January 03, 2023

Lately I've been working with some of my students on getting over the break on the clarinet. I've noticed that many of the method books have a series of exercises that explore using the register key, making students play 12th's. And that's where they stop. "Good work kid, you can move your thumb, now good luck moving from A to B."

For most students, I don't think the difficult thing is moving the thumb. I think the difficult part is going from using no fingers, to putting on all the fingers. So here's a simple exercise that I wrote exploring this concept which I hope bridges the gap in the method books.