so the first thing you need to know to be able to play a recorder is how to hold your recorder so when you hold a recorder your left hand is going to go on top whether you're left-handed or right-handed it doesn't matter your left hand is going to go on top and one of the reasons for that is if you look down to the bottom of your recorder you're going to notice that there's a little hole and it's kind of off to the side so if you put your left hand on top and your right hand on the bottom it's going to line up your pinky perfectly for that hole at the end if you do it the other way around and you put your right hand on the top you'll notice that your left pinky would have to really reach around to get to that hole it would be kind of uncomfortable so that's one of the reasons why our left hand goes on the top so what you want to do to hold your recorder is figure out which hand is your left hand if you're not sure you can go ask somebody which hand your left hand is or you can do it I like to do and I call it the L trick so to do that you put both of your hands out like this and one of your hands is going to make an L going the right way and one's going to make an L going the wrong way so for me my left hand is going to be this one whichever hand has the elbow in the correct way is going to be your left so that's this hand and if you can't remember which one it is you can either put a sticker on your hand or you can take a little bracelet like this and put it on your left hand and that's going to help you remember which hand is going to go on top so if you can't remember what someone tells you or what you do the L trick try one of those things to help you out so you're going to take your left hand and you're going to give yourself a thumbs up always good and you're going to put your thumb actually on the hole on the back of the recorder the back of the recorder is a place that has one hole the front is the place that has lots of holes so you're gonna take yourself you're gonna take your thumbs up put it on the hole that's on the back of the recorder you kind of have to turn your thumb sideways to cover up the hole like this so the thumb on the back hole then you're going to flip it around to the front take your pointer finger and cover up the first hole on the front of the recorder just like that and this is actually the fingering for our first note B which we'll talk about in a different video but this is just a good way to get your recorder ready to hold it so you should be able to hold it with these two fingers your thumb on the back your pointer finger on the front but to give yourself a little extra balance we're going to take our other hand our right hand and just hold the recorder down at the bottom like this eventually when we need to play these other notes down here we're going to have to line up our finger here but for now we don't need to do that we can just hold our recorder at the bottom like that so that's the first part the second thing you might be wondering is where do I hold my recorder go and hold it up to top I do I hold it down low so what you want to do is put it at what we call a 45 degree angle so basically what that means is we want to have it right in the middle we don't want to have it up too high we don't want to have it too low just right in the middle like this and when we blow air into the recorder which we'll talk about next we want to put just the tip of our recorder in our mouth not the whole thing just the very very top so it's going to look something like this once we're ready to play our recorder so that's how to hold your recorder if you think that you've got that down and you're ready to learn how to make a sound and go ahead on to the next video