 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Agomongo
Date: 2016-02-08 04:51
So I know that we're suppose to have a high E and raise the tongue etc. etc.
I remember getting a lesson from a teacher and he said, "Get your mouthpiece and barrel. If your tongue position is correct you'll get a concert F# that's slightly flat on the piano, but make sure your embouchure is correct and you're blowing consistent fast air." I then looked at the Midwest clinic paper and they said that the F# should be in tune.
I also got a test to play middle C to upper G then lower altissimo E, but using the side G#/Ab key.
These two tests gave me, and told me to do, completely different things. The barrel and mouthpiece test put my tongue lower than the C to G then E test. And the C-G-E test gave me better intonation.
When I did the B+MP tongue position I played the lower altissimo notes and they were EXTREMELY flat. I feel like the B+MP thing isn't correct. If anything I would've said, "The barrel and mouthpiece should give you a concert F# around 20-30 cents sharp." Because when I do it with just the B+MP (which gives me the same tongue positioning as the C-G-E test):
1. stick my tongue out as far as possible (so that the way back of the tongue touches my molars and NOT the part of the tongue 3/4's back)
2. my whole tongue is raised (not just the back of the tongue)
3. the tip of the tongue is as close as possible to the tip of the reed
Now of course everyone holds the clarinet angle in different in angles, but I feel like this would be a better general guideline. Does anyone else find that the B+MP trick doesn't work? How do you teach clarinet tongue position?
Post Edited (2016-02-08 05:02)
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Author: bmcgar ★2017
Date: 2016-02-08 05:03
Heresy coming:
I don't teach tongue position. Moving the tongue around primarily influences embouchure formation. I teach embouchure and blowing, which include instrument positioning. I never speak of tongue position other than when teaching articulation. I don't buy it that tongue position influences air in some magical way.
Let the flames begin.
B.
Post Edited (2016-02-08 05:08)
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2016-02-08 05:06
>> How do you teach clarinet tongue position?>>
How do you teach children to say vowels?...then how do you teach them to produce syllables?...then how do you teach them to combine the syllables into words?
And then how do you teach them to speak?
Some of the above is true.
Tony
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Author: Agomongo
Date: 2016-02-08 05:07
bmcgar wrote:
> Heresy coming:
>
> I don't teach tongue position. Moving the tongue around
> primarily influences embouchure formation. I teach embouchure,
> which includes instrument positioning. I never speak of tongue
> position other than when teaching articulation.
>
> Let the flames begin.
>
> B.
My teachers never talked about positioning either. It wasn't until I met Hawkins. Well to be honest when he did teach my tongue position intonation got better and so did sound. Probably works for you, but not for me. Weird...
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Author: bmcgar ★2017
Date: 2016-02-08 05:12
To clarify, in essence, move your tongue and your embouchure changes. The embouchure is the key, not the tongue.
B.
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Author: Agomongo
Date: 2016-02-08 05:20
bmcgar wrote:
> To clarify, in essence, move your tongue and your embouchure
> changes. The embouchure is the key, not the tongue.
>
> B.
I see well if that works for you go for it, however for me it doesn't work for all. I've been taught for 3 years just embouchure. It wasn't until someone taught me tongue positioning everything started to move forward.
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Author: locke9342
Date: 2016-02-08 05:28
"To clarify, in essence, move your tongue and your embouchure changes. The embouchure is the key, not the tongue."
That's exactly what I've been discovering as my teachers have told me about tongue position. But that's just my findings as a student learning.
Also the way my band director (who's not a clarinet player) described it was that it changed the air speed
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Author: sfalexi
Date: 2016-02-08 07:48
I believe you want the air to go as straight as possible into the horn. So I envision whatever tongue position allows the air to come up my throat, over the tongue, and enter smoothly into the mouthpiece. So my clarinet sticks out a little more to be "in line" with my preferred, and stable, tongue position.
For me, it's pretty high in the back. I can feel the sides of my molars with the sides of my tongue, and tip lined up with the Reed.
Alexi
US Army Japan Band
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Author: kdk
Date: 2016-02-08 08:15
bmcgar wrote:
> To clarify, in essence, move your tongue and your embouchure
> changes. The embouchure is the key, not the tongue.
>
Two things:
First, I have to disagree that embouchure and tongue position are so mutually dependent. Embouchure is essentially the position of your lips with respect to the mouthpiece. The tongue certainly moves independent of the embouchure when used for articulation. Why should changing the vowel the tongue forms inside the mouth necessarily cause the embouchure to change?
Related to this, I can say from first-hand experience as a voice student back in my college days, that one important exercise was to change the vowel while sustaining a tone without moving the mouth. One very characteristic difference between French (and German) and English pronunciation is the sound created when you form an o-o-o with your lips and an e-e-e with your tongue, which forms one variety of French 'u' and the umlauted 'u' in German (open the lips a little and you get 'o' with an umlaut). We simply don't have that sound in American English (though I've noticed it occasionally in some British accents).
Second, most of the time we don't really know what our tongues or throats or uvulas or epiglottises are doing. Most of the time we produce vocal sounds - speech - by imitating at a very young age what we hear others around us producing without anyone's explaining that you have to raise the back of your tongue for this or the middle for that or curl the tip up for something. As with many other elements of technique, we sometimes make up explanations in order to explain why we do things that, in reality, we have simply learned to do by imitation through aural trial and error. So "teaching tongue position" may be a little oxymoronic since most of us don't really know what we're actually doing physically. You can try to describe the vowel you *think* you're producing with your arrangement of things in the air stream, but to try to go much (if at all) beyond that seems almost pointless.
Karl
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Author: gwie
Date: 2016-02-08 09:15
I do talk to my students about the position of their tongue, but only if it is contributing to some issue in their tone production.
Usually, it's because someone has told them to "open their throat" and say "awhwhwhwhwhw" and their tongue is practically bottoming out, and their tone is spread and fuzzy. Bringing it up to a more moderate position helps alot!
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2016-02-08 09:23
I agree with sfalexi. I keep the tongue pretty close to the roof of my mouth, and the sides feel like they curl slightly up to touch the sides of the molars.
My tongue is relatively large, so I arch it not only in the back but also somewhat forward. This makes room for the mouthpiece in my mouth, and also adds a gentle tension to the tongue, which seems to help my sound.
Also, the tip of the tongue stays close to the reed, like about as close as I can get without hindering its vibration. This seems necessary for fast articulation, plus I like the feel of my whole tongue "aiming" or "channeling" the air almost directly into the tip opening. Like the instrument extends into me.
Just my observation, but the tongue seems to be a key element in the quality of sound.
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2016-02-08 14:51
The pitch thing is relative to what type of mouthpiece you have and how long your barrel is. If you play a Hawkins mouthpiece, your pitch (in this way, just barrel and mouthpiece) will be demonstrably higher. If you play a Yamaha CSG with the correspondingly short (55ish mm barrel), you will play a lot higher.
So that sort of thinking comes from an era when things where somewhat more homogenous.
I too see tongue position as meaningless in relation to pitch. All tongue position does as far as I am concerned is focus air at the tip of the mouthpiece/reed system (or not).
This goes down in clarinet-lore along with "hot and cold air."
........and may they rest in peace.
...................Paul Aviles
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Author: fernie51296
Date: 2016-02-08 20:04
I've found a proper tongue positioning allows me to use faster air without straining.
Fernando
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Author: kdk
Date: 2016-02-08 22:04
fernie51296 wrote:
> I've found a proper tongue positioning allows me to use faster
> air without straining.
>
At the risk of beating an old dead horse (this has come up before, as have "warm" and "cold" air), I think this puts the matter backward. I don't think anyone really knows how fast the breath is moving at the point where it comes into contact with the reed, or more to the point, whether one tongue position speeds the air up or not. This, IMO, is another of those concepts invented to explain something we do, if not intuitively, then as a fairly unconscious response to a need we encountered early in our attempts to play.
I think players find the tongue position that produces their best result mostly by trial and error (and perhaps as a response to other players' suggestions that tongue position may be important). Whether or not a given tongue position is actually superior because it makes the air move faster is immaterial. For a given player, a given position just works.
What exactly do "fast" and "slow" air mean and how exactly are these air speeds measured directly? How much faster does air move if I hold my tongue in an "e" position than if my tongue position forms an "o"?
Karl
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2016-02-09 05:58
The actual speed is not the point. When you push a given volume of air through a system, it moves faster moving through a smaller opening than it does through a larger opening.
You could think of it in terms of marbles if it helps. Let's say you move a number of marbles from a wide mouth jar to another jar in a certain time period. Now if you had to move the same number of marbles in the same amount of time from one wine bottle to another, the marbles would have to move faster to accomplish the task since fewer marbles could move through the narrow necks of the bottles at any given moment.
Focusing your air at the tip of the mouthpiece is the point.
.................Paul Aviles
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Author: kdk
Date: 2016-02-09 06:56
Well, I understand about holding the volume constant and reducing the aperture you push a fluid (air or water) through. I also understand that Bernoulli's principle says (in part) the speed of air over the convex surface of an airplane's wing moves faster than the air under its flat surface. But whether the air speed is significantly - meaningfully - faster over a raised tongue than it is over a flattened one isn't necessarily clear to me. The eventual aperture is the same.
I think you're closer to the point when you say that focusing your air at the tip of the mouthpiece is what's important. That's still more of a mental image than an objectively provable phenomenon, but it's intuitively hard to argue that funneling the air directly into the mouthpiece aperture isn't more efficient than having quantities of the air bouncing off other surfaces and rummaging around the inside of your mouth.
To be honest, I use Bernoulli to explain to students why they're producing tubby, unfocused sounds by over-relying on stretching their "throats" open to make the sound full. But I preface it by saying, "the theory is," and not presenting it as scientific, verifiable fact. When the sound improves because they've allowed their tongues to come to a more neutral (or slightly raised) position that's more relaxed and less rigid, the explanation then becomes superfluous. The result is convincing enough.
Karl
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Author: jonok
Date: 2016-02-09 07:41
... not to mention the apparent elephant in this thread ...
-------------------
aspiring fanatic
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2016-02-09 08:37
The aperture as I see it IS created by the tongue position. Relaxed is fine. I only find things objectionable when one uses an "AHHHH" or "OOOOOO" tongue position. In either case instead of decreasing the size of the aperture through which the air travels in the mouth, you are occluding the passage of air from the throat with the back of the tongue........not good.
The other part of this that I find helpful is using the tip of the tongue to the tip of the reed for articulation. You can see that when it is off the reed the tip of the tongue being in close proximity to the tip of the reed is the final ingredient to focusing the air at "the target."
Anyway, this makes the system most efficient. If you get great results in less efficient ways that only means you don't mind working harder.
...............Paul Aviles
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Author: kdk
Date: 2016-02-09 18:56
Paul Aviles wrote:
> Anyway, this makes the system most efficient. If you get
> great results in less efficient ways that only means you don't
> mind working harder.
>
Paul, *I* probably do things the same way you do (to the extent I can accurately understand what you do). The point of the thread seemed to be the OP's final sentence, "How do you *teach* clarinet tongue position?" (my emphasis).
This wasn't, as I read it, about how any of us position our own tongues; it asked what we say about it to our students. I questioned the idea of "fast" air because I don't know that it conveys the same image to everyone who uses or hears it, and I'm not aware of a way to measure it objectively. In the process I questioned whether the actual speed of the air (could pressure be an explanation? Direction? Focus - your word? Are those all synonymous with speed?) was the physically verifiable explanation. I also gave my own answer to the actual question, saying only that I don't "teach" tongue position, the player in essence finds it for himself, perhaps with some specific individualized cues from me, using his ears as the arbiter of the result. Whatever descriptions a teacher uses (including warm/cool and slow/fast air) fall into the category of imagery and not, at least currently, verifiable science.
Teachers can say anything that seems useful to a student or nothing, if nothing need be said. I get antsy when we get all wrapped up in science and physics when what's really involved are conjecture and imagery.
Can anyone tell me how to make my tone darker?
Karl
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Author: kdk
Date: 2016-02-09 19:40
Agomongo wrote:
> 1. stick my tongue out as far as possible (so that the way back
> of the tongue touches my molars and NOT the part of the tongue
> 3/4's back)
> 2. my whole tongue is raised (not just the back of the tongue)
> 3. the tip of the tongue is as close as possible to the tip of
> the reed
>
To get all the way back to your original post...
I have the feeling that there are things implied but missing in the first couple of paragraphs that make me feel as though I've come into the middle of a longer conversation. What Midwest clinic paper do you mean? Who wrote it? Did your teacher mention that reed strength could noticeably affect the pitch of the B+MP test? The C-G-E test is somewhat an apples-to-oranges test compared to B+MP because E6 vented as G + the G# key is naturally sharper than venting with the open 1st finger. Was it supposed to test tongue position? Where did you get the suggestion? What was supposed to not happen if your tongue position was wrong?
In any case your three part process has some conceptual problems if you try to use it to explain to other people (students?) what you do:
1. Your tongue goes a lot farther back than you probably think. The "way back" of your tongue isn't coming anywhere near your molars. It's closer to your uvula. You're still very "middle" of your tongue. Meanwhile, the back may be doing something you really don't intend, perhaps coming upward toward the soft palate and closing the opening. Though, since that would reduce the opening, it ought to make the air speed up by some theories, which maybe would make it an unintended benefit. (I don't think so.)
2. Exactly - this is very likely, though I'm not certain it's anatomically inevitable. But it also may be a problem (see #1).
3. Now, you're placing where everything is at such a level of priority that some players whose tongues don't naturally find this position will have to contort to some extent to comply. Contortion leads to rigidity and, as most voice teachers and choral directors will tell you (though it seems to elude a great many teachers of wind instruments), rigid soft tissue inside the mouth will damp resonance and dull the tone.
Positions of things can't take precedence over the sound produced by whatever the player does. If you try to teach this as a three step approach for every student you meet, you may help some, but perhaps frustrate many others. You and they need, to some extent literally, to play this kind of thing by ear. A good teacher helps solve individual problems, not create copies of a template.
Karl
Post Edited (2016-02-09 20:06)
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Author: TomS
Date: 2016-02-10 06:03
As a starting point, use the sound "Hee" (as in Hee-Haw) ... you can feel the sides of you tongue touching your upper back teeth.
A double embouchure kinda naturally sets the draws and pulls in the facial muscles and puts the tongue in the right spot for some players.
I got used to dropping the tongue on the LH clarion notes and some of the altissimo notes to compensate for sharpness on some instruments ... on the Ridenour clarinets, you can keep the tongue more stable. If you keep the air focus constant on these instruments, they are excellent in tuning.
Tom
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