High Notes Part 3 - What to do with your tongue ...
Sent Thursday, January 16, 2014
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Clarinet Mentors
For clarinetists who want to perform more easily and beautifully
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Hello! Welcome to the Clarinet Mentors bi-weekly newsletter. I welcome new readers to the Clarinet Mentors community, and I hope that you enjoy the clarinet-related knowledge that is shared here. Feel free to comment on any of the videos on my YouTube page, or by sending me an email. My goal is to continue to make life easier for clarinetists all around the world! I enjoy and appreciate your feedback. I enjoyed many holiday travels in late December and early January (including Winnipeg, which boasted of being the "coldest place on Earth" on New Year's Eve - somewhere around minus 40). The photo below is me with hair and breath freezing almost instantly. I returned home to an email inbox with hundreds of emails to answer. My apologies if I am slow to get back to you, but I am catching up! One of the interesting things about teaching is that I sometimes find myself making suggestions to a student, and then realizing that I should be following my own advice. One of my clarinet New Year's Resolutions is to reduce tension in my performing. This is so important to good performances, and I'll definitely have more videos for you about this later this year. Too much tension in your body can slow down your fingers, pinch the reed (which restricts your tone) and simply tire you out more quickly. I find that when people learn to play with very relaxed fingers, speed comes much more easily. It is ironic that the "hard" spots in music (which usually means fast fingering) really aren't very hard when we remove slapping, pounding, tense fingers from the equation. I encourage you to have a Clarinet New Year's resolution too. Pick one area of your playing, and focus on it a bit each day that you play. This is how we program better habits into our bodies.
I hope you are all doing well out there in Clarinet Land, and for those of you struggle with high notes, today's newsletter features High Notes 101: Part 3 - designed to help you play high notes more easily. Thanks for being a part of my community!
As you know, I enjoying reading your letters and comments. Many people write to me that they struggle a bit with high notes. Personally, I don't believe that high notes should be harder than low notes, but sometimes it really feels that way. My theory is that they are simply more revealing than low notes of any underlying problems we may have in our basic approach to playing. (This is similar to how a bikini may be more revealing of our eating and exercise habits than a snowsuit!)
The good news is that all of these problems can be solved fairly easily if you know how to do it! This is the third video in my recent series on improving high notes. As I mentioned with the last one, I am re-recording some of my earlier video tutorials with my new and improved sound system. If you have been a dedicated Clarinet Mentors member for a while, you may have seen some of the lessons that are included in today's video in older presentations. However, each time I present one of my favourite concepts, I add something a bit new into it. I encourage you all to watch this, and let me know if it helps you with your high notes. This video focuses on tongue position, or "voicing", and gives you a finger technic to make the response of the altissimo register feel more comfortable.
As always, I enjoy hearing from you, so please add your comments in the comments box below the video on YouTube, or send me an email. Click on the video image below to watch this video lesson.
It is now easy to find many types of music online for you to enjoy on your clarinet. One site that I really like is Virtual Sheet Music. Many of the most "famous" clarinet solo pieces are found there - the Mozart Concerto, the Weber solos, Debussy's Premiere Rhapsodie, the Brahms Sonata, and many collections of fun music with various themes. They have music for virtually every level of performer. If you are practising by yourself much of the time, you might appreciate the mp3 accompaniments that are provided with most of the music. It gives you a piano soundtrack to play along with. Of course, this is not as gratifying as playing with a real live player, but it does give you one more option to add into your practise routine. You can buy single pieces of music, or, if you are a bargain-hunter like me, you can buy an annual membership and download as much music as you like onto your computer.
If you are curious to see if there is any music that interests you, just click on the box below for a link to the Virtual Sheet Music home page.
How To Solve Your Common Clarinet Frustrations and Play Clarinet More Easily
Click here for the free preview videos to Clarinet Is Easy
Click here to order Clarinet Is Easy
If you are curious about this, you can try these lessons with a 100% 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee. (That means that you can try a full 5 lessons before you decide if you have received great value from the course.) If it is not the right style for you, you get your tuition refunded, no problem. I invite you to try it now! Many students have received amazing results so far from this course (and you can read their comments on the order page).
Michelle Anderson, the founder of Clarinet Mentors, is a professional clarinetist and teacher who currently lives in Vancouver BC. Her professional career spans 30 years and she currently 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 through online resources, and conducts the Vancouver Clarinet Choir.
Thanks for reading this biweekly newsletter. If you think a friend would enjoy this, please feel free to forward it. If they want to enrol in the Clarinet Mentors Community, they can go to www.learnclarinetnow.com.
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