Breathing Techniques for Beginning Clarinet Players

Video Transcript

" Hi! My name is Leslie Bernick and I am speaking on behalf of expertvillage.com. Today I’m going to talk about proper breathing techniques for clarinet and this really would apply to most wind instruments. When you work on breathing, you want to breathe from your diaphragm. You do not want to just take air, either is in your mouth or from the upper part of your lungs. You want to really expand and really fill up especially as you progress and you are going to be playing longer passages, you want to really fill up your lungs with your diaphragm, again you are going to set your mouth on the mouthpiece, take a big breath. And if you take the proper amount of air, you will be able to go a long time on one breath. As a beginner you will tend to squeak a lot. This is totally common, squeaking can happen either by taking, generally it is by taking too much mouthpiece in your mouth or as you are starting to cover the holes when you accidentally do not cover the holes or push keys that you should push you will tend to get a squeak. So again you want to take a big breath, and you are ready to go."