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In This Issue November 28, 2012
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- A Note From Michelle Anderson - 'Tis The Season For Concerts
- Clarinet Tips - Continuing our series on faster fingers...
- Free Training - A great video which gives you a tool to tackle difficult finger passages
- Michelle Recommends - Selected Duets for Clarinet - a classic book
- Clarinet Is Easy - 10 comprehensive lesson for beginners
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A Note from Michelle Anderson
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Hello Everyone,
A big welcome to all of you who are reading the Clarinet Mentors newsletter for the first time. If this is your first newsletter, I hope that you find great content to help you play the clarinet more easily. These newsletters are sent to the Clarinet Mentors community every two weeks, usually on Wednesdays.
I enjoyed the first ever Clarinet Mentors Webinar last week. It was a chance for all of you to send me questions, and for me to answer them live, over a video conference online. It was exciting for me to have a new way to interact with the Clarinet Mentors community. The replay was posted for all of you who signed up. Thanks for taking part. Now that I am more familiar with the technology, I'd love to do another session in January.
December is often a time of many concerts for me. I am playing in a Christmas concert on Sunday at the Chan Centre in Vancouver. It is acoustically and visually one of the most beautiful halls that I have ever played in, and this show features a fantastic choir with a professional orchestra. It is always one of my favourite shows of the year. I also have a concert this month with my wind ensemble, and with the Lion's Gate Sinfonia, a local orchestra. Busy times, but all fun music.
I hope that some of you who are new to the instrument can check out the concerts near you that feature adult amateur musicians (and of course, please support your local professionals as well...). You might be inspired to consider joining a group yourself in the new year. The structure of playing with others helps all of us to develop as performers.
Thanks for being a part of my community!
As I mentioned in the last newsletter, I notice that many adult players eventually hit a section of music that just goes "too fast", or has too many notes for their fingers to handle. (Frankly, I've had those moments myself. There were sections of John Adams "Nixon In China" clarinet parts that had me sweating after several hours of preparation.) There are many tools to help us to improve our finger technic and speed. I will continue to be presenting some for the next couple of newsletters.
Today's tool is one of my favourite tools for improving a tough section of music where all of the notes are written in equal lengths (such as all sixteenth notes). The basic premise is that we systematically rehearse the passage in a series of alternate rhythms. This technic somehow helps us to access the "auto-pilot" part of brain much more quickly. It is a fantastic way to build speed into our fingers, and also to help memorize something (such as a scale that we would like to learn well).
Please enjoy the video which explains this in detail.
Improving Finger Speed With Alternate Rhythm Patterns
Please watch this training video to learn a valuable tool that will help you to develop faster fingers, and better technic on the clarinet. There is an optional pdf file that you can download here which gives you a written version of these rhythms, as well as a copy of the excerpt that I use as an example in this video.
Selected Duets for Clarinet - Voxman
This classic duet book has been around for a long time, and I still love to use it with my intermediate level students. The melody parts are interesting enough for one person to work on as an etude. Playing them as a duet is an extra bonus, since the arrangements are very well done.
There is a more advanced book which features some of the Bach Inventions, and an arrangement of the Beethoven Clarinet/Bassoon duets for two clarinets. There are also two excellent flute/clarinet duet books published in this series if there is a flute-playing buddy in your life.
I always love to play chamber music, such as duets or trios, and I highly recommend it to you as well.
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Clarinet Is Easy - Beginner Course - coming soon
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I firmly believe that if anyone has the "recipe" for how to play clarinet, things are really relatively easy to do. Most of our frustrations come from inadvertently learning bad habits along the way. With that in mind, I have been hard at work on creating a 10 lesson course for beginners that I think gives you the tools to truly learn the clarinet easily, and well, while avoiding all of those common frustrations.
The lessons have great content, and are virtually ready to go. I have under-estimated how long the technology of presenting much more in-depth lessons takes to master, so I am still getting it ready to go "online". It's not quite as easy as simply making music with someone in my home studio! Having said that, they are finally in the "testing stage", and my volunteer testers are letting me know how things are working. I expect to have this ready to go for all of you soon.
If you would like a comprehensive, thorough, course on how to learn the beginning concepts on clarinet (stress-free), this will be a valuable resource for you. Stay tuned for details! I'm very excited to put all of my very best tips for beginners together in one very full package of lessons.
Michelle Anderson is a professional clarinetist and teacher who currently lives in Vancouver BC. She has been a professional performer for 30 years and plays regularly with the Vancouver Opera Orchestra, the Pacific Symphonic Wind Ensemble and the West Coast Chamber Music series. She has performed with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the CBC Vancouver Orchestra, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet Touring Orchestra and many other groups. Michelle currently specializes in teaching adults to play clarinet more easily and quickly, and conducts the Vancouver Clarinet Choir.
Thanks for reading this biweekly newsletter.
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Helping you to find success on your instrument with sound teaching techniques, and useful learning systems.
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