At last! I am so excited that the
Clarinet Is Easy lesson series will be ready to share on Monday, December 17th, 2012! I have been working very hard on this for months, and I have tried to include all of the topic suggestions that you all have sent to me. This course is a 10 - lesson course for those of you that want an in-depth, step-by-step guide to all of the technics and tools that you need to play clarinet easily and properly. Nearly all of the frustrations that I see people experiencing - (trouble with high notes, squeaking, fingers that don't move around the instrument the way the should, tonguing trouble etc.) are all easy to prevent if you learn with proper systems, and they can be fixed with simple changes to the current systems if you missed out on that learning in the first place.
This course is set up in 10 weekly lessons, but I got carried away and put about a year's worth of material into it! I figure that with video lessons, you can watch them again and again, and brush up on any units that seem helpful over time. It was originally designed to be a course for complete beginners, and with that in mind, Lesson One includes how to put the instrument together properly, and our first five notes. That will be very basic for many of you, but I am also a firm believer in teaching "advanced" topics right from the beginning. Lesson One also includes many of the most important good habits to get you started in relation to embouchure, blowing, tonguing, posture and fingers in Lesson One. That's more than I would typically do on someone's first lesson, but for those of you with some previous experience, it will help you evaluate what you are already doing well, and where you could be improving. I will send out an email later with week with more details about the course, but right now I have some special bonuses for you!
Many of you have written to me about challenges with the timing of music. Most people kind of figure out rhythm on their own, and do alright, until something new is thrown at them, and they don't have a system for learning it. I've heard so many people complain that they don't have a good sense of rhythm, or they just don't "get it". I think they simply haven't learned how to do it. The good news is, rhythm is actually very easy to learn and improve. Some of my students who have the best ability to read rhythms once felt that it was hopeless. They often had great ears, and had gotten by playing more or less by ear while listening to other players. That worked well until they had to play something unfamiliar, or all by themselves. Once they decided to learn how to read rhythms, they applied a simple counting system to the most common rhythm patterns and quickly learned to read with ease. In the Clarinet Is Easy series of lessons, I have included a bonus set of accompanying lessons that are guidelines for how to read music. This includes the valuable rhythm learning system. I thought that it would be fun to share one of these lessons with you today. This is taken from Lesson Five, and gives you a system for counting 6/8 rhythms.
This video lesson is about half an hour long - much longer than I usually put in the Clarinet Mentors newsletters. I do say in the video that usually I would probably split this material up over three lessons. If you find 6/8 rhythms a bit tricky, I recommend that you work your way through the exercises in this video. You can take your time going through it. I predict that after a couple of weeks, you will feel like 6/8 is pretty simple.
I have created a website that is an introduction to the Clarinet Is Easy course. I have posted the half hour 6/8 video lesson there for you, since it comes from the new course. When you click the link below, you will be taken to a page with a video introduction. (It is mostly me being excited about all of the new stuff that is coming online!) I have a special offer box there for you. Only until December 16th, 2012, I will be offering some FREE videos taken directly out of the Clarinet Is Easy course. They will be surprises, but good ones. I will only send the links to those of you that sign up to see them on that page. At the end of the intro video, there will be a button to click to take you to the 6/8 rhythm instructional video. I will keep the 6/8 video accessible to you for longer than Dec. 16th, but the other bonus videos are just available until the course is ready for sale on Monday.
I would love to receive comments from you about the 6/8 video if you enjoy it, or if you have questions. You'll discover that there is a Facebook comment sheet directly under the 6/8 video for you to leave comments on the web page.
Enjoy this video, and if you are already a rhythm whiz, then just sign up for the mysterious, bonus, free videos!
