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Nathan T's avatar

I heard a story that Steve Kellner (former principal euph in the marine band) got frustrated with how bad his K tongue sounded, so he played everyone using only the K tongue for an entire summer.

I read a long time ago about flute players using a "nga" syllable in place of the k tongue. Obviously it's the same place of articulation, but have you ever experimented with this on brass?

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Jacob Garchik's avatar

Not familiar with "nga" but we did discuss baroque flute and recorded articulations in Part 2 of the series and the comments. Anything "n" is unlikely to work well with brass which needs an open oral cavity to get a good sound.

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Jeb Bishop's avatar

Sometimes I work on ka-ta-ka-ta instead of ta-ka-ta-ka. Occasionally I do it in performance. It even seems to affect the content of my ideas somehow.

These are great ideas, I'm going to pull Arban out again.

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Jacob Garchik's avatar

oh yes. that's coming. This is just for the beginners!

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Rob Ewing's avatar

Great stuff! I’ve been shedding out of the McChesney book lately, but using double instead of doodle. Works well.

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Jacob Garchik's avatar

I have some ideas (coming in part 4) about ways to integrate jazz practice into tonguing that don't involve playing "etudes".

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