Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2011-07-19 17:27
I know you said you're only looking for advice on strengthening your embouchure, so I'm probably a little out of line with this post. It seems to me your P.S. is more to the point.
You've made an unspecified "change in embouchure." It isn't likely that a change would "destroy" any strength you've built up in the muscles around your mouth. At worst, you'd be using the muscles in a way they're not used to and need to apply the strength in a different way. You've left it completely open whether or not this change was productive or, if it was, what its impact might have been, so suggesting ways to re-educate the muscles to work in the new way are hard to make. Long tones, whether in scales or single sustained notes, are useful, but given your implication that you had a feeling of greater strength before the change, may not be enough.
Someone else is apparently making choices for you about instrument and mouthpiece. Who is it? Is it the same person who suggested the embouchure change? Is this a teacher you're studying with? If so, the teacher should be the one to guide you through the process, including retraining your embouchure. If the teacher is a generalist who you suspect doesn't know enough about the clarinet to be helpful, you should really find a teacher, even for the short term, whose expertise is the clarinet who can help you work things out. It may be that the change itself was unproductive and some other approach would be more appropriate.
There's nothing generically wrong, btw, with an M13 mouthpiece or an R13 clarinet, both of which are from the sound of your post vast improvements over what you were using. V12 #4 is a good strength for an M13, but other players I know use #3-1/2 and produce a good sound. I'm not sure whether you mean that your current embouchure won't produce or control an acceptable sound with a #4 or that your endurance with a #4 is too short to get through normal practice sessions and rehearsals.
If you describe your situation in a little more detail, it might be possible from cyberspace to offer some more specific help, but the best help (as always) would be a teacher listening to you in person who knows both how the play the instrument and how to diagnose problems that he/she hears in someone else's playing.
I know I've gone more than a little beyond what you asked, but often trying to solve one small part of a much larger set of problems ends up being a waste of energy, especially if the small part isn't the most significant one.
Karl
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