Advanced Sounds with the Didgeridoo

Video Transcript

"Once you've gotten a good basic sound on the instrument that feels comfortable to do that, you want to move on to some of the more advanced kind of color and stranger sounds. People are always amazed at the variety of different sounds that you can get out of the didgeridoo. The way to get those basically is it's wide open. Whatever you can do with your mouth or your tongue or your head or your throat in order to make these different sounds just wide open. In some ways it's the hardest thing to teach because you can't really see it, but the fun part is you can just experiment. All of it is fair game, whatever you want to try. A good way to get started I think is to use vowels. In the same way that you would say vowels like A, E, I, O, U, you can use those as you're playing when you're buzzing your lips. If this was our basic sound. I'm now going to say those vowels as I play. A, E, I, O, U. It helps if you really exaggerate them as you're doing it. A, E, I, O, U. That's a good way to get started. You can use those vowels in any combination, any kind of rhythm that you want to put to it. Another one that I think of is a technique that I use with my tongue where I force my tongue toward the front of my mouth to the point where it's almost poking out between my teeth as I play, and you get something like this. Like I said, I can almost feel my tongue vibrating as I do it. I'm still playing the same way. I'm letting my lips buzz the same way. Manipulating my tongue so that it does that. You can also do things with your cheeks and your throat. Particular when you let your cheeks puff out. That's going to change the quality of the sound. That's a good one to practice also because it's going to set us up for the circular breathing exercise that we're going to do later. "