Author: vboboe
Date: 2007-08-01 02:27
... avoid sounding like a duck?
it's not the swell and fade technique itself (excellent technical exercise, sweat it a bit for 3 months), it's how trim your embouchure is able to manage the reed's sweet spot, and how you focus your air through the reed, that's what 'tones up' your notes
blow your reed (out of oboe) in different places, and listen to the varieties of tone quality, the place where it sounds the nicest, and what happens at pp to ff on that spot, on that reed, that's where your embouchure has to stay in control, and the place where it sounds the duckiest -- don't go there, no-no! (easier said than done)
when you blow your air 'broadly' into any reed, you're going to get a coarser sound (and very appropriate in 'primitive' style of music too) but if you want a finer and more elegant 'royale' sound, the goal is to focus and concentrate your airstream like a laser beam, it's up to you to figure out exactly how to 'whistle', and it's up to your chops how long you can go on doing that (again, easier said than done)
... best technique to end a note with nice tone?
So sorry, there's just isn't any one best technique, rather there are several techniques that all need to be learned well. Standard is tongue on/off, then there's lip on/off and air/off, each has appropriate & inappropriate uses, and alas, each has technical pitfalls to overcome, nothing's easy, eh?
Your teacher's got you doing some lip off now, so work at it, experiment with long tones doing tongue on/off and lip on/off methods, and figure pros & cons, make it a game with yourself, OK?
For instance, when you lip off, you're closing up the reed aperture, what must you do with reed in mouth to open it again? And if you lip on/off too frequently as the reed gets wetter with play ... ?
And then there's standard tonguing, please do tongue lightly, don't flog the poor little reed to fiber mash, Everybody tongues a lot harder than they should on oboe reeds, results in lots of extra unwanted noises and ugly sounds at speed. Do it delicately, no matter how animato, staccato or marcato the piece may be. Experiment with 'lu' and 'du' tonguing as well as the standard 'tu'. Unfortunately classical training tends to favour 'tu' so there's that extra crisp cackly sound happening in faster runs ...
Think of tonguing the reed as if you're trying to blow a hair off tongue, and do it that way all the time
... as in -- legato (easy), cantabile (easy), mp (easy)
staccato (... uh?), forte (Huh ...?!), sffz (wot!!?),
marcato, or accented with those little hats (beep-beep!)...
Well those are some suggestions to get rid of the duck, another requires a sharp knife, a plunge in hot water, a toasty oven and some unsweetened granny smith applesauce condiment -- oh, and a tot of reed mash vodka
on the rocks
{:-}
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