I totally relate, Chris! Congrats on Your Awareness of what you are doing…that is the most important part of playing.

I had to avoid Clarke 1 for many months due to years of bad habits that I felt impossible or unlikely to overcome.

What helped me is doing octaves with breath attack and passively released air, observing the incremental effort involved (I.e. not much low G to G on the staff) and trying to do as little as possible necessary to change pitch, kind of trying to miss by not doing enough.

That’s important, you have to surrender expectations and become an objective Observer when experimenting, like a scientist does–scientists avoid forming a conclusion beforehand, they have to be open to any outcome.

Otherwise, you’ll just manipulate something (tighten your throat, kick the air) and won’t learn what made you successfully or unsuccessfully achieve the pitch.

I was doing the octave thing today and posted details in the other thread a little while ago today.

And of course Greg’s course is great, going up the harmonic series with different articulation and passive and active air, etc.

My $.02, FWIW. Good luck! Let us know how it goes.

Wr have to be willing to fail when trying new methods, otherwise we wont ever learn–we learn from failure.