October 13, 2007
Clarinet lesson #13
Unlike my poor start last week, today I sat down once I got to Kirts and just played some long tones, and thought about what I was playing, even when I was simply trying to warm up. There is no time when slacking moves you forward.
Before we did any playing at all, Kirt had me stand up, bend from the waist and breathe deeply, just as you breathe deeply before you play. We repeated this exercise at a couple of different angles, each time making certain to keep all the air coming up from the lungs, not trying to fill the upper lungs at all and most important, keeping the shoulders loose and relaxed. If your shoulders tense up when you are playing, it will affect all your playing, and will start to make your breath fill up the upper part of your lungs. When this happens, you have pretty much lost it, since you are no longer controlling the air as you should from your gut.
To catch up, this past week I have been playing looking at myself in the mirror almost all the time, the better to watch my finger position, and its paying off. There are really so many things going on with this technique, its hard to keep them all under control. Some of the things that Kirt pointed out were the angle of my left hand and how that interacts with the pinky.
Kirt had mentioned but was more assertive this time in telling me to keep the pinky straight, so that it hits flat on the key, not curved. Even if the hand is fairly tight and collapsed toward the body of the horn, if the bottom of the wrist is not twisted up slightly, you will have difficulty in getting the hand and the pinky to lie in the correct manor. Please see the photo from the last lesson on this. Also, having the slip of paper between the thumb and forefinger of the left hand really helps here.
One other thing that I have been concentrating on is to make a concious effort to make certain that I am not changing my breath as I play notes. As Kirt has explained, think of it like a totally solid, unchanging column of air that is constant, with only your fingers moving. Again, once you start the air moving, don't change the velocity or postition at all. He wasn't specific about it, but I suspect this is like the guitar for instance - you have to be able to play the notes exactly the same wherever they are on the neck, with the same tone and volume. That is how you get control on the guitar. I am not saying that you would never be totally unchanging in your breath, since you have to do bends and so forth, but the control is they key. You can't play whatever comes into your mind if you cannot produce a clear, clean tone at any volume at any time,
Consider the following simple exercise:
play this set as one continuous legato line, and once you have your tone, don't vary your embrosure at all for any reason. You may find that you have some issues going from the low E to the C, but if these are only from slight misplacments when you hit the register key, you can overcome that. The real trick is to stay focused on that one great tone, and just let the fingers do what they do, independent of the mouth.
One other thing to note is that the thumb doesn't contact the register key in line with the body of the clarinet but at a 45 degree angle, and the thumb just moves ever so slightly when uncovering the hole and hitting the register key.
Once we got thru breathing (sounds ominous, doesn't it?), Kirt told me the next step was to start doing some stacatto practice. We had done this once before, some time back, but really I have only been practicing legato now for some time.
As a reminder, Kirt made me do the whole process of setting myself to play correctly: 1) get the embrosure set on the horn - bottom lip stretched, corners of the mouth in, chin flat. 2) slide the chin straight down contacting the reed as far as you can 3) chew in an upward direction until you are at the correct spot to start the note.
Certainly I don't go to this extent with each breath, but certainly to be reminded of it is a good thing, and the results were immediate, the notes simply sounded better.
Now for the first stacatto: once you are ready to play, close the reed with the tounge and blow as hard as possible, then open just the merest fraction to let a sound out and immediately close the opening. This is the "dut" sound (detached) and its not suppose to be pretty, we are simply trying to make the perfect staccato here. Do this until your run out of breath, and then several more times.
Legato: this is with the sound of "daw" (connected, smooth) and you are trying to make this as smooth as possible. Don't rush this, and your tounge should make the minimum amount of contact possible, light as an angles kiss you know? Here is where having the embrosure fixed solidly, especially not moving the chin, is all important.
Final stacatto: this again is the "duh" sound, but unlike the first stacatto, you are not trying to blow your brains out, but are trying with minimum movement to make a succient, precise stacatto. Don't rush this, make them slow quarter notes and accurate, accurate, accurate.
Since I am working at going over the break, we did some work going up from A to B, with variations as you saw from the last lesson, and here again is where Kirt was telling me to pay particular attention to my left pinky. If you have the hand in the correct position, with the bottom side of the wrist up slightly, the hand can just rock back and forth in a very tiny movement to move the keys and go over the break. I did A to B many times, and too quickly too, since doing it too fast ruined my left hand position. Its not a race, you don't get to play accurately at speed if you can't play accurately slowly. And again the pinky is flat and slaps the key.You can also rest the pinky against the key as an anchor to keep your hand in the correct position. We worked on this for some time.
Finally, I got some new exercises, the basic scales with a very slight twist as the first note of each octave is held for a quarter note instead of an eighth, on the ascending notes only and then on the decent you end up first note of the relative minor. Download file
We are not about to tear through all these, I am only doing the C and A minor for this next week.
So - get your hands in the right postition before you start to play, and keep them relaxed as you play, because like everything else here in this life, stress is your enemy.