Interval Practice

In my private lessons this week, several students are having similar challenges with large intervals, involving intonation and air support.

A few thoughts...

Student #1 was working on an etude which involved slurring octave C's and octave D-flats. The student was having some difficulty directing her air toward the low C, so we tried a few things. The first thing we tried was simply taking the slur out of the picture and articulating both notes, then we isolated the low C on its on and just practiced some simple attacks with prepared air support behind them.
The final thing we tried (also the most effective) was to turn the octave slur into an arpeggio so that she could really FEEL the space of the octave- it is a pretty big space to cover. We simply added in a G and E-natural and practiced arpeggiating downward several time, after this, blowing across the octave slur became much easier.

Student #2 was working on an etude which involved punching out some high C's, D's and even E-naturals (she is an 8th grader- go girl!). The problem was that she was overblowing quite a bit to ensure that the notes would speak and the result was some very sharp oboe playing. My suggestion to her was to practice playing octaves (wow, this seems like the word of the day huh?) coming at the high notes from beneath and really playing to the bottom of her sound with steady air as she "reached" for the higher notes. All of this is done best with a TUNER, I keep the tuner either right in my lap or directly on the music stand for all of my oboe students. While I don't want them to become so absolutely obsessed with it that they turn off their ears, it is still an important tool to begin training their ear to hear what is what.

Happy practicing your intervals and octaves!