January 3, 2006

Ok so I went down to my basement to practice for about 75 minutes
tonight.

The first thing I usually do is try a few reeds to see how they're
faring. The two that I started and you worked on yesterday were
both a tiny bit hard today and somewhat flat. Your reed was great
so I stayed with that one and didn't go back to the others (I'll
try to break them in some later this week).

I did some long tones mostly in the lower register but also tried
the higher E, F, and G (the notes that were sounding kind of weak
yesterday). The G was ok from the get-go but the E and F took a
while to start opening up. I have to think about the egg in my
mouth again in order to get those to not sound muffled.

I didn't do any real scales tonight but instead worked on some
technical exercises from an old book I had lying around (Tunes for
Oboe Technic). They were easy tunes but I wanted to play something
more musical now that I had a nice reed.

I did the octave exercise you gave me at our other lesson in between
the tunes. And other similar exercises I found on the web (for
register changes/octaves).

I worked on my two Sellner exercises a bit also (#7 on page 11 and
#7 on page 15). I also worked on the Siciliano and Air Jacob
pieces. Did I leave my music on your stand? I ended up playing
from the piano accompaniment sheet music I had at home.

I think that was it. I wasn't particularly intense in terms of
technique tonight but I did try to zero in on my chops as much as I
could and also tried to focus on strong air. I'd say it was a nice
practice because it left me wanting to keep playing (but my mouth
was too tired!).