How To Teach Clarinet Better (but great pointers for players too!)

Michelle Anderson, founder of Clarinet Mentors, gives a lecture at the UBC WindFest on How To Teach Clarinet Effectively. This 75 minute presentation is filled with teaching and playing technics that will be useful to many clarinetists. The timeline below can help you jump to the section of the video that most applies to you.

How To Teach Clarinet More Effectively
Presented September 24, 2017 at UBC WindFest

This timeline will help you to find key sections within this video. Points with an asterisk are exercises that you can do with your students (or try yourself as a clarinetist)

1:15 The Dream - What we want for our students
2:25 The most important “Big Picture” things we need to consider to be a good teacher
3:36 The most common challenge that inexperienced players will face (in their own words)
4:18 Reeds - This causes so many problems for clarinetists!
5:22 How to check to see if your student has the correct reed strength
7:15 Reed strength guidelines - a chart
8:01 How to break in a cane reed and how to know if it is waterlogged
8:46 How the angle of your head and clarinet affect sound and ease of playing
*10:45 How to help students find their own ideal playing position
12:15 Voicing - the importance of tongue position for good tone
*14:16 How to help students find the best voicing
* 6:31 How to improve voicing using a tuner
17:30 Tonguing - How to teach the basics
17:39 - Air Support and Tonguing
*18:30 Exercise on how to teach proper air support while tonguing
*19:10 “Inside Out Tonguing”
*20:15 The best way to teach people to put the right part of the tongue on the right part of the reed
*21:00 How to use the “Whisper Technic” while tonguing
21:52 - Question from group “What do we do when they tongue by hitting the roof of their mouth with the tongue?”
22:35 - How to diagnose improper tongue placement
24:46 Finger Technic
*25.12 Two finger exercises to help find the best hand/finger shape to use when playing clarinet
*25:50 How to demonstrate to students that poor finger position will really slow them down
**26:50 How to teach students to hold their left hand correctly, which radically improves finger technic
29:00 How to improve the position of the left thumb
*30:25 An important exercise to help students have better finger technic and much more comfort in the right hand and thumb
33:05 Embouchure - The Three Steps
33:20 How much mouthpiece do we put in our mouths?
*33:45 How to figure this out
35:00 Comment from Mike Brown on how this is true for bass clarinet as well
36:15 Step Two - The bottom lip
36:28 The World’s Worst Embouchure
*36:50 How to teach the bottom lip position for better tone
37:15 How many people (including myself, once) have muscles that literally don’t know how to move into position to play clarinet
37:50 How I was able to teach my muscles to do it (after a year of bad embouchure and a frustrated teacher!)
*40:15 The Embouchure Tester - a great tool to use with your students
*43:45 - A great more advanced air support warmup
44:40 Why clarinetists squeak
45:20 Challenges for more advanced students (In their own words)
45:39 “My Tone Sucks”
*46:23 How to use the Whisper Technic to improve tone and expression
*48:12 A great exercise to improve air speed
**49:25 “Huffing” as a teaching tool - One of the most effective tools for air support and other things
51:20 Mike Brown mentions how good breathing is found by watching a baby breathe
*55:38 How to use Huffing to smooth out wide intervals (Such as the big leap from clarion C to altissimo Eb in the Brahms Sonata)
57:50 Have a good tonal model
*58:22 How to record your students and use these recordings as a supportive (rather than destructive) learning tool
1;00:00 How can we help students to play more expressively?
1:00;15 Using singing
1:01:25 How to explore phrase shapes
1:01:43 Ask students to pencil in their phrase ideas
*1:02:07 How to use Subdivision to to improve expression and create more beautiful phrases
*1;03:47 Using the Whisper Technic with Subdivision
1:04:35 Finger Technic
*1:05:00 Red Alert! How to recognize those spots that are hardest for the students, identify how body tension gets in the way, and create an easier mindset
*1:06:15 Creating Pattern Interuptions for the Brain (ex. playing a fast technical passage as a slow, beautiful, piece)
*1:07:33 Working Backwards Technic
1:08:30 How relaxing fingers can have an undesirable effect on relaxing air
1:10:11 Further Resources
*1:11:00 How to help students to tongue faster with a stop tongue exercise