songblog

November 2008

I haven't written in some time so this will be sort of a make up

I have found, as Kirt said in the last lesson, that he says many of the same things over and over again to all his students. I should, he says, be able to continue on and progress even if I never got another lesson from him again,as long as I remember the concepts he has explained to me.
I know the feeling, I have felt the same way with my guitar students over the years. Its easy to say, hard to get in many cases.
Therefore I will give you some highlights in no particular order, but just as the occur to me; maybe the stream of conscious thing will work OK for me.

One concept: I am exerting much more force than is necessary for me to produce the tones. Kirt has said that in the ideal situation, playing should be no harder than breathing. Great idea, but I know that for me, this horn takes all the air I can stuff into it and more; and I get very very bushed after playing for some time.

Remember the gliss of death? I can do this pretty reliably now, with the understanding that I cannot play this at the low volume that Kirt can. I am happy now that I can, no kidding, gliss down a 7th - hard to believe, I know, but it is possible.
Now for the variant, what I am trying to do is make a totally smooth gliss, up and down a fifth, so from C to G. This exercise needs to be slow, very slow, and smooth as possible. I find its very challenging to make them smooth, easier to emphasize the steps than make them smooth. The entire exercise is about control, making the horn work for you, instead of against you.

Clarinet ears: this sounds silly until you do it. Here is the idea: you cannot hear your horn in the way the audience can, and surely you are aware it sounds different in from of you then when you are playing.
Take one of your hands and place it at a 90 degree angle just forward from your ear (towards your nose). What you have done then is to make it so your ear cannot hear directly but only what noise will make it around the barrier of the ear.
How do we apply this? Take a couple of pieces of cardboard, tie them together with yarn or whatever, and hang them over your head. Again, we are not blocking the ears by flattening the cardboard against the ear, but having the pieces of cardboard sticking out at right angles, just like another set of ears. Now play, and you won't be able to hear in the same way at all; note how the clatting noises from closing the keys are not so noticeable. What you are hearing now is more of the horn, and not the other noises of the horn. Sure it looks silly as hell, but who is watching you practice, no one right?

Daily practice: of course everyone has some sort of routine, right? For me, its 1) long tones high E, F and G; 2) matching of the tone of the normal Bb( just below the break) and the side Bb, which is the same technique as the gliss technique; 3) the gliss; 4) the chromatic scale from low F to high G, can't quite make it to A yet; 5) the major and relative minor scales, scales in thirds, arpeggios, every single time. But I have also started to take note of certain two note combinations that are just plain difficult to me. I write these down when I notice them, and practice them before any of the exercises. It's not a long list, and once I can do the hard stuff easily, I can either drop it off the list or just go thru it once. Now I am usually going thru these difficult passages right after the chromatic scales.
If I have any energy left I will practice some songs and simple duets from the book I just purchased; the old Selected Duets by H Voxman. Basic stuff, but I am still very much a beginner in most senses.

Part of the reason I have been doing this, in particular, is that some of the key combinations, that I have no trouble playing, are not accurate and lag a bit. Drives me crazy. Think of going from an E over the break to a C over the break. My pinky has a tendency to lag. Of late, I have been trying to slap the pinky down with a bit more speed; not force, since you don't have to apply much pressure at all to close the key if you horn is working correctly.

On a side note, but related: I had much trouble with pains in my hands last year, even got a strap to see if that would help and it did. Now however, either my fingers have gotten stronger or I am just not trying to squeeze the living daylights out of the horn. Hopefully it's the latter, but in any event my left hand is pain free and my right isn’t bad at all. One more note, when playing notes, ideally once you release a note, any note, you should immediately be in a neutral position with your fingers, able to move in any direction needed to play the next note. This means that your fingertips don't just fly off into space between notes, keeping them close to the keys; for sure this save movements, and minimum finger movement is what its all apart on any instrument you play.

Venting - something everyone does, but I am surprised at how I don't think of this enough. Consider this little bit of a D minor scale:

This has been making me hate life for some time now, until the other night when I just left my right hand down for the whole passage from the G, so I am just pivoting the hand, not lifting so much. Simple, like most answers when you finally get them.

Tip for high notes: to get the upper register notes to sound for certain fingerings, you can just open the note a pin hole, not wide open. Its more like just a bit of a slide off the key, rather than just having the hand fly open. It can make the note speak clearer too.

I am still not giving myself that extra couple of seconds before I play. So once the abdomen is set, get some air and close the reed; the sound doesn't happen until you release the tongue from the reed. Hard to do, I am impatient, but that is the goal.

One other bad habit: rushing the timing when I get to difficult passages. Pretty dumb, eh? Why rush the hard stuff, don't you need more time then?

Something that really struck me was this: as he had done many times before, Kirt spun around the mouthpiece on the horn and I just blew air and he did the fingerings. It sounded really pretty good to me! However, when he spun the horn the other way, and I was doing the fingering, it sounded awful! And here is the lesson in this: the first instance is how I sound, the second is how I play. Gave me something to think about!