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.
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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.
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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 take in all of the mouthpiece that is not touching the reed, i.e., right up to the point the reed and mouthpiece rail meet. While this varies subtly from time to time, it's a pretty standard way to approach that point.
To "chew up" more means to take more slack out of the reed with the upward motion on the reed that we practiced. Your stretched lip is going to be fairly firm against the reed. The times I instructed you to chew up more, the tone was not quite focused enough and the high c was flat.
We could say more "pressure" on the reed, but that connotes biting, which we are not about whatsoever! Pressure from below the reed/rail juncture right up to that juncture, and then maintaining that snug fit to maintain an in tune high c is the gig.
In the future when all of this is second nature, of course you'll play with a much looser embouchure for the style you are playing, in your case Greek/Turkish. The difference is that you'll be able to play with the tonal vortex in your mouth and not at the reed/mouthpiece aperture. This will make endless possibilities effortless.
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.
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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!