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!