Some quick thoughts about developing YOUR sound.

Hi there,

It's been a little while. Funny how school makes one busy!


    You know, usually when people talk about sound development or 'developing a sound concept', they refer to the pedagogy behind having a 'good sound'. As well they should, I suppose, as I am of the mindset that when all else fails, strip down to the most basic fundamentals and see what's going on. However, this isn't the concept to which I refer.
    You see, to most folks, 'good sound' and 'good sound concept' are one and the same. It's steady air stream, good embouchure, blah blah blah....I'm talking about the mental end of things; the process by which we develop our ideas on sound in our mind before we train ourselves to try to will that sound our of our instrument.
     One of the purposes of this blog is for me to 1: work things out when I think about them and 2: write about concepts that pop into my head because the thought seems like it might have some importance at the time and if I don't get it out of my A.D.D riddled mind and on to a steadier medium quickly, I might forget. I had such a thought today.
      When we work with students, how many of us actually try to get them to think about or conceptualize what a good sound ? How many of us have even thought about HOW to teach that process or have we even done it ourselves?


We're pretty much all told the same things, right?


      Listen to great players. Do lots of long tones. Learn how to manipulate the overtone series. We hear sounds which appeal to us and try to mimic them. Eventually a bit of our own personality works its way in and there's our developed sound. What if, though, we could take it further by actually thinking about what we want out of our sound. What if we could put a new level of thought into the process of conceptualizing a 'good sound'?


      I had the thought this weekend when I was talking about sound with the principal clarinet at our university. Her sound is fabulous, big, woody, sweet, warm....just great. She stated, though, that lately she'd be dissatisfied with her sound. That's pretty common at multiple stages in our development but it got me thinking since she couldn't really explain to me WHY she was unhappy which gave me this thought-


Wouldn't it be so much easier on student AND teacher if we could figure out verbal cues to allow students to describe what they are hearing in their 'mind's ear' as far as sound concepts?


To be continued when I hash this out a bit more. I think it could have value but how does one verbalize something as personal and unique as a concept of sound?