embrosure is set against the reed, but for practice off the reed your mouth will be a bit open.
Of course I was all happy with myself that I could gliss down from a high c to an a, but I couldn't for the life of me do this during my lesson. B flat, no problem, but A? And of course I am not even close to hitting the E as Kurt can do without even thinking about it - and he can bend notes a lot farther than that.
Once again, the main thing is to make the opening in the mouth, not the embrosure, do all the work, by changing the size of the mouth cavity. Once, I get that, then I will (hopefully!) really be able to take off.
So that was pretty much what went down, but a couple of other things to note: I am not to do any scale playing, or if I just can't help myself, to stay in the clarion range, not the altissimo, since Kurt tells me this entails a different set of skills, and I don't want to get ahead of myself.
I also have a lot of trouble getting the A that is above the staff to sound nice. When I asked about this, Kurt showed me a different fingering that made all the bad tone disappear. Amazing to me. However, the trick will be, at some later date, learning how to make the A sound just as good with the normal fingering as with the alternate. That is really going to take some work.
Oh I lied, three things: I am going to have to learn to hold my left had in a totally different fashion than I do now. Kurt tells me everyone starts the same way, with the fingers on the left hand making a sort of "C" shape to contact the keys. The rest of the fingers curl naturally onto the keys.
His technique, which includes holding a piece of paper between the thumb and first finger, makes the left hand look just like you see the hand postions when playing a violin.
.....
yeah, that is gonna be a killer. I don't even want to think about that now!
I almost forgot, the high point of the lesson for me, I was playing a high C, a long tone I was just holding, and Kurt said, that's great, you don't need to go any farther when you get a tone like that. Man, that felt good, now if I could only do that on every note!

the eternal student

It has finally come to this. After some months of debating back and forth with myself, and with Barbara urging me on, I have at last started to take some clarinet lessons.
So why tell anyone about this? Mostly, its to remind me of what happens at each lesson, so I won't forget. On top of that there may be some things I glean from the lessons that could be of interest of the hundreds, or maybe tens or whoever may stumble upon these humble writings.
I had responded to an ad on Craigs list from a clarinet teacher, but didn't do this for some time since I figured, OK, for sure any teacher is going to tell me, play scales and arpeggios, so I just concentrated on that for the past several months.
Of course, there are things that are difficult for me, I can't pretend to have all the answers, so I finally call up the teacher and find he's a bit far away from my house. I ask if he can recommend any other teachers that may be closer to where I live.
Right off the top of his head he comes up with a list of six other teachers. I call them all, and each one of them seems to be a good prospect to me. Interesting, all of them say good things about each other, when I finally get return calls.
I almost decide to try this one fellow, when I get a call back from one of the remaining instructors. I ask him a question about preparing reeds, since I have lots of issues with this, in fact the instructor that I almost went with told me he knew a lot of about refacing reeds.
However, this guy said, I don't do any resurfacing of reeds, if I had to worry about that I would quit. His method, so he told me, eliminates the need to be a slave to the reed (other than what makes sense, reeds are after all natural products and they all simply can't be fantastic).
So this intrigues me, and I set up a lesson the following Saturday. After I do this, the last potential instructor calls me and I tell him, gee you sound great but I think I am going with the other guy. Once I mention my potential teachers name, the guy on the phone says, oh him! he's a world class player, you can't possibly go wrong with him, unless for some reason your personalities don't click.
Well, sounds good to me, after all the man I am talking with on the phone has no reason to praise this other teacher, right.
One thing my teacher said, the only requirement at all, was that I buy a box of Vandoren 2 1/2 reeds. I was saying, really? Thats stronger than what I have been using, and the Vandorens I tried for a bit I didn't like much at all. Still, I have to give the man the benfit of the doubt, no?
I buy a box, and damn, they don't sound all that bad. That is surprise #1.
Saturday comes around and off I go to his house. I must say, all the teachers live not so close to me, I suppose in retrospect I could have gone to the first guy I spoke with. But now I am glad I didn't.
So I meet Kurt (I don't want to give his last name, and does it make any difference?) and he seems really nice and very precise. I mean, immaculate beautiful house and yard, totally organized studio filled with wind instruments - a good sign I think.
He examines my horn and pronounces it fine to play on, although needing one slight adjustment. He of course has a really knockout old Buffet, and yeah, hes a great player, no doubt.
He takes my B45 mouthpiece, says this is good, and then takes my fabric ligature and tightens it up all the way. I have used this same type of ligature for years on my sax, and never, ever made it tight like that. I can make sound like this?
As the lesson progressed, I began to understand why Kurt said that his teaching method was different than the other instructors in town. Unlike the way I had been playing sax and clarinet for all this time, making lots of adjustments to my embrosure, he had me make the correct playing postion with my mouth, teeth and tounge, and not move my lips or jaw at all - all the work done by the tounge, including pitch bending.
I had told Kurt pitch bending was important, and man, he can pitch bend like crazy, still using his technique, so yeah, it can certainly be done.
A short story: Kurt told me that he had been playing with good, conventional technique for 20 years, and doing a lot of teaching, before he started taking lessons with the teacher that taught him this method. Once Kurt got the idea, he got rid of all his students, and told them to take lessons from the guy he was taking lessons from! That is commitment, eh?
So the rest of the lesson was about tone, tone, tone, using these ideas. Of course I had done long tones, but this was different conceptually for me. Lots of open G, making sure I had my mouth and tounge set, tounge on the reed closing it, until I had the air pressure built up, before opening the reed.
The other lesson was pitch bend, from a high C down to an A, with no movement of my lips or jaw.
This two techniques have been what I have been pounding on this week, and after several days I can actually get down to the A, just reshaping the tounge, no lip, tooth or jaw movement. Not easy, but opens up many possibilites. And I am getting better with the tone too.
As Kurt said, the idea is to get the tone I want to easily in any register, without killing my mouth.
I am as you can tell very enthusiastic about this, and can't wait for my next lesson tomorrow.