Author: ohsuzan
Date: 2008-06-06 14:51
Hi Ashley --
There are two things I would like to add to what others have said, and to what I wrote in the referenced thread on "Tone".
First, it may be that your student is blowing too hard.
Second, it may be that she is actually playing with too loose of an embouchure.
I'm saying these two things because they were issues for me when I began playing the oboe after having played clarinet for many years. A teacher characterized my blowing habit as "powerful" -- as in, "too much". It was an artefact of my clarinet playing. Clarinet takes a bigger airstream than oboe. Remember the advice to blow against the resistance of the reed (but not overwhelm it).
You could actually go one of two ways with this: if she already is using an easy reed, she might want to back off on her air. If she is using a more-resistant reed, you might want to scale the reed strength back a bit, until she learns the "feel" of cooperating with, rather than overwhelming, the reed.
My teacher told me that I actually needed to tighten up my embouchure on the oboe. Most folks, she said, begin with a too-tight embouchure; I began too loose. Again, I think this is an artefact of clarinet playing, where the mouthpiece is obviously much bigger. I have found that rolling my lips in more, while still maintaining the "ah" effort in the center of the lips, helps a great deal.
It's more than just a matter of getting more lip on the reed. My teacher characterizes the oboe embouchure as needing to be "firm". Not biting, but firm. To demonstrate, she used to ask me to try to push her oboe out of her mouth while she was playing. Her embouchure was firm enough that the instrument did not move when I pushed it. My embouchure -- well, it was a pushover!
Susan
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