Lesson with HLS #2

On Friday, September 9, my "guinea pig" student mentioned in the last post (who will be referred to in this blog now as HLS) and I had our second lesson together. Our lessons are going great so far and I'm already starting to see the first glimmers of real progress.

There are a couple of technical aspects of playing the clarinet that I'm working on with HLS: embouchure change and hand position/finger technique.

Regarding the embouchure change, things are going well - slowly, but well - so I'm happy with that. After going over the specifics of a good embouchure in our first lesson together, I had HLS talk me through all of the "steps" in creating an embouchure during this lesson. She remembered almost everything correctly and by having her talk me through the process I was able to quickly identify what things needed further clarification. I also asked her to warm-up and play her scales in front of the mirror and watching her embouchure, noticing when it starts to revert back to old habits. So far I've noticed this happening mostly when something becomes technically hard or she is getting tired - we'll see if she comes to the same conclusions this week in her practice. :-)

The hand position and finger technique have already improved a lot, but she is still playing her etudes slow enough that she can really think about each muscle movement. This is great for now while she establishes the muscle control and relaxation necessary for good technique. We are sticking with the same etudes for another week and trying to work on speeding up the tempo by practicing with a metronome and allow the finger motion to become more fluid and even as the tempo increases. I'm curious to see how this challenge goes this week because these ideas are clearly new ones for HLS.

Those are the essential things we worked on in our 50 minutes together, and I hope I see the evidence of good practice again this coming week as I did this past week.

Go Team!! :-)

ps - hopefully I'll get a few minutes of video up from a moment in this lesson when we were talking about hand position.... if I can figure this thing out!