 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: SecondTry
Date: 2023-05-17 02:00
My title: 3 seemingly independent things.
When I was in 1st grade, literally more than 50 years ago, I had an oral frenectomy to remove a gap between my front teeth.
I'm not sure if, after all this time, this is even the cause of an irritation I'm about to describe, but recently, when playing double lip: which I'm trying to transition to, the inside of my top center lip would sort of get lodged between my two front teeth.
It's a lodging I "clear" once removing the mouthpiece from my mouth.
...."great, another pain hurdle," I thought to myself, having finally callused up enough of my inner top lip with double lip play to handle its rigors, while also building face muscle strength developing muscles less than taxed in decades of single lip play.
My desire to learn double lip is because I feel that my play is slightly more resonant when approaching the mouthpiece this way.
Resourceful as we clarinet players are, I reached from some floral tape to address the pain. It's this wax coated stuff, if you're not familiar, that florists use to bind flower stems, which works well in aqueous situations (read: the mouth.) Sometimes players transitioning to double lip put in on their top two front teeth as a guard.
Anyway, as I put an about 1/2" wide rolled up strip of it inside my mouth, say with a diameter of about 1/8", in front of my top front teeth, while playing single lip for a while, I could not help but think that my resonance improved.
As I understand it, double lip play helps expand the upper oral cavity as the upper lip does greater "reaching" around the top front two teeth, and that this aids in the enhanced sound quality of this embouchure over the single lip variety.
I am theorizing that with this floral tape obstacle, that my upper lip had to extend just a tad bit more to reach the mouthpiece, like a person lying over a barrel.
Have I found, in addition to sideways embouchure pressure, the holy grail to double lip sound with a single lip embouchure? I suspect not, but I was wondering if anyone else would like to try this and report their findings.
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Author: kdk
Date: 2023-05-17 03:22
SecondTry wrote:
> I am theorizing that with this floral tape obstacle, that my
> upper lip had to extend just a tad bit more to reach the
> mouthpiece, like a person lying over a barrel.
>
> Have I found, in addition to sideways embouchure pressure, the
> holy grail to double lip sound with a single lip embouchure? I
> suspect not, but I was wondering if anyone else would like to
> try this and report their findings.
Gigliotti, and I think Bonade, described their approaches to single lip as pulling the top lip back against the teeth, which simulates the position of the upper lip and soft palate in a double lip embouchure. The goal was (is) to get the advantages of double lip without the discomfort of having the lip under the upper teeth.
When Gigliotti recommended double lip to me as a grad student, it was to solve a biting problem I had developed, and he meant for me to learn the feeling of double lip and then replicate the same embouchure position with single lip (as he did). But I found - still find - that sooner or later I revert to biting when I go back to single lip, so I've learned to prefer double for general use.
So, yes what you're doing may very well have the effect you describe. If it works...
Karl
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