Still, I need to practice basics, while learning the songs so here is what I have been doing in my practices:
I firmly believe that at my level, I need to practice three things daily: major and minor scales, scales in thirds, and arpeggios.
What I had been doing in the past was to rotate on which days I played these, since many times I have a limited amount of practice time to do any thing in. What this meant was that I never really got good at any of the three of scales forms I need to know cold.
What I decided to do was to just play the major and minor scales, if nothing else at all, each day as the first thing I practice, after long tones and other warm up exercises. Bear in mind, I had never to that point gone thru all the scales, but crapped out 3/4 of the way through. Pathetic, I know. It was very frustrating to me to do this, and many times it took all the 45 minutes or so that I had to play through all the scales.
I had to start this way: for years, I played in lots and lots of bands as a tenor sax player with no complaints from other musicians about my playing ablilty, and still I never had learned all the scales on that instrument, which is stupid, since they aren't that difficult on the sax. So I was determined to not let this happen with the clarinet.
Its been several months since then, since I started playing the scales first (and looking at the music and not my hands too) and I feel I am making some progress at last. Also, and most important, I lowered the tempo for the scales from 88 on the metronome to 76 - and sometime even lower than that if necessary. After reading the great piece by Gino Cioffi, it makes perfect sense to play slowly and correctly, perfect sense.
Today, it took me less than 20 minutes to run thru all the scales, not blazing fast by anyones measure but much better than I was. This also means that I have enough time and energy left to practice the other two basic scale types every day. I alternate between the arpeggios and the scales and thirds. At some point, I will get down to where I can play them all and still have time left to play.

Nothing mind boggling here I know, its all just common sense but you know how rare that is! Someday I may take lessons again but if I do, it sure won't be about playing the basics. Thanks again to all who took the time to read my humble scribblings on learning the clarinet.

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!

1) Center. By this I mean, before you take a breath on each new exercise, take the few seconds and set your embrosure and your breathing so that you are actually ready to play. In my case, I set my stomach muscles so they are firm, then exhale, then inhale so I have a good amount of air to play. As Kirt said to me the other day, "Airstream is everything"..
2) Shake your hands. Most of us have a tendency to tighten up our muscles as we play, and that makes the entire process more difficult. In my case, its mostly my right hand, so I frequently stop and fling my arm out like I was shaking off water from the end of my fingers. You always want that light touchon the keys. Also shake your shoulders if you hold tension up there, again it won’t do your playing any good.
3) Always play with the metronome - except when you don't. Here is something my teacher may not agree with. I think that once you have played thru say a scale several times and have it down, I turn off the metronome so that I can concentrate exclusively on my tone. For me this works even if my timing can be not so good, as has often been pointed out to me. Still, if the tone isn’t there, what is there?
4) Practice the exercises slower than you can actually play them. You aren't going to impress your teacher by how fast you can play – especially if you make mistakes. Its hard to slow down but its worth it, and you can only play fast by playing accurately at a slow tempo.
5) Practice your exercises in chunks. You will know after you play them for a few times which are the difficult passages for you, so concentrate on them first, since you won't play the whole exercise well if you are flailing after that tricky key combination. I circle the difficult passges on the music so I can go right to them.
6) Volume does not equal tone. Let me say that again: volume does not equal tone. I think you get the idea.
7) Get close, to the music that you are playing and/or to the mirror that you play in front of. This is the best way to check your fingering or get yourself concentrated on the music in front of you. With scales, arpeggios and thirds, which I think are the basis of everything else you will play, memorize the material so you can look at your hands and get the most efficient motion that you can.
8) Memorize With the major and minor scales, arpeggios and thirds, which I think are the basis of everything else you will play, memorize the material so you can look at your hands and get the most efficient motion that you can.
9) Do what you can with the time you have.Better to not get through everything in your practice routine than to play sloppy and with bad tone.
10)Push When you start to get out of breath, push harder from your stomach rather than clench down on the mouthpiece, which will kill off your tone.

Here are some exercises from the Vade Mecum a text designed for the clarinet player that may have a limited amount of practice time and still wants to get a complete workout for the hands.
Supposedly you can do the entire 21 pages in half an hour. If you can do that, you probably don't even need then, you are already an amazing player. This would be an excellent book to add to your collection.
I am including a couple of these exercises here, which Kirt tells me are the essence of the practice. First lets take a look at page 5:
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Note that I have been very tense with my hands when doing these. I have difficulty with the rocking motion the whole left hand must perform so that you need to do these movements. Things to remember: don't slide on the register key, the thumb should just barley cover the lower right part of the key when you are going from F to the octave. The thumb should be at a 45 degree angle to the key, and the thumb rocks on and off the key as needed. You won't fuzz the notes on the register key hole by keeping the thumb close. Kirt has his thumb pretty much touching the register key all the time, even when he is not pinching the key open, and as he says its pretty much a pinch movement.
Look carefully at your hands in the mirror. In my case, my index finger seems to want to fly off the mark constantly like I was flipping someone off. Very difficult for me to overcome. The trick is to relax the hand and at the same time keep the hand close in to the body of the horn. I always try and get good finger position first, before I play. What I mean by this is to put all the fingers down as if I was playing a low E and then just fractionally lifting off the keys, keeping the anchor points (left hand resting on the A and Ab keys, right hand resting on the side keys, in both cases not opening the keys but keeping in contact with them). This position is what Kirt says is the open G position - think about it and it will make a lot of sense to you.
In all cases the first finger of the left hand remains curved, pointed towards the F# key, never straight. In fact you play the A with the knuckle, which makes for only a tiny movement, and your first finger wastes no motion at all. A good exercise for this is E - A - Ab.
Remember that what Kirt is showing me is going directly to the technical difficulties of the horn - get the hard stuff out of the way first.

Tounging: here is the first and simplest exercise:
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This can sure make your tongue hurt if you do it long enough. Now, if that hasn't killed you off,go to page 14 of the Vade Mecum:Download file
Its important to remember that these are staccato notes, and you should be concentrating on opening and closing the tongue as the only movement your make in your mouth, and a very small movement at that. I find that this exercise is actually easier to play faster rather then slower. I also find that squeak like crazy on this exercise for some reason, which is course means I am not covering the holes correctly. I mean to say, I know this is the simple and straightforward reason, but its still very difficult for me.
So - a solid tone, move the fingers and stop the reed with the tongue. You never stop blowing through the entire exercise. On top of all this, the tone has to be pure, not fuzzy. Have fun with this one kids.

Clarinet face: Kirt has talked about this before, but the idea is that you get your embrosure all set before you put the horn to your mouth. This means, jaw moved back like a drawer pushed all the way in, corners of the mouth back,lower lip stretched, not like a drum head but enough to make a flat plane across the lower teeth, upper lip down and just covering the teeth. If you do this right, and have the face already made, then you can put the horn in your mouth without moving anything, and just play. This means that you aren't trying to grasp and hold onto the mouthpiece, and thereby biting down on the reed, but rather the mouthpiece is just placed there in the mouth. This minimal contact ensures that you are really using the mouth cavity to shape the sound, and not wrapping the lips around the mouthpiece, as you would with a saxophone. If you do this right, make the face and then put in the clarinet and just blow, you will already be in the ideal position to play before you touch the horn, with no adjustments.
I have had some success with this when I put the horn in the mouth, get set to play and then take out the horn without moving. This is backwards but it gets me ready to play, and it is one more thing I am working on. Very difficult for me indeed. I was told that while this is not has difficult as the gliss, Kirt wanted to emphasize that this is absolutely critical for me to be able to perfect my overall technique.

One last thing, I will pass on 141 practical technical exercises from the classic Klose. You will see this is aimed at the Boehm system, so for those of you playing Alberts, this should even be more fun. These are self explanatory I think, so go for it:
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Keep it real - keep playing!

Vocalizing - this exercise is simply designed to get awareness of the glottis - its almost like chocking. Start out with a good tone, like a good c scale. Its not embrosure, its all down in the throat. You activate your vocal chords, and keep steady air while you do this. Its gonna hurt, makes the throat dry. Again, bottom of the neck, and try to hold a tone when you do this. You are basically speaking thru the horn.

Start with a 100% good tone on a high C - don't do this exercise any other way.. Now, take the back part of the tongue raise it to the roof of the mouth, not the glottis, but the back back part (maybe the back third) of the tongue. Move it up to the point of choking off the tone entirely. Remember to start with a regular tone, and then lift the back of the tongue. This is not the same at all as what I have been trying to do, which was dealing with the front two thirds of my tongue - this is why I could never gliss all the way down a sixth.

Exercise: do a normal tone, then raise your tongue to close it, then normal, closed, normal, closed, feeling the tone coming through this valve we are creating with the raising of the tongue. Again, the back third of the tongue is where the tone is focused, a physical sensation of creating the tone.

Now, play the C again, close it up and now hold it just barely opened from closed off - takes a lot of air pressure. Remember, this is still within the mouth, not down into the neck. Now try the gliss exercise without the clarinet. You should feel the sensation up in the back area of the mouth, not low on the tongue. You will also be aware of the glottis, but of course its still lower than the back of the mouth.

The idea behind this is that you can produce the pure tones using this area of the back of the mouth, and also it will make it so that you can ride the gliss to go between notes. Again, we are not using the front part of the tongue, it's the rear section that you are concentrating on. Kirt can do the sixth gliss without playing at high volume, so its not strength but awareness. Also for the gliss exercise use a kuh sound instead of a tah sound, unlike the rest of the time when you play. Its also a good idea to do make an embrosure, then do the gliss without the clarinet in the mouth. Do this for two or three minutes, close the eyes and really concentrate on what you are doing. Assuming you can do the gliss, you can also make it chromatic too, how much more control could you have? It occurs to me that if you are doing this all in the back of the mouth, then you could have even finer control, quarter tones and anything in between.

You know you have this correct when you are aware not only that you are not moving the front of your tongue, or changing your embrosure, but also it feels like the path of air is like a super highway or a tunnel of high velocity air. Note that this should end up being totally controllable, so that you can do the gliss at any volume. I have a ways to go on this!

I will say it again, the reason for the gliss is to enable the precise control of notes, so that the air does what you want it to, to not only get great tone but exact, fluid transitions between the notes.
You can do the gliss starting on the open G, but not any lower on the instrument, its just not possible.

March 31st - I DID IT! The first gliss!

April 2nd

Next step: Okay, let's work to get more control of it. Gliss a downward C scale in half notes to F, the back up to C. Nail the pitch as best you can. Try going to E a few times if possible. E is about the lowest note we can get, but it is not very stable and a real challenge. Again, if you don't start with a 100% quality C, you are missing the point. Also, do this slowly and make the pitches as clear as you can: the bliss of the gliss
Note: this is actually a bit faster than it should be, I figure set the metronome for 84 as about the right speed.

Next step:Okay, let's work to get more control of it. Gliss a downward C scale in half notes to F, the back up to C. Nail the pitch as best you can. Try going to E a few times if possible. E is about the lowest note we can get, but it is not very stable and a real challenge.

Once you have this set, the next challenge is to be able to do this gliss using a double embrosure where both teeth are covered by the lips. This I found was harder to do and for me at least it had something to do with how I was actually holding the horn. Sometimes I like to cross one of my legs and rest the bell near my ankle. This removes all the weight of the horn from my hand completely. After finally getting the single embrosure down, it was quite frustrating with the double until I change my seating position in this fashion. Then I was able to make the gliss work with the double lip.
Its been a week now and I am getting better with it all the time, and will get to the point where even the double lop should be no trouble. As Kirt said many times, once you can grasp the concept and do the gliss, its really pretty easy.
About a year ago during one of my first lessons, Kirt told me to try and make the normal Bb - the one where you use the bottom key and the top key - sound the same as the side Bb key. You are purifying the normal Bb to sound like the side Bb. This is basically moves the awareness to the back of the throat, akin to using the gliss - the tone is not produced at the embrosure, not in the formation of the tongue - its all in the upper back section of the mouth. Kirt's idea is that "you play the whole clarinet like that improved (matched tone) Bb, with enough embrosure pressure to bring the high C into tune, and subtle gradations on every note from G on up with the gliss - and that's it, that's all you do".
So there it is - the basic and key concept - or the secret, the opening of the treasure chest -for Kirt's concept of playing the clarinet. See, what took me a year to do, you got in just reading a few of these scribbles - and you can't beat the price.

OK, so that isn't all there is: another concept Kirt threw at me: have as little of the mouthpiece in your mouth as possible. To do this, first of course you have to have the right embrosure: have the lower lip stretched just tight enough against the teeth, just flat, you don't have to kill yourself. The chin should be flat and relaxed, and the corners of the mouth should be pulled back, and only need to be closed enough to stop air leakage around the mouthpiece. You can, when practicing this, even leak a little air around the corners. Its kind of like smiling with your mouth pretty closed.
Remember, try to keep the corners of your mouth back - keep the reed away from, and not surrounded by the lips. You could almost say that the horn is just barely dangling on the tip of the mouthpiece.

This is totally different than what I do on the saxophone, which is to simply wrap your lips loosely around the mouthpiece, surround it, and blow. Also, you move the jaw forward and back on the sax, that is correct technique for the instrument. That is one of the many reasons the clarinet is so much more difficult. As Kirt said once to me, you can teach yourself to play sax, but not the clarinet.
Rings true in my case, for sure!

That is it for now, see you next time

The kilt wearing tuba player was there at the bar too. I told him I was looking forward to hearing Jelim Jelim, and he went off on a little tirade about having to play that old tirled song. He said he had played a million bar mitzvahs and wedddings, and being asked to play Jelim Jelim was like being asked to play Hava Naglia - nobody ever asks for an over played song like that.
Wow, I felt dumb there, I had only recently even become familar with this song, from a SSP record no less, but now I realize it must be one of the standards of standards. Still a great song I think.
After the break, just the singer and the accordionist came on stage and yes, we were treated to Jelim, Jeilim, and the crowed loved it.

Even better, as the song ended, the rest of the band had formed up behind the audience at the far end of the hall and started to play a song. They stared to march around and play in a circle within the crowd, and at long last I could hear everything clearly. Why does sound have to suck so bad in clubs? On stage, even though the accordion was amplified wirelessly, I couldn't really hear him above the band. Away from the stage, he was quite loud and clear. Bad, bad sound mixer dude!
Of course, the other thing that was hard to hear on stage was, you guessed it, the clarinet. He didn't have a pickup on the horn, but was forced to try and get some volume from maybe two mics at once. It didn't work all that well unforuntately. He probably needs to buy a PT100 pickup, eh?

These quibbles aside, this was a great night, The band just kept playing and playing, since as they said they had come a long way. Everyone in this band was really top rate: I could not imagine seeing better musicians than this, and I was struck many times on how the trombones were in large part the center of the band, the glue that held it all together.
They want back out in the crowd a few times, and again that was the best for me; if I can't be in the band, having them right in front of me, and sometimes in back of me at the same time, thats the best.
Live music - no substitue!

So I am well aware that you may play out all the time, jam all the time and its just normal for you, but for me this was a great night. I felt for the first time in ages that I was again a member of the tribe of musicians, that I belonged there. I am still parsecs away from where I want to be as a clarinet player, but at least now I feel that I am not quite so out in the cold.