Everyday Recorder Keep Fit

How often do you practise your recorder? Don’t worry, I’m not making a judgement about your playing or commitment to the instrument, but I am interested. For some people recorder playing is a skill they diligently practise every day, while for others it may be a fun activity they only do in the company of others. Of course, there’s a sliding scale of possibilities between these two options!

Bending the laws of physics

For many of us, simply finding the time to practise is the biggest problem - modern life makes so many demands on our time that it’s easy to neglect our music making.

I don’t know about you, but I often find myself wishing I could bend the laws of physics, creating the occasional 36 hour long day or 8 day week. Now I think about it, perhaps that isn’t such a great idea… Parkinson’s Law (coined by author Cyril Northcote Parkinson in 1955) dictates that work always expands to fill the time available. No doubt, if I had a 36 hour day at my disposal the boring stuff would still squeeze out the time for music making!

Of course, practice doesn’t need to occupy many hours every day – you can make gains in a short time if you know how. When I studied at music college I habitually practised for three or four hours each day. But when I emerged into the world of work I swiftly realised this was no longer practical. To compensate I taught myself to practise more efficiently, learning to achieve in 30 minutes what would once have taken an hour or more.

If you’re busy, don’t neglect the basics…

Inevitably we tend to focus on actually playing music - that’s the fun part of playing the recorder. But by neglecting the basics of technique you may compromise the quality of your music making too.

Below you’ll find a three step programme to help you hone your technique - think of it as a daily keep fit workout for your recorder playing. None of these exercises will take more than a few minutes, but if you do them regularly you will notice differences in your playing.

I’ve broken them down into three easy steps, each of which will take five minutes of your time. Now, you’re supposed to spend two minutes, morning and evening cleaning your teeth and I bet you spend those four minutes brushing without giving it a second thought. Just one of these steps takes only a minute longer. If you’re still thinking, “But I haven’t got the time”, just think of it as one of those non-negotiable tasks we all carry out every day without fail.

First things first…

Always have a recorder out and ready to play!

The simple task of assembling your instrument can create inertia, so why not keep an instrument out together and ready to play at all times? An inexpensive plastic recorder won’t take up a lot of space on your table. If it’s there, staring you in the face every time you walk past, you’re much more likely to pick it up and play!

If you have five spare minutes a day…

Let’s begin by thinking about your breathing and tone:

Step one… Spend a minute breathing deeply, really filling your lungs with air. Keep your stomach relaxed so it can expand as you breathe in. Initially, exhale freely, enjoying the benefits of all that oxygen. As I often tell the recorder players I meet, breathing is an excellent thing to do, whether playing the recorder or in every day life!

Next, try hissing as you exhale, gently squeezing your stomach muscles to control the speed of the air. Varying the strength of movement in your stomach muscles, you’ll hear the sound of your hissing change as the breath moves faster and slower.

Step two… Use the rest of your five minutes to play a simple scale slowly. And I mean really slowly – perhaps four steady beats on each note. Breathe as often as you need to - every couple of notes if need be. On every single note really listen critically to your sound.

Do you enjoy your tone? If not, try using faster or slower air (using your stomach muscles, as in step one above) until you can make a full, rich sound on every note.

If you have ten spare minutes a day…

The next step is to make your fingers neater. Practise all the items above, plus the following:

Step one… Break your chosen scale down into groups of five notes and play these groups up and down, slurring every note. Begin slowly, playing the notes as whole beats at a speed of crotchet=72. Really focus on the quality of your finger changes – make small, quick movements. Playing in front of a mirror is handy to check you’re not lifting your fingers too far from the instrument.

Step two… When you need to move several fingers together, use a mirror to check they’re moving at exactly the same time. You may need to be more proactive with the fingers you lift as these don’t have gravity to help them!

If you have fifteen minutes a day…

You’re making progress on your tone and fingers now, so let’s build up some speed too. Practise all the exercises above, plus these:

Step one… Using the same five note scale patterns you practised in the last step, gradually increase their speed. Continue slurring all the notes. Really listen to the notes (close your eyes – it’ll make you listen more carefully!) and ask yourself if they’re completely smooth and even. If your fingers begin to rush away, use a metronome to help you control the speed.

Step two… Now put your five note patterns back together into a complete scale and repeat the process. This’ll demand more concentration and will help you take stock of your progress.

Don’t forget to keep listening to your tone - aim to maintain the beautiful sound you honed in step one at the same time!

Make yourself a promise…

My challenge to you is to practise these exercises every day for a whole month. Now much as I would love to be able to check in with you all on your progress, that would require me to have days which last at least 96 hours! Instead, make a promise to yourself that you’ll stick with it.

If you can make these simple exercises part of your every day routine, you will see results in a month’s time. If you don’t believe me, why not record your first session? The voice memo app on any smartphone is all you need, or a cassette recorder for those who prefer more retro technology! After a month, record yourself again and listen back to both for comparison.

I’d love to hear how you get on with this. Why not share your experiences in the comments below? Or perhaps you already have your own daily recorder ‘keep fit’ routine - if you do I’d love to hear more!

The technique zone - Making space and time to breathe

You’d think we’d be experts in the art of breathing, wouldn’t you? After all, breathing is something we do instinctively, so it’s a subject we rarely give a second thought to. If we’re running for a bus, or maybe if we’ve got a bad cough, we might be more conscious of our breathing, but otherwise it’s something we do without consideration.

A while ago Liz, one of my subscribers, got in touch to tell me about the challenges she finds when breathing deeply to play the recorder and it struck me it might be a useful topic to cover here in the Technique Zone:

“It’s making time to take a breath I find difficult. I'm still frequently left short of enough breath for the final note, and Bach is just impossible! I think the problem lies in finding/making enough time between the notes to take a big lungful or not breathing in deeply enough in the first place.”

I think there are two issues here. One is learning how to breath in deeply and quickly, so we make the best use of our natural lung capacity. The second is a musical issue - specifically how to make space for breaths without it feeling like we’re creating a huge chasm in the music.

I often see musicians struggling with this problem, so if you’re nodding your head in sympathy with Liz’s message, you’re in good company. In today’s blog we’ll look at both topics and I’ll do my best to help you overcome these challenges.

Back to basics.

Let’s begin with a quick refresher on the best way to breathe when you’re playing. I covered the topic of breathing and tone production in a blog last year. You’ll find that post here, but let’s have a quick refresher on the basics of breathing for playing the recorder before we consider other techniques.

First of all, be as relaxed as possible. Whenever you play, always sit or stand with good posture, keeping your face, throat, neck, shoulders and abdomen, relaxed and soft.

When you breathe in, allow your rib cage and stomach to expand as the air descends into your lungs, inflating them like balloons. You then need to create a little tension to control your tone when you blow out again – specifically in your stomach muscles. Tightening these muscles places pressure on the diaphragm, which in turn gently squeezes the air from your lungs and out into your recorder.

When we practise these techniques to improve our breath control and tone quality, more often than not we do so in a slow controlled way. This means taking leisurely, relaxed breaths in, then releasing the air in a measured way, perhaps playing long notes. This is excellent practice, but doesn’t necessarily equip us for the real musical world.

Learning to breathe quickly

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Bach was a musical genius, but rarely considered the need to breathe in his music!

As Liz implied in her email, one of the greatest challenges is being able to breathe in deeply at speed.

Composers don’t always allow us a lot of time to breathe, and some are more sympathetic than others - I am of course primarily thinking of J.S.Bach. Singers and wind players alike always complain about his long phrases, which take no account of our very human need for oxygen!

If we’re going to breathe in quickly and deeply, what’s the most important factor to remember? Undoubtedly relaxation is key here.

If you’re one of those people who habitually pulls in their stomach muscles to make themselves look thinner, you’re going to struggle to breathe in quickly and deeply. Instead you need to let your stomach and rib cage remain as relaxed as possible, even if this means you don’t look quite a slender as perhaps you might wish!

Let’s begin the process of speeding up our breathing with an exercise:

Practising this exercise regularly, gradually reducing the time you allow yourself to breathe in, will help you learn to fill more of your lung capacity more swiftly. Of course sometimes you’ll have almost no time to breathe – maybe just a tiny rest or perhaps even between notes in a fast run. Here you need to speed up this technique even more, and for this I have a mental image to help you.

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Many years ago, I observed a colleague at a Saturday morning music centre talking to his young choir, helping them learn to breathe quickly and deeply. He described the type of breath they needed as one of those you take when something catches you by surprise - a sharp but deep breath.

No doubt you can think of occasions when you’ve experienced exactly this, but my colleague Mitch had a particularly imaginative scenario which he described to the children. He asked them to imagine they were sitting in a peaceful space, minding their own business, perhaps quietly reading a book. Out of nowhere a tribe of rabbits bursts through the window, riding Harley Davidson motorbikes and toting machine guns. He proposed, quite rightly I think, that this sight would cause you to gasp with surprise!

Try to imagine such a scene. Perhaps not rabbits on motorbikes, but instead think of a moment when something has caused you to gasp for breath in sheer surprise. When this happens, you don’t have time to think about the mechanics of how you breathe. Instead your body instinctively draws the maximum amount of air into your lungs at great speed. This is what we need to do, albeit in a slightly more controlled way, when we have to breathe swiftly and deeply, mid phrase.

Removing the kinks…

We’ve already talked about how your midriff needs to remain soft and relaxed, but this isn’t the only part of your body to consider. Working upwards from your lungs to your windpipe, you come to the narrowest part of your breathing apparatus.

Take a moment to picture your garden hose. Imagine you’ve tied knots in the hose, or trapped part of it under something heavy. These kinks and restrictions prevent the water flowing freely and quickly. Now think of your windway and picture what happens when you tense your throat. Just like the hosepipe, this tension creates a restriction, stopping the air flowing freely. This limits the speed at which you can fill your lungs.

Spend a couple of minutes quietly breathing in and out again in a genuinely relaxed way. Make sure you keep your face cheeks, lips and throat really relaxed, so your entire breathing apparatus is as relaxed and open of possible. One of the best ways to remove tension and relax your throat is to yawn. When you yawn, your soft palate lifts, and your throat opens up, creating lots of room. I bet just reading about it makes you want to yawn, doesn’t it? I’m fighting back a yawn just writing about it now!

Most wind instruments require an embouchure - using your lips and face muscles to control the vibrations of a reed or to buzz into a brass mouthpiece. Our instrument doesn’t demand this, but instead you should aim to keep your face and throat relaxed and free of tension when playing. I’ve heard other wind teachers talk about breathing in with a ‘yawning breath’ which is a great image to have in your mind. Imagine your throat and windway as wide pipes which have enough capacity to allow in lots of air very quickly, rather than that narrow, knotty hosepipe we imagined earlier.

Use your mouth, not your nose!

Finally (and this may seem like a statement of the blindingly obvious) always breathe in through your mouth to play the recorder. I’ve encountered several recorder players over the years who breathe in through their nose. When you think about it, it’s clear that inhaling through your mouth is quicker and more efficient, simply because air cannot travel as quickly through the small spaces of your nostrils. However, if this makes just one of you think about what you’re doing and realise perhaps you’ve been breathing through your nose rather than your mouth, it’s been worth me stating the obvious!

Okay, so we’ve considered the physical aspects of breathing quickly and deeply, so now let’s look at how we put this into practice while playing music…

Sometimes the music we play allows lots of room to breathe. This may come in the form of rests or breath marks, carefully planned out between phrases. But sometimes a really quick breathe is required, perhaps during a very small rest or in the middle of a long run of fast notes. This is where the techniques I’ve described above will help you.

Tailoring breaths to suit different recorders

Of course, different sizes of recorder demand varying quantities of breath. When playing a sopranino, for instance, you may find that inhaling really deeply results in you having too much air left in your lungs, so you then have to exhale before you can breathe in again for the next phrase. In contrast, a bass recorder will gobble up all the air you put into it very quickly and you might find you simply can’t reach the end of a phrase.

We all have different lung capacities and this is partly determined by our build. For instance, a tall person will naturally have larger lungs than someone who is short. It’s entirely possible to develop your breathing though, learning to use your natural capacity more efficiently, as I discussed in my earlier blog.

Even if you work really hard, you may still find there are phrases you simply cannot play in one breath, particularly on larger sizes of recorder. In this situation don’t give yourself too hard time - you’re only human and we all have our physical limitations!

If you feel you’re going to run out of air, don’t just stagger on to the next breath mark, rationing your breath to try and make it last. This compromises the quality of your tone and ruins your intonation. A much better solution is to find an additional place to breathe, so you can maintain the best possible tone throughout. If you’re playing in an ensemble with several players on each part, a handy strategy is to agree who will breathe where. By staggering your breaths in different places, you can create the illusion of a long well supported phrase, even if no individual player can manage the entire phrase in one go.

Be prepared!

When sight reading we tend to grab breaths whenever we can. That’s absolutely fine because you’re just getting to know the music. But when you settle down to really learn a piece thoroughly it’s a good idea to plan you’re going to breathe, especially if the music you’re playing from doesn’t contain printed breath marks. Knowing the location of your next breath means you can judge how deeply you need to breathe at any given moment.

Remember, there’s rarely an absolutely right or wrong place to breathe. Experiment inserting breaths at different places and see which feels right for you. Most music contains regular phrase lengths - perhaps two or four bars - so use that as a starting point. If the piece begins with an anacrusis (or upbeat), subsequent phrases will likely do the same - a useful guide when seeking out further breaths.

Remember too that any breaths you pencil into your music aren’t then set in stone forever. Music making should be a fluid, dynamic affair, and you’re allowed to change your mind about the best places to breathe as you get to know the music better.

Breathing without spoiling the musical line

Breaths should never sound like a desperate gasp for air!

If you only have a short space in which to breathe, it’s very easy to feel you need to do so as quickly as possible, to avoid interrupting the flow of the music. This seems logical, but in fact a desperate gasp will often interrupt the musical line more than a carefully planned and more leisurely breath.

Imagine you’re reading a speech to a large crowd of people. Between sentences you breathe in and take a moment for the points you’ve made to hit home. Hurrying on between sentences makes the text harder to understand for your audience and will make your listeners feel uncomfortable. Try to use the same strategy in your music making. The music needs to breathe just as much as you do, so use your breaths as musical punctuation to add clarity to your phrasing.

The music below is a short extract from the second movement of Handel’s Recorder Sonata in F major - you can click on the music to make it bigger if you want to play it yourself.

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Here’s a recording of the same extract. Listen carefully and you’ll hear I’ve added a breath three notes before the end of bar 22, in the middle of the semiquaver passagework. At this point the melodic pattern changes and it seems to me to be an appropriate spot for a top-up breath.

Try playing the music yourself at a tempo which allows you to get around the notes fluently - you don’t have to play it as quickly as me! Now record yourself and listen back to it. The voice memo app on a smartphone is useful for this. When you listen to yourself playing, do your breaths sound like an act of desperation by someone who’s gasping for air? Or do they sound well considered and musical?

Compare your recording with mine and listen to how I make room for the breaths. The music, like spoken text, needs room to breathe, so the musical sentences make sense. Even in the middle of a run of semiquavers you can create space to breathe. Try and make your breaths feel they are an intrinsic part of the music, rather than an apologetic need for air.

If you find this difficult, play the music again and make really obvious spaces for the breaths, creating additional rests where you need to inhale. Gradually make these spaces smaller, using the quick, deep, yawning breaths I described earlier. As this becomes more natural you’ll be surprised how much time you can take to breathe and if you do this with conviction it will feel like part of the music.

Now make another recording with these more leisurely, purposeful breaths, and listen back to it. Does this feel like a more coherent performance? Do the breaths feel more organic and musical? It may seem counterintuitive to do this, but as your confidence and conviction grows around breathing, your breaths will sound more musical and considered.

Collaborate with your fellow musicians

If you’re playing with other musicians, agreeing on where to breathe should be a collaborative process. There will be places where you should all breathe together, and you may decide that the music would benefit if you allow a little bit more space to do so. In other situations, one part will need a breath while the other voices are still playing. Here it may be necessary to note in your part that someone else needs a little time to breathe. It’s all a matter of give-and-take - if you allow one of your fellow musicians time to breathe, no doubt, they will do the same for you at another time.

~ ~ ~

I hope the tips I’ve shared today will prove helpful in your playing and have gone some way to answering Liz’s question. The most important thing is to remember you’re human and your lung capacity and technique may not always immediately match up to the music you’re trying to play. This shouldn’t stop you trying challenging pieces of music, so have a go, experiment with different places to breathe, and most importantly, have fun. Don’t get too hung up on the notes, but instead focus on making music, allowing room for both you and the music to breathe.

If you’ve learnt a piece of music which particularly tests your breathing, why not tell us about it in the comments below. I’d love to hear what strategies you used to overcome the challenges while practising.

The Technique Zone - creating a truly beautiful tone

“Spare the breath and spoil the tone”

— Walter Bergmann

Walter Bergmann’s pithy aphorisms about recorder playing result from years spent working with amateur recorder players; observing their habits. While some may sound a little facetious, they all contain at least a nugget of truth. Today’s blog is inspired by the golden rule quoted above - one I often repeat to the musicians I work with. Let’s explore the reasons why…

Which element of technique do you pay most attention to when playing? I bet there are many occasions when you get tied up with fast fingerwork, or moments when you feel you’re wrestling with some sort of tongue twister. But what happens to your tone while this battle is going on? Almost certainly it suffers as you struggle to multitask. In this second chapter of The Technique Zone my mission is to help you understand how to work on your sound - hopefully to the point where you develop good habits which will hold, no matter how fast the notes are

Setting good foundations

In part one of The Technique Zone I talked about the importance of good posture when playing. Hopefully you’ve been thinking about this in recent weeks but if you’d like a refresher you can find that blog post here.

The next step is to get you breathing efficiently. Breath is as vital for a good recorder tone as it is for life itself, so it’s worth taking a moment to consider exactly how our lungs work. Breathing is such an instinctive act - our bodies just get on with it and it’s often only when things go wrong that we become aware of it. 

Understanding the way we breathe

The most important tool for breathing is your diaphragm - a parachute shaped muscle which sits beneath your lungs, separating them from your digestive system. Like your heart, it does its job without conscious direction from your brain. This is vital or there’s a danger we’d forget to breathe if something more exciting distracted us! 

So what does your diaphragm actually do? Fundamentally, it pulls downwards, expanding your lungs and creating a vacuum in them. This vacuum pulls air in from the atmosphere via your windpipe, filling your lungs and providing oxygen to your brain - breathing in. When it’s time to exhale your diaphragm relaxes, pushing the waste products (carbon dioxide) and any unused breathe out of your lungs. All this happens between 12 and 20 times a minute at rest without us even thinking! There are other muscles in your rib cage (your intercostal muscles) which hep this process, but for the purposes of recorder playing it’s the diaphragm that’s the main focus of our attention. If you want to learn more about how your lungs work I can recommend this article from the British Lung Foundation which explains the complete process of breathing very clearly.

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Learn to breathe efficiently

If you’re going to make the best possible tone with your recorder there’s one thing you need lots of - breath! We take our breathing for granted 99% of the time and it’s something we only really consider when under stress - perhaps when running for the bus or working out at the gym. At these moments our bodies need more oxygen so our breathing mechanism instinctively works harder, using the spare lung capacity which goes unused most of the time. 

If you’re to play with a beautiful tone you need to learn to utilise this spare capacity at will, really filling your lungs so allow for long, controlled musical phrases. The first step is to learn to inhale in a relaxed, open manner, really filling your lungs with air. 

The starting point is to be as relaxed as possible, especially around your abdomen. Take a few deep breaths in and as you do so imagine the air travelling right to the bottom of your lungs. To do this your stomach muscles need to be relaxed and soft - don’t try to hold your stomach muscles in to look thinner while you’re doing this. Allow your stomach and the soft tissue in your sides and back to expand as you inhale and your diaphragm pulls downwards, compressing the contents of your abdomen. When you exhale, do so in a completely relaxed way - just let the air go with no attempt to control its flow. 

It’s no bad idea to spend a minute or two doing this before you play each day so the feeling of really filling your lungs becomes natural and instinctive. This is of course the way you breathe when you’re asleep and you’re completely relaxed.

How to take active control of your diaphragm 

If the diaphragm is an involuntary muscle how can we control it to help our recorder playing? Although you can’t directly feel your diaphragm, it is possible to give it a helping hand by using your stomach muscles. We’ll begin by using these muscles in an extreme way and the gradually take control over the exhalation of breath.

Take a deep, open relaxed breath and this time strongly squeeze your tummy muscles to push the air out of your lungs really quickly. Imagine blowing out lots of candles on a birthday cake, trying to make sure none of them are left flickering. When you do this, the pressure from your stomach muscles pushes on the diaphragm, squeezing the air out of your lungs.

As you get used to this, gradually reduce the strength of contraction in your stomach muscles so you still exhale quickly but in a more controlled manner. This is still too violent for recorder  playing, but it’s part of the process of taking control of your breathing.

Finally, instead of tensing up your stomach muscles strongly, make it a gradual squeeze, noting how you can vary the speed of the air leaving your mouth with these abdominal muscles. This is where you want to be for playing the recorder. You’re now controlling the flow of air using these powerful muscles rather than creating tension in your chest, shoulders and neck. In the following video clip I demonstrate this technique.

Do you look happy as you play?

Even if recorder playing is an absolute joy for you (and why wouldn’t it be?!), you should always aim to look sulky and a little depressed! When you smile you engage lots of small muscles around your face and throat, creating tension - try smiling right now and note the way your face muscles tense up. 

Now take a breath and sigh heavily, consciously relaxing your lips, cheeks and throat.  This is the feeling you want while playing the recorder as any tension in your windway will have an adverse effect on your tone. Try yawning too, and notice how this opens up and relaxes your throat. 

Unlike all other wind instruments, there is no embouchure required for the recorder - the act of forming your lips around or against a mouthpiece. Instead you should aim to keep your lips and throat as relaxed as possible - no real effort is needed to seal the lips around the beak of the instrument. If you don’t believe me, try actively tensing up your face and throat and notice the effect this constriction has on your tone! 

Putting these new skills into practice

Now you know how to breath well, let’s grab a recorder and use these new skills to play.

Pick a recorder (perhaps a treble or tenor for starters) and try some of the exercises in the following video. Take some time to explore the extremes of your sound - from really weedy to overblown and violent. Don’t worry about disturbing your neighbours! 

Play notes in different parts of the instrument’s range and notice the way they demand different levels of breath. Low notes need gentle breath or they split easily - for these note you need to squeeze your stomach muscles very gently. 

In contrast, your breath needs to be moving faster for the highest notes - a firmer squeeze from those abdominal muscles. Thinking about these differences in terms of speed of air rather than being loud or quiet can be really helpful. To get a better sense of this, blow gently on your hand (slow moving breath) and notice how the air is warm, as it has time to pick up heat from your body before it leaves your mouth. Now engage your stomach muscles more firmly to move the breath quickly. As it touches your hand the breath now feels cold. This is because the air has less contact time with your blood vessels and doesn’t pick up body heat. You may find it helpful to think of low notes as requiring warm air, while high notes demand cooler air. 

How to develop your tone through practice

As with any new skill, it’s best to practise some simple exercises at first, so you’re able to give them your full attention. In time these techniques become habitual and you’ll need to think about them less while working on other things. Here are a few simple exercises to develop your tone.

1. Long notes. Ok, long notes aren’t the most exciting thing to practise, but they do give you lots time to think! Spend a few minutes at the start of each practice session playing long notes in different parts of the recorder’s range. With each one, aim to find the ideal speed of air to make a full, beautiful tone - slower air for the low notes, faster air for the high ones. Really listen to your sound (close your eyes - you’ll notice more!) and take care to keep the pitch of each note the same from beginning to end - don’t let them sag as you lungs begin to empty. As you feel you’re running out of breath, engage those stomach muscles a little more and you may be surprised at the untapped reserves of air remaining in your lungs.

2. Slow scales. Pick a really simple scale (no more than one sharp or flat) and play it really slowly - perhaps four steady beats on each note. As you rise up through the scale, you’ll need to gradually increase the speed of your breath to make the optimum sound. When you run out of breath, stop to breathe in deeply and restart on the same note you just finished. As you do this, listen carefully to see if your tone improves when you restart. If it does, that’s because you’d stopped blowing as efficiently as your lungs emptied. Instead, try to ensure the tone matches so you can be sure you’re always making the best possible sound.

Five or ten minutes spent every day on these two simple exercises will have a dramatic effect on your tone - as long as you really think about what you’re doing and listen critically to what your hear. 

The techniques I’ve covered here won’t make you a whizzy, virtuosic recorder player, but you’ll definitely sound better. Fast fingers and nippy tonguing can come later, but if there’s one thing I’m always imploring of musicians I work with it’s to play with a genuinely beautiful tone.

When Walter Bergmann said, “Spare the breath and spoil the tone” he was absolutely right. Blowing inefficiently will create a weedy, undernourished tone which doesn’t make good use of the your instrument’s design. If you want just one thing to focus on every time you play, you simply can’t go wrong by concentrating on breathing and blowing more efficiently. I often say to groups I work with that few things in recorder playing can’t be improved by using more air and I suspect I’ll be saying that until I retire! 

Now it’s your turn to do some homework…

If my words here have inspired you to work on your tone here’s a simple task for you. Pick a simple melody to learn, then record yourself playing it. If you own a smartphone the built in voice memo app will do the job just fine. If you’re not sure what tune to choose, why not try this one by Jacob Van Eyck:

Next, spend a few minutes each day working on the exercises I talked about earlier - deep breathing and controlled blowing, long notes and slow scales. Ten minutes will be enough to make a difference. Maybe think of it as the recorder playing equivalent of cleaning your teeth - one off those short tasks you carry out without fail every day!

In six weeks time, record yourself again playing the same tune and compare the two. I’m sure you’ll notice a difference and by this stage the techniques you’re using will be more habitual, freeing you up to concentrate on other aspects of your playing.

Do leave a comment below if you’re planning to try this (there’s nothing like promising something in public to make you feel more accountable!) and I’d love it if you could report back in a few weeks and let us know how you’re getting on. Why not join me in my mission to make the recorder soundworld a more beautiful place!