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Good morning.
Welcome back to Play with a Pro.
It’s early morning in Copenhagen,
I have a cup of coffee...
... I have my bassoon, I have my reeds...
And I’d like to talk you through
how to get the day started.
We all have lots of things to do,
and it’s difficult to portion out our energy.
We usually spend the time just noodling around,
and there’s always something missing, so...
I have this kind of warm-up routine,
and first thing we do,
after having a bit of coffee,
is selecting a reed.
What do we need in a reed? Well...
You can actually hear the precision from the fingers
already at this stage, while warming up the instrument,
even without the reed.
One more time:
Let’s add a bit of speed to this,
going into 16th notes:
Then alternate:
triplets, 16th notes chromatically up.
Now we start in the B natural.
This really warms up your air through the body,
warms up the bassoon itself
and also warms up a little bit of your tonguing muscles.
Very important is that already on this stage
don’t move around with your embouchure,
don’t jump.
Just keep a very, very round and fixed embouchure
and let the tongue hit at an angle on the crook,
just like we talked about with the reed exercises.
Now we’re ready to make staccato.
Use the point of tenuto:
Stay there, release the note
and go fast back again.
The faster back you go to the point sealing the reed,
the shorter the note will be.
Keep a good ear open for intonation
while doing this exercise.
Your staccato needs to be in tune as well.
Try:
In the end, we will have tenuto and staccato...
... becoming one for speed.
So,
we are ready
to go to the bassoon, finally.