Hello fellow Windworkers!

I feel like sharing a great moment I had yesterday while re-watching the course again. Enjoy!

First a little history. For the longest time, I’ve always had trouble getting rid of the clamp in my playing. It has been a very persistent issue dating back to my first years on the tuba back in grade 7. I always had trouble making a clean, big sound no matter what I did. That very buzzy, nasally sound persisted. The music directors I had always said the same sort of thing like “more air” or “buzz more on the mouthpiece.” It didn’t work for me and if anything made things worse. My lips were in a lot of pain after playing, hurting days afterwards and I remember crying on the bus rides home because I knew something was wrong with my playing but I didn’t know what it was or how to fix it. Eventually I found my way to Windworks and has been a true godsend.

I’ve been working my way slowly and very carefully through the course doing my best to let go of any expectations of results as expectations will almost always lead to reinforcing our old habit as I did make the mistake early in the course rushing through it missing a lot of information. Because of this the problem of clamping persisted despite doing mmahooh exercise. However, on my 5th rerun of the course on the Andante level, I noticed that teeth and jaw were closing every time I did mmahooh exercise without even knowing it. Now knowing this, I closed my eyes and did the finger exercise to prevent my jaw from closing as I brought my corners in and then did it again except with the visualizer and no finger. What a difference! That opening is enormous and feels totally different from how I’ve always done it and I can sense the 1.0 wiring of my brain freaking out but that’s ok. I’ll get there one day at a time.

There is a silver lining to the clamping fiasco believe or not lol.

Because of this very sneaky an persistent clamping issue, I was able to correct a lot of other bad habit I developed over the years such as a rounded and hunched posture, shallow breaths (that and very constricted breathing habits like raising my chest and shoulders to inhale then later “belly breathing” forcing my abdomen out to inhale which created a ton of strain in my body, a lot of unnecessary abdominal activation to play higher and louder, overblowing, and choking in the throat to play higher. Yes I know I basically had every bad habit under the sun but at least now I know what these bad habits feel like so I can feel the difference when I’m actually doing it correctly.

Moral of the story don’t be me and rush through the course and always do these exercises eyes closed. Even then it can be easy to overlook things even when eyes are closed. Also recognize that change is gradual and will happen over time. Just like what The Cleaner from Toy Story 2: “You can’t rush art.”

Hope you enjoyed my long post and I hope it helps!

REPLY FROM GREG:

Best Wishes,
Greg