I find that once voicing and breath support are balanced against each other, a good oboe with a good reed is one of the easiest woodwinds to play in tune, and responds easily in all registers.
This is, generally speaking, true of all of the woodwinds: solid breath support plus a stable voicing appropriate to the instrument are the recipe for reliable, in-tune notes from low to high.
If you buy into the myth that there are only two or three “good” reeds in a box of ten, you are buying the wrong reeds. There are many, many options available to you. When I’ve got the right brand, cut, and size of reed for my mouthpiece and embouchure, easily eight play respectably well right out of the box. Within 15-20 minutes, I can adjust nine or ten to play quite well, and maybe three or four of those at recital quality. I use the steps below and nothing else.
Um, no.Don’t waste time and cane messing with the topography of the reed’s cut. With all the variation in reeds, the cut is the one thing that is really quite consistent. If you don’t like the cut, shop around some more. If you own a diagram like the one shown here, with elaborate instructions on which tiny sectors of reed you should sand, I recommend that you throw it away.
Make sure the reed is flat. Many aren’t, and one that was flat yesterday may not be flat today. A piece of 600-grit wet-dry sandpaper held against a piece of glass is the perfect tool for this. Concentrate on the part of the reed that contacts the mouthpiece’s table. For $2, I had a local glass shop cut me a 3″×4″ piece of ¼” glass, with the edges ground smooth. You can also use a mirror or window pane. A flattened reed will respond better and squeak less.
Balance the corners. This is the one exception I make for changing the reed’s cut. Well-balanced reeds have a nice clear tone and respond reliably throughout the instrument’s range and at any dynamic level. I find that balancing the corners can correct for much of the asymmetry of a typical reed. Even a reed that already seems pretty good can often be improved. Tom Ridenour’s method is dead simple and strikingly effective—required reading.
If absolutely necessary, clip the tip using a high-quality reed trimmer. I do this to maybe one in twenty reeds. I do it to make a reed feel a little stronger. Clip off the tiniest possible amount at first—a little clip goes a long way. It’s very rare that I clip off more than a tiny bit, and if I do, it rarely works out well.
As a graduate student and younger professional I started to get opportunities to teach in masterclass/workshop settings and to adjudicate competitions. I had taught private lessons for many years. But sometimes I found it challenging to give effective feedback in these newer situations, where I was hearing someone play for the first time and needed to give useful suggestions after just a quick first impression. For example:
I would listen to a talented competition entrant who played at a much higher level than my students, and I would find myself at a loss for what to address.
I would listen to a struggling masterclass student with deep fundamental flaws in their playing, but it seemed too overwhelming to tackle in fifteen minutes. So instead I would harp on some small detail like an esoteric alternate fingering or the various possible approaches to a certain grace note.
There are plenty of “right” ways to teach in these situations, but here’s the breakthrough that really helped me:
Have a specific list of things in mind to listen for. In terms of the woodwind sounds I’m hearing, I generally focus on tone, response, intonation, execution of volume/dynamics, and finger and tongue fluency. Assuming these are generally in place, I might also consider non-woodwind-specific musical/interpretive factors.
While listening, make a list, mental and/or written, of a very small handful of items I want to address (sometimes just one). I do my best to pick the most bang-for-the-buck ones, or the ones I haven’t already addressed with another student in the same masterclass, but I don’t stress over it too much.
Have some accumulated ideas of techniques and approaches that can be applied to the problem areas. For woodwind fundamentals, which are appropriately addressed at every stage of advancement, I zero in on posture and playing position, breath support, voicing, embouchure, finger and tongue movement, and fingering selection. For interpretive matters, I might address small-scale phrase shaping, and from there work up to interpretation of larger structures like themes, movements, complete pieces, and even full recital programs.
Your lists (what to listen for, and what techniques/approaches to apply) might differ from mine, though you are welcome to adopt them if you need a starting point. The object is to have a methodical approach to listening and problem-solving, so I’m making efficient and effective use of time.
If breath support, embouchure, and voicing are correctly established, then Crossing the Dreaded Break ceases to be a Thing. It’s just another note: a moment ago you were playing B-flat, and now you are playing B-natural. As long as your fingers get where they are supposed to go, then that’s all there is to it. Personally, I don’t even use the word “break” with a beginning student—there’s no need to get them all uptight about what really is a non-event.
My point was that crossing a register break is merely a fingering issue, and shouldn’t be turned into a big to-do about embouchures and equipment purchases and so forth. And I stand by that, but there is something I glossed over a bit that perhaps ought to be revisited in more detail, and that applies to register break crossings on all woodwind instruments.
The point that I want to return to is that of breath support. If it, and some other basic tone-production matters, are “correctly established,” then break-crossing is indeed nothing more than a new fingering or two. But assuming that breath support is 100% correct with a student just reaching the break-crossing stage is often a mistake.
Each note on the clarinet (and on any woodwind) has a certain level of resistance—that is to say, it requires a certain amount of air pressure to get the air column vibrating. Some notes are more resistant, and some are less resistant. As a sort of general oversimplification, we might assume that a long-tube note (with more toneholes closed) is more resistant than a short-tube note (with more toneholes open). Other factors do apply, of course: the size of the toneholes, whether the fingering is a “forked” fingering, and more, but let’s isolate tube length for the moment. So for the clarinet, having a break between A-sharp and B, we would expect to see this kind of resistance change while crossing the break:
Taller grey bar = higher resistance
(Note that the bar graphs here are strictly illustrative and not based on any real measurements.)
A beginner who is accustomed to the lower resistance of a few chalumeau-register notes might have intuitively developed just enough breath support to make those notes respond. When he or she attempts to cross the break, the breath support isn’t enough to overcome the increased resistance: Read More “Breath support, register breaks, and resistance”
EDIT: I originally had an embedded video here, of a CBS news interview with Broadway woodwind doubler Dan Willis. It appears the video is no longer available. You can read a text summary here, at least for the time being. Below is a picture I stole from their website.
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I made a small modification to my Hercules instrument stands so I could clip them onto my instrument cases for easier carrying.
The stands all have this same yellow sort of teddy-bear-head piece on the bottom:
Remove the nut from the center of the bear’s forehead:
I bought a handful of these. They are almost the right thing for the job:
…but they don’t quite fit: the holes are too small. The metal seemed fairly soft and not too thick, so I managed to open up the holes a bit with a handheld drill and a 1/4″ wood-drilling bit. It would probably be safer and more precise to use a drill press and a proper metal-drilling bit.
Or, even better, can anyone recommend a premade part with two 1/4″ (65mm) holes about 1″ (3cm) apart, no thicker than about 1/16″ (1mm), preferably without sharp corners?
Anyway, with the holes slightly enlarged, put the part in place and replace the nut.
This worked well on all my Hercules stands, with a minor modification for the bassoon/bass clarinet stand. The “forehead” bolt was too short to get the nut back on with the extra piece in place, so I installed it off-center. It works fine.
I’d be curious to hear about your favorite equipment modifications in the comments.
The New York Times’s “Lens” blog did a nice piece on Steve Gorn, a woodwind doubler who has turned his primary focus to the bansuri (Indian bamboo flute). Surf on over to see a nice photo and hear audio of an interview/performance. (Both photo and audio feature Gorn’s soprano saxophone playing.)
Steve Gorn on his beginnings as a woodwind player:
I advanced relatively quickly with the clarinet. When I got into eighth or ninth grade I got into a lot of jazz, and I started playing saxophone at that point. Jazz became much more of a focus. I played clarinet in the school orchestra.
