Author: jhoyla
Date: 2007-11-30 08:19
IF Chris's description is the problem your pupil is experiencing, a few words of caution.
Firstly, this can become enormously painful if allowed to continue, to the point where your pupil may have to stop playing oboe for several months in order to recover (I suffered from this when I was about 14-15 yrs of age). The back of the soft palate becomes dry, inflamed and more "leaky", and the leaking air just irritates it further.
The problem in my case stemmed from breathing in through my nose almost to the exclusion of breathing through my mouth. There were several reasons I did this (in retrospect):
1. Getting my lips into a good position on the reed was non-trivial for me at that age.
2. I was using European scrape reeds and you just cannot get a grip on the shiny bark with your lips, if it is at all wet. If you have full lips there will ALWAYS be some lip on the bark. Opening your mouth to breathe will get the reed wet, and then you won't be able to "grip" the reed and hold your embouchure for more than a few seconds.
3. Like your pupil I was "into" hard reeds, high pressure, and lip-control.
I eventually got over this problem by doing the following:
1. Breathing exclusively through my mouth, with my soft-palate closed. This forced me to become adept at finding a good embouchure at a moments' notice.
2. Moving to softer, easier reeds that required delicate control, not strength, in my lips. Unsurprisingly, my tone production improved as well!
3. Learning to play (and later, to make) American-style "long scrape" reeds, that were much easier for me to grip with my lips [I expect that German-style mid-length scrapes will work also].
Note that "1" does NOT mean he/she will never be able to circular-breathe. Once the problem is over and when he/she has grown a bit, it will be possible to breathe through the nose occasionally - but this should be the exception, not the rule.
Hope this helps,
J.
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