Video transcript
@The Arts Unit Art Bites – Oboe – 01. Embouchure and finger technique

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JONATHAN RYAN: Hello. My name is Jono Ryan. I'm a freelance oboist and tutor at The Arts Unit, Sydney, New South Wales. Today, I'm really pleased to be talking to you about some fundamentals of our oboe technique.

I'd like to start with our embouchure so namely, our mouth position and how we form it around the reed. So the first thing to note that we sometimes forget is that we really put our reed on the bottom lip like so, and not too much of the reed. That's quite important.

We want to form an M shape around. So you want to think of maybe your mum putting on a lipstick, an M like this. So if we do that, put not too much reed in the mouth and the bottom lip

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And we want to think about maintaining there muscles here, particularly near the corners, nice and maintained. So whether we play something very straightforward

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or something a bit more involved.

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One thing to avoid with our embouchure, particularly when we're going up high or when we're getting a bit tired, is our tendency to bite on the reed. That creates a tightness and narrowness in the sound. So if I were to bite, rather than having--

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we get something like this.

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And this is a bit exaggerated, of course. But it's just to give you an idea of difference between us not biting and us biting.

Another important aspect of our technique are our fingers and how clean they are. We call it the finger cleanliness. So we have a number of tricky intervals on the oboe. One example would be B flat, which is two finger left hand, one on the right hand, going to B natural, which is just the one on the left hand.

That might seem easy and straightforward. However, we do have the potential for blips. And this is caused normally by the A finger, second finger left hand, staying on a little too long. And we get this little blip here.

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Just slowed down a little so you can hear it.

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What we should think about is separating what each hand has to do. So our left hand has to move the second finger has to move on the left hand, just A to B, if you think of it that way.

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And our right hand, just our first finger on the F sharp key, and then release. Same speed that we did for the left hand.

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Then you want to visualise that and then join the fingers together.

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And do that a few times.

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Another tricky coordination fingering on oboe is the interval of A to C, so from two fingers on the left hand again, but we're switching to the C. So we sometimes get a little sound in between.

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And we want to reduce this gap, obviously, so there's no more sound. So we want to separate again.

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Right hand.

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And together.

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You can also go backwards, if you want, from C to A.

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Another tricky aspect to our fingers, particularly in our first years of learning, is the half-hole finger, the first finger on the left hand. I think, often, we move the finger a little too much. And it's often in instruction manuals as well, our first oboe books. They say that you have to move the finger a great distance. I see often things like this.

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A great sort of sliding movement. The reality is that we don't have to move the finger very much at all. If I play low D to half-hole D--

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You actually don't need to move the finger even half the distance of the hole, which is a very small amount. A way you can practise this is if we were to play a B natural and just move the finger very slowly. And you will hear a buzz. And as soon as you hear that buzz in the sound, that means you've opened the key enough. I'll demonstrate.

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Listen for that.

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Applying this to low D to high D

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When we use this half-hole finger, we have, again, a rather tricky coordination aspect, such as B to D, or another one that I'm going to demonstrate for you now, which is B to C sharp. So applying the process we used before, if we want to isolate first our right hand, we would have B obviously, no fingers. And then we'd have our fingers on the F sharp, E, D, and C sharp keys.

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Now, this time, given that we have the half-hole complication, let's just do our movement just B to G on the left hand.

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What you might get now is B to low C sharp when you join those together.

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Let's think about our half-hole finger.

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And now let's put that all together. So instead of having

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this finger being slightly too early, we now join it.

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So with all our finger coordination and the cleanliness, this is something that we work on every single day. It's not something that just happens within a week. So certainly don't beat yourself up if you hear a blip. Just use it as something to work towards.

And those are some of the trickiest examples that we have. So if it doesn't work first time, don't be critical. We just need to work really slowly and really precisely. And any improvements we can make, even if it's 1% over a week, is very positive.

So just to recap today, we've talked about our M-bouchure, if you like keeping our embouchure in that M shape and resisting the temptation to bite, particularly on our higher notes. So rather than our--

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rather than this narrow sound, keeping it nice and clean

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and keeping our fingers nice and close to the keys to help us with our coordination, and remember, not moving our half-hole finger too much. I hope this gives you something to think about in your daily practise.