 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Tiffany
Date: 1999-12-01 22:33
Hi all, I am new to the board and help you can help me with a problem. I have recently returned to playing the clarinet after about a ten year break. I am studying with a terrific teacher who changed my emboucher. I was not taught about the flat chin all those years ago. I have been working faithfully at this for several months now and am able to play with the correct emboucher, but dispite all the wonderful exercises suggested by my instructor, I can only play with a good emboucher until the first time I take a breath. After that the old chin starts to bunch up and I can't seem to get it back where it belongs. I would appreciated any suggestion! Thanks!
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Author: Mark Charette
Date: 1999-12-01 23:04
Tiffany - it takes a while :^) I've been working on keeping that chin flat for the last couple of years; it still creeps around sometimes.
A large mirror in your practice room can help.
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Author: diane k.
Date: 1999-12-01 23:38
If I understand you correctly, you're having a hard time actually using the new embouchure while you are playing "normally" (meaning playing regular music that is not specifically meant to make you play with your new embouchure). I'm not sure I have any great wisdom for you if that is the case, but:
1) This is the hardest part of any "new" thing - making it so it isn't "new" anymore- and it can take a lot of time. As an example: my weak point was always tongueing (I had learned to tongue wrong). Once I set out to "fix" this, it took about a year and a half before I felt that I had fully dealt with the problem.
2) Several months after I started working on this, I realized that I could reliably tongue the way I wanted to during the exercises I had devised/found to practice tongueing; but I still reverted to the bad tonguing technique during normal playing. What I did then (and still do) was to take phrases out of my "normal" music and do what I did in the tongueing exercises - took it very slowly and thought ONLY about the position my tongue was in, how was it contacting the reed during tongueing, and the sound I was making (I found this to be the most reliable way of checking if my tongueing was right - as soon as my tongue went wrong, the sound during tongued passages fell apart). During that part of my practice sessions, I didn't worry about anything else (dynamics, right notes (well, mostly), etc...). I come back to that piece of music during the rest of my session to work on those (during this part of my practice session, I periodically check on how my tongue was contacting the reed and adjust it from there, but it wasn't the sole focus of attention it had been).
3. Most important: Don't get discouraged! Yes, it can take a long time to make major changes like this,but the outcome is worth it.
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Author: Ken Shaw
Date: 1999-12-01 23:57
Tiffany wrote:
-------------------------------
Hi all, I am new to the board and help you can help me with a problem. I have recently returned to playing the clarinet after about a ten year break. I am studying with a terrific teacher who changed my emboucher. I was not taught about the flat chin all those years ago. I have been working faithfully at this for several months now and am able to play with the correct emboucher, but dispite all the wonderful exercises suggested by my instructor, I can only play with a good emboucher until the first time I take a breath. After that the old chin starts to bunch up and I can't seem to get it back where it belongs. I would appreciated any suggestion! Thanks!
Tiffany -
Welcome home! It all comes back much quicker than you expect. Unfortunately, your old embouchure comes back, too. However, a week or two of working on it should be enough to change the old habit.
As soon as you can, get a copy of Keith Stein's book The Art of Clarinet Playing. This has excellent exercises and photos showing the proper embouchure, as well as a treasure trove of other good things.
To avoid bunching up your chin, think of pointing the tip of it downward, as if you had the devil's little pointed beard. Feel the skin stretching between your lip and the point of your chin. It helps to do this in front of a mirror.
If you bunch up your chin, you are probably putting too much of your lower lip over your teeth. Only about half of the red part of the lip should be over your teeth, or else the reed doesn't vibrate freely and the tone is muffled. You can solve both problems at once by pointing your chin down so that the downward movement pulls the excess lip out from over your teeth.
It may help to do the exercises using only the mouthpiece and barrel, again in front of a mirror. That way you can hold the barrel in one hand and press in and down with your other thumb in the hollow between your lip and the point of your chin to get everything taut and (as Keith Stein says) "dressy."
Despite the mirror, concentrate on how it feels as much as how it looks. You want to train your "muscle memory" to do it right without thought.
Once you get the right position, play on the mouthpiece and barrel (but not too loud), slow quarter notes and rests (note, rest, note, rest) at about one beat per second. Do several without breathing, watching in the mirror to be sure things don't collapse. Then, play four beats (two notes and two rests), taking a smallish breath during the second rest, but not letting loose of your embouchure. When that feels comfortable, put the mouthpiece and barrel back on the instrument and do the same thing on low C (all left hand fingers down). That way, you can put the bell between your knees and work as before with your right thumb.
Keep at it. We've all been through this, and after a while it becomes automatic.
Best regards.
Ken Shaw
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Author: HIROSHI
Date: 1999-12-02 00:24
Ken's suggestion is very good I think. This is my way:
1.For me, it is a piece of a cake. No training necessary. My upper teeth row is a little bit in front of my lower teeth row. I just let my lower teeth row just in line with upper.
2.Every wind instruments embouchure has a same principle.
Tighten the lip corners and let freer the center of the lips and make easier tonguing and adjusting pressure. Understanding this principle made it easy for me to play flute,clarinet, and saxophone.
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Author: Tiffany
Date: 1999-12-02 05:06
Thank you for the advice and the encouragement. I'll let you know how it's going. Tiffany
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Author: paul
Date: 1999-12-02 17:38
Okay, here's another tech way of doing an embouchure drill. The mirror trick is one of the best, but I've found some of the most interesting "practice" times to help with counting, embouchure, tounging, etc. The trick is to take advantage of every spare moment in your day.
A lot of these tricks came from ideas given to me by a pro who noticed some apparently odd behaviors that principle chair artists had throughout the day. That's how they got their well earned seat.
Example: A large city orchestra's lead violinist had to do all kinds of mundane things everyday like everyone else. Whenever he had a spare moment, he had a piece of a beat up broom stick in his hands, practicing fingerings and runs. For auditions, he would quote back exactly the page and measures from well known and unknown pieces that the conductor wanted to hear, then he would play it from memory. He knew the music that well.
So, with this story in mind, I've discovered a few tricks of my own.
Counting: Use a loud clicking clock and go to sleep with that tricky run in your head. Okay, so 60 beats per minute is slow. Great. Use it as the basis to slowly analyze the piece. Speeding up the next day or so isn't that big a leap anymore.
Embouchure: How many times do you use a drinking straw for consuming a soda pop or water, etc.? Think about it. If its several times a week, use the drinking straw as the basis for an embouchure. It isn't totally accurate, but you'd be surprised at how well you can make a good embouchure around the straw and practice with it.
Tounging: How many times in the day can you get away with saying nothing, but stay with the conversation? A bunch. Don't completely drift away, but you can occasionally split your attention for a minute or two at all times of the day to get the tonguing drills down.
Listening: Even the ads on network television are a study in music. Take the time to ignore the ad's main message and listen for the instrmental music in the background. Lots of pros make a very good living doing studio music. It's a hard living and you have to be able to sight read the tough stuff and then get it right the first time. For novices like me, it's a study in tone, technique, style, etc. Ditto for listening to classical radio as I'm stuck in my twice daily traffic jam. The clarinet pieces recently played were absolutely exquisite. They were so good, I purposefully took a longer route to hear the entire piece.
I'm sure there are many more tricks like this. I wonder what our resident BBS pros do in their "spare time"?
The point here is that practice time consists of two things. Mental and mechanical drills. I bet that most of the time, the mental skills are harder to acquire than the mechanical ones. So, use all of the opportunities you can in the day to practice, practice, practice. Then, when you have time on the horn, you can sharpen your mechanical skills along with your mental ones.
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Author: Kevin Bowman
Date: 1999-12-02 19:47
Paul,
The drinking straw analogy is a good one. I discovered this by accident one day while attempting to suck an extremely thick malt shake through a straw. Now it's one of the things I ask my clarinet students to think about when teaching the embouchure. Another technique is to blow a thin stream of air (as thin as possible) into the palm of your hand (hold hand about 4 inches in front of face). Almost everyone will begin to form a correct embouchure to accomplish this task!
Excellent "off line" ideas for practicing.
Kevin Bowman
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Author: paul
Date: 1999-12-02 20:55
Okay, I'll add to Kevin's posting from my pro tutor's bag of tricks...
The air stream trick can be accomplished very well by forming a pretty close embouchure, blowing a thin line of air onto your hand at about 4 inches away and saying the word "two" pronounced more like "teeooo".
Any other hints like this?
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Author: Tobin Coleman
Date: 1999-12-03 01:24
I recently learned this trick while reading this BB. When the clock on my computer says I've been on line for more than 15 minutes, I shut down and go pick up my clarinet. I've gained an hour a day in practice time!
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Author: William
Date: 1999-12-03 15:59
Tiffany: Welcome back!!! You may be biting too much as well so...., experiment with play double-lip embrochre for a while at the start of each practice. It will help the "biting" problem and may force your lower chin to stay where it belongs. Perhaps, also, you are using too stiff a reed in the first place. This is a problem with many clarinetists, amature and "pro" alike.
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Author: LV
Date: 1999-12-04 20:21
How about whistling? Ask your student or yourself where the facial muscles go when whistling. Notice what happens to the lips, the upper lip muscles, the corners, the chin and the tongue.
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