hello and welcome I'm Michelle Anderson the founder of clarinet mentors today I want to share with you a little practice tool that I use if I have a high note and a piece of music that I don't quite feel secure with usually this is either a high note that comes out of nowhere following a rest or at the beginning of a piece or perhaps we jump up to it from a lower note it's really common for us not to feel secure in hitting that note with good sound so this is one tool of many that I use just to help my body get more secure with that high note so that I feel more confident that I'm going to hit it at the dynamic I want to and with the tone that I want to now for the purposes of this video I've chosen two excerpts of music that both have high notes that I notice are tricky with some of my students and that I find tricky myself they're both from pieces written by carl maria von weber well-known clarinet pieces and he was a composer who really loved the clarinet and wrote some great music for clarinet if you'd like to see these excerpts yourself in the write up below this video there is a link to a PDF file that you can download and you can look at the music or you can print it out whatever you like they're just little samples so the first one I'm going to look at is taken from the Weber concertino and if that's piece you haven't played it's a great one to look at that often becomes one of the first kind of real serious clarinet pieces that my students approach because technically it sits under the fingers very well and there's a lot of fun musical moods within the piece anyway the first note of the piece is a high B flat right above the staff now this is not a particularly difficult note for most people the challenge here is that we come in we want to sneak in on that note super softly the background music is very mysterious and almost spooky here and a great effect to create for our listening audience is that all of a sudden that note sneaks in and for a moment they're not sure what that beautiful distant sound is and then our sound emerges out the woodwork into this big full beautiful warm clarinet sound it's somehow more effective than just boom announcing our presence instantly and so we want to have the confidence to hit that high note very softly many people when they try to play a high note softly find some common things happen one is that in spite of trying to play it softly it kind of explodes out of the instrument so it might do something like this all of a sudden it surprises me it jumps out now there's lots of reasons for that some of it simply our own nervousness like oh my gosh here comes that hard note I might not do it another really common reason is that we're biting down in anticipation of the note so physically speaking just some good habits for high notes are to remember to keep our corners of the mouth actively wrapping in around the mouthpiece that will help prevent any biting or jaw pressure that would inhibit our reed from vibrating but most important it's our air and what we want to do with it so to play soft on any note we are using less air less air means softer sound but we still want the reed to vibrate like crazy so we want that air to be as fast as we can so if I'm just getting to know my high b-flat one exercise I could do is just do a long tone warm up on the b-flat where I start loudly which is pretty easy for most of us to do and I very quickly diminuendo to quite soft and then I just hang out in soft land to see how that feels now maybe hard to hear through a computer screen a very soft tone and what I'm doing there but basically I'm just listening to that soft sound and noticing what my blowing muscles down here have to do to make that air move really fast if I hear any airiness or fuzz or unstability I work on increasing their I have some separate videos on YouTube specifically about long tones and if you haven't explored those I encourage you to do so meanwhile here's the heart of the exercise for today we want to get used to playing that high b-flat under many different conditions and if I can play it under lots of extreme conditions it'll be much easier to come in and play it on a piece of music like the concertino so you can kind of make up your own exercise for this I'm going to take that note and I want to get used to coming in on our six most common dynamic levels pianist mo piano mezzo piano mezzo Forte Forte and fortissimo and aside from that I want to be confident hitting it under different conditions so here's an exercise I would create for myself initially I would actually take out tonguing I'm just going to blow this note with just my air and normally we don't start a note without our tongue but for this exercise it's useful to do it just using our air a metronome can be really handy or you can just be thinking a pulse to yourself what we're gonna do is create an exercise and I could write this out but I find it's almost more effective if we just randomly assign numbers to this ourselves I'm gonna play the note maybe five times each time with a different dynamic and a different note length and I'm not going to stop between them much now some of these notes are going to be successful some of them are not the point of the exercise initially is just to experiment so let's say I'm going to go two beats Forte pause four beats piano pause one beat fortissimo pause two beats pianist mo pause something like that so here's what I might do and then I'd be going even louder but short and then very soft for longer now at first when we're trying to go soft you may find you just get air through your clarinet or you get that low sub tone hmm that's just a sign that your air wasn't quite moving fast enough so if that happens here's how we're gonna get to know that no we're going to Huff our air on that note just short bursts of air again no tongue it's kind of a strange exercise but it helps our blowing muscles and I'm gradually going to make those hops a little bit softer until they're extremely soft then I'm going to say I'm gonna play that note softly for three beats one two great even softer tooth great and so on I'm also going to try playing it loudly so I'm just alternating between different dynamics different note lengths using just my air for articulation purposes now after I've done that for a bit and it's starting to feel more comfortable then I would try toning the notes now if the piece had unusual articulation markings for this particular high note that I might also adapt this exercise to reflect the different types of articulation let's say it was staccato then I would try some loud staccato and then some softer staccato maybe even softer and just Dickens getting the feel for that note and how it works now I won't play through all of the different dynamics on a high F because you can extrapolate from the first exercise how we would do that but let's say I want to work on that particular fingering I would try a couple high ones a couple low ones again using dub just my air or to start the note initially and then I'll add the tongue and once I start getting more comfortable with it and the reason that I would also play it softly is twofold one it's harder and it's always good to challenge ourselves if we can do a more extremely difficult version of something then when we go back to the easier version it will feel all the more easy and it's always nice up psychologically and though it feels easy and comfortable to us again we're also just trying to get to know this note then I would add my tongue in now because we also do want to look at possibly using other fingerings there is an alternate F that we can use here and it's called the long F or sometimes it's called the full F and basically it has our thumb and register key our first three fingers down and our next three fingers down and the same pinkie that we normally use and what you'll find with that fingering is it's a bit more resistant and I find that's comforting when we have to come in out of nowhere now this fingering sometimes isn't practical because of what our fingers might be doing before or after it but in this case we're starting the piece so I often recommend people use that full app when they're starting it and because it's more covered and there's more resistance we can blow a bit more air into it and that allows us to play nice and loud but again I might take that fingering and go through the exercise of huffing loud and soft and I find this one gives me a bit more control so in a piece like this I would probably use that fingering although there's nothing wrong with using the ordinary fingering there after I've worked through a few different huffing zhan the high F and I feel like it's working well then I would add my tongue in and try it loudly and softly and in the case of the piece that we're playing here I'd like to come in nice and strong so then I might just try talking a few strong high-ass and my second one was better than my first and the first one I had a little bit of a challenge with it scooping into the pitch if you listen to it you'll hear subtly whoa that's a sign that I really didn't have my embouchure set properly in that case it was probably a sign that my corners weren't for him and that my tongue wasn't really in position it kind of went from low to higher and that affected the pitch so whenever we're starting a note we kind of want to make sure we're focused and ready to go I fixed it on the second one so if I were practicing this piece I would go back and probably take my clearin out of my mouth out of my mouth and just practice making sure I'm set before I start all right this is just one technique that I use for working on high notes but everything that we want to do on clarinet is to train our body to be comfortable on these notes and just huffing high notes loudly and softly different dynamics really gets our body used to the adjustments we need to make for the higher notes so that they feel easy and comfortable I encourage you to try this on any piece of music where you have a high note that right now you're feeling uncomfortable with just a reminder of some of the common problems we have if it squeaks it's almost always that while we're trying hard we're putting a biting pressure on the reed we're squishing the reed and that causes it to squeak if you get no sound at all it's possible that you're biting so much you've closed the reed off and no sound goes in if you get that undertone before the high note comes out that's a sign there is not enough support for the note and although we can have support with embouchure corners in which will help most of its airspeed so always we want to be working for the fastest possible airstream to get good tone so I have lots of great tricks for the clarinet this one as I say it's a little bit more advanced technique it's great if you have the patience to sit down and pick apart a piece of music and work on one note until it feels comfortable but the bonus is if I work on high F in the Weber second concerto the next piece I come across that has high F it's going to feel more natural and more easy our body learns so quickly that we adapt to it in the next piece will feel easier so I encourage you to try this out I'm curious to know what you think of it and how it works for you there's a comments box below this video and I'd love for you to put your comments in I do read them and I answer your questions if you have any questions for me and I also invite you to join the clarinet mentors community where you get to interact with me even more it's totally free to join if you go to www.hsn.com and it's all designed to help you play the clarinet more easily so I look forward to your comments and I hope to see you on my next video