The Oboe BBoard

The Oboe BBoard The C4 standard

New Topic | Go to Top | Go to Topic | Search | Help/Rules | Smileys/Notes | Log In

Re: Gekeler, continued

Author: Dutchy
Date: 2007-07-05 02:57

I'm still in Gekeler 1 myself. I started on it last spring after I'd finally worked my way through all three Hal Leonard Essential Elements books, and realized that they didn't really include "exercises"--those two and three-bar bits where you play, say, Ab to Bb over and over again, or slurring F# to A.

I play the piano, and I'm well aware that when you're learning to play an instrument, there's inevitable a certain amount of scutwork involved, where you just have to play exercises over and over again, which is how I knew it was missing in the Essential Elements books.

The Essential Elements books are all "about" getting the kid up to speed so he can "play in band" along with the other kids, not "about" intensive technical proficiency of the kind that a private teacher would provide, above and beyond the basic mastery of the instrument, so they give you lots of little folk tunes, but very little by way of hard-nose technical exercises (I suppose because they're considered "boring", I can hear the Suits now, "Kids don't wanna play those old-fashioned things, kids wanna play rock music..."), other than a few token scales and arpeggios in the most common keys.

So I felt ("Uh-oh... [sense of foreboding]") like I'd probably missed something, and since in my first frenzy of oboe enthusiasm two years ago I'd outfitted myself with a complete set, not only of Gekeler, but also of Rubank and Edlefson, plus a host of others, from the Online Auction Site Who Must Not Be Named, it was a simple matter of rummaging through the (very large) pile and pulling out Rubank, Gekeler, and Edlefson, since I found this web page recommending them.

So I'm working my way through all three of them simultaneously, and already I've learned things that Hal Leonard didn't think to tell me. Did you know you can rock your right pinky on the low C# to C, instead of trying to slide it, which never works for me? Or that it doesn't really matter whether you hold down both octave keys or not when playing the second octave?

I was also emboldened by my forays into technical proficiency, learning things besides "Oh Danny Boy", to get out the Fox fingering chart and learn to play notes higher than D, with the result that now I can actually get up to F, and am quite insufferable about it. [grin]