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Re: Tonguing: I hate it.

Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2017-02-15 18:16

Some of the approaches you describe sound bizarre or are maybe specific to certain players who play in specific music genres. If you read players' description, you might look to see what their playing style is and consider how mainstream their playing style is.

To provide articulation - separation - between the notes you play, you have to somehow stop the sound. You can do this in either of two ways, basically - stop the air from reaching the mouthpiece/reed or stop the reed from vibrating for short periods of time. Most modern players stop the reed in one way or another. Of those players, I think most would say that they articulate by touching the exposed surface of the reed with the top surface of the tongue. It's at that point that you get most of the divergence. Where on the reed surface? What part of the tongue surface?

The easiest way to start gaining comfort is to try as much as possible to imitate what you do when you speak. Use the part of your tongue that feels comfortable when you produce tongue-based consonants ("d", "t") but touch the reed surface instead of the roof of your mouth. The sound will be affected by where on the reed you touch, but that can really be refined later. Anything that cleanly stops the reed from vibrating will work at the beginning.

Many of us think about holding the reed with the tongue, blowing, and then releasing the reed for the first note of a tongued passage. Tonguing notes in a sequence then involves blowing a continuous air stream and interrupting the reed with the consonant motion you've chosen. The continuous air stream becomes more important the faster the notes become.

Katrina makes a really important point - many adult learners want to be perfect too quickly. You learned to speak over a period of years. You already know how to do that, but applying the movements of speech to a reed is a learning process. Some of it is learned by taking advice, some by trial and error. Because others' words may not translate well to feelings you need to internalize, sometimes you have to experiment. If something really doesn't work, leave it and try something else.

The other important point is that, when you "tongue" you're only separating long sounds into shorter ones. The sound still needs to be the best you can produce, so don't change anything in your basic approach to tone production in order to apply any tonguing technique. Always be aware of the tone quality of the notes you play and the consistency of the tone from one note to the next.

Karl

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