Eddie Daniels is not a doubler
Great video of Eddie Daniels talking about doubling—er, not doubling.
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Practice technique: anchoring
This is a technique I recommend often to students who are struggling with notey passages. I can’t remember where I picked it up, or whether “anchoring” is my own name for it or someone else’s. No doubt credit for this belongs to somebody smarter than I.
The problem that I sometimes see with my students (and, okay, occasionally with myself) is that fast passages are uneven and panicky. The student sees a long string of notes and frantically dives in, to the detriment of meter and tempo, and with notes accidentally omitted or added.
Let’s consider this excerpt:
from Debussy Première rhapsodie (clarinet) It’s a challenging passage—shifting harmony, intervallic motion, awkward fingerings. This is a recipe for frustration using the old standby method of playing slowly with the metronome and gradually increasing the tempo. Instead, let’s set the metronome aside for a few minutes, and play the passage in an intentionally uneven way:
with added tenuto-accent-fermatas Put lots of weight on the metric pulses (the “anchor” notes): play them long, loud, and with emphasis. Hold each fermata long enough to scope out the next four notes, then move through them as quickly as you accurately can, coming to rest again on the next fermata. Repeat the passage in this way as many times as you can stand.
Here’s what this accomplishes:
- It makes you think about logical groups of notes, rather than trying either to process each note individually or to deal with the whole phrase as an overwhelming sea of notes. It’s the sweet spot between too much mental chatter and too little focus.
- It encourages effective phrasing by treating the notes as leading toward downbeats.
- It trains your ears to hear the notes in fours (at least in this 2/4 passage—try threes instead if the situation calls for it). Now as you return to playing the passage evenly, you are more likely to notice if you are omitting or adding notes.
To transition from this technique into a more performable approach, gradually decrease the duration of the fermatas and the weight of the accents, while continuing to mentally emphasize the anchor notes and place them carefully in tempo (time to get the metronome back out). Also try spacing the anchors farther apart as an intermediate step—one at the beginning of each measure, for example, or every few measures as appropriate.
Practice smart!
Peter Hilliard on contracting woodwind doublers
- Photo, danifeb
Peter Hilliard has a nice blog, Music Directing the School Musical. It doesn’t offer any information about who Peter Hilliard is (presumably this guy), not even contact information*. But he does seem to know a thing or two about putting on a musical, and, in a recent post, offers some advice about hiring musicians. Here’s a little of what he has to say about hiring woodwind players—I do suggest reading the whole thing.
The actual numbers (Reed I, Reed II, etc.) vary widely from show to show, but if you look through your books, you’ll see the following is generally true:
…
There is a book (usually Reed I) that looks like this: Flute and Piccolo normally, sometimes Clarinet, Soprano and/or Alto Sax. Normally this book is very flute heavy. In old shows, sometimes it’s only flute, with no doubling. Hire somebody with a good flute embouchure, not a clarinet or sax player who plays flute with an airy tone. Have the guy who dabbles on flute play the book with all the second or 3rd flute parts. For some reason, the alto flute got really popular from the 70s through the 80s, but beware. 1) you’ll never hear it. 2) You’ll never find one! I swear, I called every instrument rental house in Philadelphia and South Jersey for a show recently and nobody had one. 3) your player will pass out from too little oxygen to the brain.
I can’t say that I’ve ever had a musical director volunteer to round up instruments for me—I need to work for this guy! By the way, keep that alto flute embouchure focused to avoid passing out, and make sure you’re playing right into the mic so the sound crew has something to work with. Read More “Peter Hilliard on contracting woodwind doublers”
Woodwind doubling and clarinet problems
Here are a few of the common problems woodwind doublers have with the clarinet:
Flabby/saggy/tubby/airy tone and flat pitch. This is a dead giveaway for a self-“taught” clarinet doubler. The clarinet’s voicing is quite high, higher than any of the other woodwinds, and beginning clarinetists sometimes struggle for years to make that proper voicing a consistent habit. Once it settles in, pitch problems mostly evaporate, tone becomes clear and ringing, and notes respond beautifully and easily in every register. If you’re thinking about buying a shorter barrel because your “clarinet” is so flat all the time, don’t. Work on your voicing instead. Voicing is the #1 crucial technique for successful clarinet doubling, and will solve most of your problems.
It may also be worth checking your mouthpiece angle—it should be quite steep compared to saxophone or double reed instruments. Keep your head up straight and eyes forward, and aim in the ballpark of keeping the clarinet around 30° from vertical. You can also use the paper trick to make sure you’re taking in the right amount of mouthpiece.
Reeds can be a contributing factor, too. Often (but not always) saxophonists lean toward a slightly more open mouthpiece and softer reed, while clarinetists lean toward a little more closed mouthpiece and stiffer reed. The strength you prefer on a typical saxophone mouthpiece may not be right strength for a typical clarinet mouthpiece.
Constricted tone. Bafflingly, there’s a common pedagogical idea that clarinetists should tighten their embouchures to fix various problems. This is nonsense. Keep your jaw open to make space for the reed to vibrate, and let your lips (not your jaw/teeth) close around the mouthpiece, not tight but just airtight. Notes will respond more readily, with a fuller, prettier tone, and you can throw away the tape or paper or dental appliance you have been using to cushion your lower lip from your teeth.
Squeaks. 95% of the time this is an issue of fingers failing to properly cover toneholes. (And 95% of the time, struggling clarinet doublers blame it on something having vaguely to do with embouchure, reeds, or the clarinet somehow just being a squeaky instrument.) Use the large, fleshy pads of your fingers (not the tippy-tips) to cover the holes. Sometimes a quick check in the mirror can reveal that your fingers aren’t where you think they are.
Fingering awkwardness. The clarinet’s fingering system and unique overtone series provide tremendous advantages: an expansive range, clean and precise technique, and lots of useful alternate fingerings. (It’s superior to the saxophone’s “easier” system with awkward palm keys and relatively few alternates. Fight me.)
But if you’re coming from another instrument, you might find the 12th between the lower and clarion registers confounding. That’s because you’re still thinking about the fingerings. Practice your scales, arpeggios, and études until your fingers move on autopilot, like they already do on your primary instrument. It can be done.
The clarinet’s dreaded “break” as a technique concern is mostly a myth. Keep your support, voicing, and embouchure well-formed and stable, and just move your fingers. Your left index finger should rock or tilt between its tonehole and the A key, not hop (losing contact with the instrument) or slide (dragging along the key). Work toward a tiny, efficient, relaxed movement.
The clarinet’s clever system of redundant pinky keys enables lightning-fast technique in virtually any key, but it takes real effort to learn to use them well. Remember that for those pinky-finger notes there aren’t really “standard” vs. “alternate” fingerings—you need to know them all well enough to use interchangeably. And if you have beginner habits like using both pinkies for third-line B, you will need to learn to use a single pinky in many cases for the most efficient and flexible approach.
Ledger line catastrophes. Because of the clarinet’s broad tessitura, clarinetists have to be fluent in ledger lines above the staff (maybe more than you’re used to if you’re an oboist) and below the staff (more than you’re used to on any treble-clef woodwind). Hit the Baermann or Kroepsh books for thorough workouts spanning the clarinet’s range.
Remember the best money you can spend on your clarinet playing isn’t another mouthpiece or barrel or book—it’s some lessons with an excellent teacher. Learn the instrument on its own terms, and, whatever you do, try not to sound like a doubler.
Teaching with your ears
We have this conversation often in my woodwind methods classes:
Me: What do you hear in so-and-so’s playing?
Student: Their embouchure is too tight?
Me: Can you hear their embouchure muscles?
Student: …?
Me: Not directly, right? But what are you hearing that makes you think their embouchure is tight?
Student: Well, it looks like it could be kind of tight.
Me: But what do you hear?Woodwind teaching isn’t, or shouldn’t be, primarily a visual activity. Crucial parts of woodwind-playing technique happen entirely out of view, inside the player’s body. And the most important element—air—is mostly invisible.
But lots of teachers like to focus on visual things. (It’s easier!) My college students often arrive on campus able to explain in elaborate detail the “right” way to sit in a chair when playing, but with little understanding of less-visible concepts like breath support and voicing. Students in my woodwind methods course, given opportunities to critique woodwind playing, often zero in on how a classmate’s embouchure looks, rather than on the sounds they are making. I see educators from beginning-band directors to world-famous masterclass teachers tackling the most immediately visible elements of a student’s approach, while ignoring glaringly audible issues.
Additionally, visual evaluation is complicated by the variety of human bodies. I regularly have to talk students literally off the ledge, as they sit precariously on the forwardmost inch of their chairs, determined that this is the one-size-fits-all correct position, regardless of the size and shape of their bodies. And I can’t count the times that I’ve seen a pedagogical book describe in breathless detail the way a player’s lips should look when playing, always assuming that those lips are of a very specific size and shape (and sometimes color).
Like many teachers, I’ve done much of my instruction in recent months remotely, via video. In the early weeks of the New Normal, I got caught up in concerns about lighting and camera angles. But I find lately that I really don’t look at the screen much when my students are playing. Most of the information I need comes from their audio feeds. Visual evaluation is at best a helpful supplement.
It’s hard to break the habit of always using our eyes first, or of jumping to conclusions about things we can’t observe directly. Start with the sound, and work from there.
That is an interesting philosophy. I’ve seen many people say they are not a doubler, but rather, and instrumentalist. But, I can see some pro’s and con’s to this mind-set. If it works for him that is great, it might even work for me. I think I won’t adapt it until I get through with Saxophone in my undergrad. But this is a very nice link, thank you for posting it.
It was also nice to see all the repair machines in the background.
This is exactly why, as a saxophonist, I fought so hard to become a clarinet primary during my graduate work as a woodwind specialist. In order to become very proficient on more than one woodwind instrument, you need to treat each additional one like it is your primary. Becoming comfortable with the clarinet has taken many years, and it probably would have taken even longer if I had to prepare for a saxophone lesson each week as well.
Such a great approach to the concept of playing multiple woodwind instruments. I’ve had conversations with some of the great woodwind artists in LA (Sal Lozano, Dan Higgins, Jay Mason) and they all have the same philosophy.