Warm up with me
Before you start to warm up your clarinet at the start of your practice, ask yourself this, “What is the point of my warmup?”
It really is a fair question.
Most clarinettists on their journey to becoming an improved player will answer this similarly and, equally do similar things to warm up.
Just take a minute and answer the question.
What do you do to warm up?
I bet many of you said things like:
“I play some notes fast to warm up my fingers and instrument as it’s cold”
“I play some scales, run up and down the registers, maybe a chromatic scale or two.”
These are all great answers, but in all honesty, you would achieve much the same results wearing a pair of gloves for a couple of minutes whilst simultaneously breathing into your instrument if your aim was to ‘get warm’.
This is why I have begun to steer clear of the word ‘warm up’ when students come to lessons. I am now toying with the wording ‘preliminary or preparation exercises’. Of course, this is a work in process and the word ‘exercise’ equally conjures up some disconcerting conotations.
However, it is, whatever wording you use, important to really understand the point behind preparation before you look at your pieces.
I teach dialogically and thus, lots of my answers come from conversation with my students so I feel I am hearing what they say and need. My first question for preparing is:
“What are you trying to achieve?”
This answer is likely to be different for each student at each level of their development. For some it might be to become more dexterous around the instrument, for some it might be to control the starts and ends of notes.
The focus of preparatory exercises is to engage with and improve on the various parts of your playing anatomy so that, eventually, they become autonomous. However, that is not to say that once you feel you are a ‘master’ of your craft you should stop with preparation, it may then just become more precises, ie: linked to passages within works.
For the beginner and intermediate player, my initial advice for preparatory exercises is, rather than just playing random scales or arpeggios, focus on something specific within them.
Main areas for attention tend to be:
Brain to finger connectivity and synchronicity
Dexterity of fingers and tongue - moving simultaneously
Aural skills - listening for accurate pitch and recognition of intervals
Breathing - starting and stopping notes, control of the diaphragm through long notes or various dynamics.
Within these areas there are further areas that will likely need attention:
Even-ness of tone and weighting of notes. I often tend to try to give a visual line here and encourage students to work on keeping their notes on the line.
Intonation - this links into pitching, but also means the intonation within the same note, are you falling off the ends of notes or scooping up to starts of notes.
Articulation - is staccato the same throughout or do you sometimes ‘drunk-slur’ on fast passages. Incorporate tongue twisters into your practice.
Your sound in general - are you playing with your throat or clamping down and creating a thin sound? Can you create a rich sound that fills both your instrument and the room, this is not a loud note, but one that is fully rounded in tone.
The next time you come to your practice, go through your notes from your lesson with your teacher. Use a pen to highlight any words that crop up frequently such as tone or control or tonguing. These will be individual to you. Now try to focus on these during your preparation. Find exercises that concentrate on these areas or use scales and arpeggios to focus solely on the areas that need work.
Over the next few weeks I’ll try to put up some ideas for preliminary exercises for different areas to look at. I would also recommend that you spend at least 30 - 35% of your practice doing the preparatory stuff at an intermediate level. This means when you come to look at the parts of the piece you keep getting wrong, you will have done work in the prelim that will, over time, help you improve in context.