When I use the term “breath support,” students and colleagues often echo back something like “oh, right, more air.” But is breath support the same thing as “more air?”
Measuring quantities of air isn’t completely straightforward—when we say “more air,” we might rightfully wonder whether that means a greater volume filled with air, or a greater number of air molecules, or whether we’re really thinking of something like airflow or air velocity.
For my purposes in teaching, I find a few different measures to be relevant:
First, you must set up breath support with a good inhalation, and I think it’s generally helpful to inhale a large volume of air into the lungs.
Then, you must pressurize the air by engaging the torso muscles, constricting the space in which the air is contained. (The diaphragm’s relaxation alone does create pressure, but not enough for good woodwind playing.)
The increased pressure makes the air escape your embouchure at a higher velocity. You can adjust the size of your embouchure, allowing more or less air to pass through, which is the basic mechanism woodwind players use to change (sound) volume (or “dynamics”).
I’m most directly concerned with air pressure when I talk about breath support, and in some ways in which that does translate to “more” air. But since “more” can be measured in multiple ways, I like to use a more exact term like “breath support.” That also has the concreteness of referring to something that the player actively does, rather than focusing the imagery on air, which is invisible.
Be precise in your pedagogical vocabulary, and consistent in your breath support.
Many doublers start out as clarinetists or saxophonists, and many doublers would say that the flute is particularly challenging as a double. These phenomena are related. Let’s look at some of the issues woodwind doublers have with the flute. I’ll offer a sort of glib, inadequate tip or two for each situation, but the real solution here is to learn the flute right, with lots of patience, years of dedicated practice, and a well-qualified and longsuffering flute teacher.
Lightheadedness, inability to play long phrases, fuzzy tone, weak low register. These are products of a too-large aperture (the opening in your lips). Single-reed players tend to have a mental image of a relatively large clarinet or saxophone mouthpiece held in their embouchures. Think instead of the actual opening between the tip of the reed and the tip of the mouthpiece—this is much closer to the size of opening you need to create in your lips. (Think especially of a high-pitched instrument like a clarinet or soprano saxophone, and a mouthpiece with a narrow tip opening.) Or try this: close your lips and relax them as much as possible, then blow gently until a tiny “needle” of air pokes through the center of your lips. That’s how much smaller your aperture needs to be.
Thin/shrill tone, weak low register. The saxophone uses a medium voicing, and the clarinet uses a high voicing, but the flute uses a very low voicing. (Flute doublers coming from a double reed instrument or even a brass instrument have an advantage here.) Keep your airstream very warm, even in the highest register, to give your tone depth.
Uneven intonation and tone. If you are counting on similarities between flute fingerings and clarinet or saxophone fingerings, then you are likely committing a number of flute crimes. F-sharp uses the right third finger, not middle finger. And you must master the ballet between the left index finger and right pinky finger, especially in the transition from first to second octave. (If middle-finger F-sharp and a lazy right pinky sound fine to you, it’s because your tone production technique and tone concept aren’t well developed yet.)
No dynamic control. The typical problem is loud third octave, medium-loud second octave, and very soft first octave. This is a sure sign that you are trying to change octaves by blowing harder or softer. Your “octave key” on the flute is your flexible, well-trained embouchure. Instead of cranking up to gale force for the higher octaves, try pushing gently forward with your lips. (As a side note, if you find in doubling situations that your embouchure is tense and swollen when switching from reeds to flute, that’s a sign that you are playing reeds with too much tension.)
Sluggish technique. There are two main problems here that doublers bring to the table. The first is the habit of moving relatively large, heavy, stiffly-sprung keys. A flute’s keys are small, light, and move with a feather touch. The second issue is insecurity in holding the instrument. It can be hard for a beginner to get the instrument properly balanced (laziness about fingerings can contribute to this, too), and that will slow you down. If the flute keeps trying to roll out of your hands, rotate it a few degrees so the bulk of the keywork sits right on top of the instrument.
Sight-reading disasters in the third octave. Flutists play way up in the ledger lines as a matter of course. If you want to hang in the flute section, it’s time to learn to read those notes fluently. Stumbling around above the staff is also a sign that you haven’t really payed your dues technique-wise yet: you’re getting by within the staff because the fingerings are similar enough to saxophone and clarinet, but above the staff is a different story. Practice your scales and arpeggios.
Good flute playing doesn’t come from casual “dabbling.” Take the flute seriously, study it diligently with good instruction, and it will be a joy to play and a boon to your doubling career.
David Erato, a Wisconsin-based woodwind doubler and teacher, describes the motivation behind his year-long “journey” to improve his clarinet chops:
The idea as a “doubler” is to make whatever instrument is in your hand not feel like a foreign object. One should really study the instrument as if it is the only instrument you play. Practice the same method books, etudes, solos, as a clarinetist in a symphony once did.
David devised a plan to work his way through a book of technical etudes, and carried it out. His plan was based on the a similar system he had used as a university saxophone student. The result?
I can say after all of that, I really do feel like I’ve taken my technique game up several notches on clarinet. It may be hard to believe, but about half way through the book I felt more connected to the instrument. Even though I was in more difficult keys, larger interval jumps became easier than when I started. By the end of it, I didn’t have to think much about playing 4ths in the key of D# harmonic minor.
It’s worth reading the whole thing. There’s one key point from David’s story that I’ve discussed here before, but which is worth restating: as a woodwind doubler, you have to be a beginner on each instrument. David had already completed a technique-building regimen on the saxophone, prescribed by a good saxophone teacher, but hadn’t done so yet on the clarinet. Many of us make the mistake of thinking that such things transfer automatically. They don’t!
I know that many of my readers are college students and/or educators, and may have some discretionary time coming up when the spring semester ends. What fundamental techniques can you spend the summer shoring up?
If you are considering buying the newest, hottest instrument, accessory, gadget, etc., it’s worth asking yourself a few questions:
Is this item made out of materials that are usually used for fine jewelry or the dashboards of luxury cars?
How likely is it that the most visually-attractive materials also happen to have the ideal acoustical qualities? Is there really a good reason to believe that this particular material sounds better than other materials that happen to be less pretty and less expensive? Is there some reason to believe this couldn’t be made from practical and low-cost materials like steel or aluminum or oak or birch, or any of the incredible and endlessly varied synthetic materials?
Does the item come in a variety of materials at a variety of price points, with the most expensive materials being pushed as the best-sounding?
Does the marketing pitch sound like it might really be describing how the material looks, rather than sounds? “The brilliance of silver,” “the smooth dark sound of grenadilla,” “the rich sound of our proprietary gold alloy,” “the complex character of our highly-figured maple.”
You should use the instruments that work best for you. If precious metals and fragrant exotic woods make you happy and you can afford them, then you should have them. But be careful not to get caught up in a sales pitch that is more about bling than about real benefits.
Since I moved to the lovely and historic Mississippi Delta about two and a half months ago, it has been on my to-do list to find a local source for Duco cement to use in bassoon reedmaking. I used to be able to buy it at a certain notorious chain store, but my local store here doesn’t stock it. One well-known double reed supplier sells it for $3.95 per one-ounce tube, which is four times the price I usually pay for it locally.
The Devcon website makes it hard to find information about retail locations, and in fact you have to head over to another web domain to find it. After an unsuccessful morning driving around looking for Duco, I went home and dug up this link:
http://www.itwconsumer.com/wheretobuy.aspx [update: link dead]
Select DUCO® CEMENT, TUBE CARDED and your state. The website doesn’t give retailer addresses, but does provide names. I found a store within a half-mile of me that had it for just under a dollar per tube. Read More “Duco cement and bassoon reeds”
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.
A lot of the questions people have about woodwind playing center on tone: how can I get a better tone? a darker tone? a tone like _____’s? There’s not a lot of clarity on this, for a few reasons:
Firstly, of course, “good” tone is subjective, and trying to communicate clearly about tone in more dispassionate terms is problematic due to inconsistent vocabulary.
Tone is made from a recipe of factors, so it’s hard to isolate individual ones. Will adding another egg improve your cake? Depends on what else is in it. Will a certain warm-up exercise or piece of equipment have a specific effect on your tone? Depends on what other equipment and playing techniques you are using.
Much of what affects tone is difficult or impossible to observe and measure.
Let’s look at the physical factors that influence tone:
Yes, of course, equipment. It’s axiomatic in woodwind playing that your equipment does affect your tone, but not as much as you affect your tone. Still, your particular combination of headjoint, reed, mouthpiece, ligature, barrel, bocal, instrument, and various other parts and accessories does influence in some way the sound that you make. Equipment of good design and construction, and within typical parameters, will contribute to an essentially characteristic tone quality. (By characteristic I mean easily identifiable as a specific instrument by someone with a musically-educated ear.)
Basic woodwind-playing techniques, including most notably breath support, voicing, and embouchure. Assuming these are well-trained, they also contribute to a characteristic tone quality.
Some subtle aspects of those woodwind-playing techniques that are hard to pin down. These small things determine how the tone fits into the larger world of characteristic tone qualities, usually described poorly in vague terms like “good” or “pure” or “rich” or “buttery” or “vocal.” For example, an oboist’s embouchure puts different pressures on different parts of the reed. Those pressures can be adjusted very subtly using the small and flexible muscles of the embouchure, but most oboists probably aren’t very aware of exactly what adjustments they are making (though they may know what it feels like). Most are also not very capable of passing that wisdom (i.e. a feeling) along to a student or colleague. Some of them can be described in too-general terms (“bring the corners of your mouth in more”), or can be evoked with spotty accuracy through metaphor or through tone exercises.
So, how do you ever develop a tone that is characteristic, personal, and beautiful?
Use appropriate equipment.
Employ solid fundamental woodwind-playing techniques.
Listen frequently, widely, and at length to good music, particularly on your instrument, to develop a tone concept—an aural impression of your ideal tone. In early stages, that might be based on how deeply you have absorbed the sound of a favorite musician, perhaps your teacher. In later stages, it might be a sort of composite of your favorite aspects of many tones that you have internalized, perhaps even things that inspired you about a performance on an instrument other than your own (or a voice). Ultimately, it might be a tone that you have never heard before, but which you can imagine.
Here’s why tone concept is so crucial:
All those subtleties of woodwind technique that affect tone, the ones that are so hard to understand and communicate? You can find them with patient and dedicated practice, if you know what you are listening for. As you have already discovered, your tone tends to change from day to day. This inconsistency can be a problem, but can also be a way of stumbling, even subconsciously, onto something positive. (When it’s a conscious process, your thought might be, “when I hold my embouchure this way, I get a sound that is more _____.”) Additionally, a clear tone concept may aid you in intuitively pursuing it; you already use the muscles of breathing, voicing, and embouchure to intuitively produce a huge and subtly-differentiated set of speech sounds, and for most of those you would be hard-pressed to explain how you make them. If you get comfortable and familiar enough with your instrument through years of practice, you can begin to tap into that intuitive control, but again: only if you know what sound you want to make.
An ideal tone is a lifelong pursuit—invest in yours by listening and practicing daily.
This all day! The buzz word around where I teach is “faster air” but kids have zero idea what that means physically. I’ve changed my vocabulary to give specific instructions that relate to lip strength, oral cavity positioning, and abdominal strength to achieve the same goal. I’m not leaving it up to 12 year olds to figure out what I mean by such an amorphous instruction.
Since I moved to the lovely and historic 
This all day! The buzz word around where I teach is “faster air” but kids have zero idea what that means physically. I’ve changed my vocabulary to give specific instructions that relate to lip strength, oral cavity positioning, and abdominal strength to achieve the same goal. I’m not leaving it up to 12 year olds to figure out what I mean by such an amorphous instruction.