Author: Dutchy
Date: 2006-02-15 13:51
<<< For my mouth to be at tip,this is kind of a problem because my mouth puts in a lot of saliva,and my mouth slips. >>>
Your lips, the part that is actually touching the reed, shouldn't be wet at all. They should be quite dry, or at the most, slightly moist. The wet "spit" part goes on INSIDE your mouth, at the end of the reed, with your tongue. But the outside part of your lips shouldn't be wet.
You should have the dry part, the outside red part that lipstick goes on, of your lips touching the reed, not the wet drool-y inside part that you chew on and get cold sores on. If your mouth is slipping on the reed, you've possibly got the reed in your mouth wrong-- are you're pooching your lips out in a "smooch" pucker-up kiss formation?
And if your embouchure is so wet that spit is dribbling out your mouth and down the sides of your reed, making you lose your grip on it, that's WAY too much. You're relying too much on spit to moisten your reed. It's possible to hold back on the spit--get yourself a tiny plastic container (I use a film canister, and if you want one, you'd better act quick before digital renders them completely obsolete and unobtainable) with about a half-inch of water in the bottom, and dip the reed into THAT when it starts feeling dry and won't sound. Spit is over-rated as a reed-moistener--water works a LOT better. All those orchestral oboists on PBS "Great Performances" who work their way through an entire concerto or symphony have little containers of water clipped to their music stand that the PBS cameras don't show you.
I actually find that if I use a lot of spit to wet my reed while I'm playing, sooner or later I get a keyhole or the octave key plugged up. So, use less spit.
Because you NEED to have your mouth at the tip. You're never going to get away from the dying duck sound if you've chronically got your mouth up on the un-scraped part of the reed. Imagine if a baseball player always had his hands choked up on the bat. He's never going to get his batting average up, is he?
And also, if you're holding the reed too high up at the unscraped "grass stem" part, you don't have as much traction to grip it. It's slippery there, whereas the scraped part has more texture and so is easier to grip with your lips.
Also, it's round up there, and your lip muscles have a lot more trouble gripping and flexing on a round slippery object than they do gripping and flexing on a flat textured object (the end of the reed).
And it's STIFF up there--that unscraped grass stem part just won't flex. The flat scraped part is the part that's designed to flex.
And the "flexing" part is actually the most important thing, because FLEXING your lips around the reed is the way you control all the important things like pitch, tone color, and dynamics. If you're just basically grabbing onto the reed with your lips and hanging on for dear life and blowing into it, then you've basically got yourself a $700 duck call there.
And, NO, whoever told you that "all oboists sound like dying ducks" needs to get out of the house more. An oboe should sound sweetly and wistfully pensive, a unique tone color that is as unlike a dying duck as I can imagine.
Here is what an oboe should sound like. WAV file.
http://www.audiosparx.com/sa/play/play.cfm/sound_iid.538
You go down to the library and you ask the Reference Librarian to help you find some recordings of oboe concertos and oboe sonatas. Then you come back and tell me that THOSE oboists sound like dying ducks, and I'll eat this keyboard.
<<< Well I found out how to finally make the alternative E-flat to play.I have to put less pressure than I usually put with the regular E-flat fingering.This,I have no clue why. >>>
By "less pressure", you mean less air pressure? Or less pressure on the key?
Either way, if you're finding that you have to do something drastically different for Alt-Eb than you do for Regular E-b, I'd say there's something mechanically wrong with your oboe's keys. If you hold the oboe in playing position (don't bash your reed with your teeth, now) and look down the barrel at how the keys work, you'll see that the mechanism that creates that Eb note when played by either pinky is actually the same--it's opening the exact same hole on the left-hand side of the barrel. The only difference between Alt-Eb and Regular Eb is that the oboe designers have made a longer key that you can work with your left pinky in order to reach down and close that exact same hole. So you shouldn't really have to do anything radically different in order to obtain that same note whether you're opening that hole with your right pinky or with your left pinky. And the fact that you're finding that you need to press more lightly on the left-hand key says to me that that that left-hand key mechanism is out of whack, that it's already opening that hole a bit, so in order to open the hole the rest of the way with your left pinky, you don't need to press as hard.
Which is a Bad Thing.
You're using a school instrument? Gosh, it's been kicking around the band room for ages, since the last time they had an oboist in the school district, and goodness knows when was the last time someone cleaned and adjusted it. Tell your band director that you NEED a professional oboe adjuster to adjust your oboe, 'cause something ain't right here. And you HAVE to do this, because if you're learning on a bad instrument, you're learning bad habits to compensate for its poor quality that will come back and bite you on the butt later on, when you move up to a "real" oboe.
It's not a big issue to find a professional oboe adjuster--it's always the company that rents all the band instruments to everybody in town. Your band director can tell you in about 2 seconds who it is, or you can ask one of the flutists or clarinetists where they got theirs.
Post Edited (2006-02-15 13:59)
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