10 Tips to Improve your Clarinet Playing

1/13/2023

We always want to find different ways to improve our clarinet playing, but sometimes we live such busy lives that it can even be a struggle to fit in a couple of minutes to practice. With the large number of school subjects’ and enrichment activities students are expected to take, it can also be exhausting even finding the motivation to practice the moment you have some free time on your hands. Throughout this guide, we’ll walk through step by step some tips that you can use to help improve your clarinet playing.

Practice regularly. The more you practice, the better you will become at playing the clarinet. Set aside dedicated time each day to work on your technique and repertoire. If you’re just starting, you can begin with 5-minutes of daily practice to build your endurance in your first week. Afterwards, you can build to 7-minutes and gradually build up to 30-minutes if you’re just starting out on the instrument. By setting small achievable goals in the beginning help build confidence and comfort over time.
Use proper posture. Proper posture is essential for good clarinet playing. Make sure you are sitting up straight with your feet flat on the ground and your instrument at a 45 degree angle. If you have bad posture, it makes it difficult to breathe and use your full lung capacity when you play.
Use proper hand and finger placement. Proper hand and finger placement is crucial for producing a clean, clear sound on the clarinet. Make sure you are using the correct fingerings and hand positions for each note you play. If you don’t have the best hand position on the clarinet, it makes it difficult to build the skills to play fast technical passages later, so that’s why it’s important to make sure to learn this early on in your clarinet playing.
Pay attention to your breath support. Good breath support is essential for good clarinet playing. Practice taking deep, controlled breaths and try to use as much focused air as you can. To work on this, you can use a plastic coffee straw to see if you are using fast air. Another useful tool is the Breath Builder Isometric Exercise that helps you increase breath control and breathe more efficiently in performance. This ties in with making sure that you have proper posture in really maximizing your lung capacity. If you don’t have a good posture, you won’t be able to have good breath support. So, it’s important to establish this early on in your playing.
Use a metronome. A metronome is a great tool for improving your timing and rhythm. You can buy one from your local music store or download one on your device. I really find Soundcorset useful because it also has the option to operate as a tuner. Practice playing with a metronome to improve your accuracy and consistency. You can also record yourself to see if you’re with the metronome and listening back to passages that you’re learning. Sometimes we underestimate that we can be our own teachers and can do a lot of self-correction. You can record with your phone, tablet, or any device that has this feature.
Work on your tone quality. A beautiful, rich tone is essential for good clarinet playing. Practice long tones to improve your tone quality with the “Achieving Virtuosity: Complete Scales for the Intermediate Clarinetist”. This book provides a fingering chart for long tones, mechanism exercises, and scales in all major and minor tonalities using a suggested practice structure.
Practice sight-reading. Sight-reading is the ability to read and play music that you have never seen before. Practice sight-reading to improve your musicality and flexibility as a clarinet player.
Study music theory. A strong understanding of music theory will help you understand how music works and how to communicate musical ideas. This often gets overlooked early on in musical studies. The Music & Language Learning Center offers music theory classes for all levels that also incorporates ear-training.
Listen to recordings, Listening to recordings of great clarinet players can help you learn new techniques and improve your playing. Listening to different players can also help you feel inspired and help you create an idea of what kind of clarinet player you wish to be. To get started, I would recommend Robert Marcellus’s recording of the Mozart Clarinet Concerto K.622 with the Cleveland Orchestra and Karl Leister’s recording of Spohr’s Concertos no. 2 & 3 in developing your ideas about clarinet sound and musical phrasing.
Find a good teacher. A good teacher can help you identify and work on areas of your playing that need improvement, and provide guidance and support as you develop as a clarinet player. You can go to your local music store or music school to ask for recommendations. Virtual lessons are also becoming increasingly popular, which can also be a great option to study with different professionals who may not be in the same area as you.

No matter where you are in your musical journey, whether you’re just starting the instrument, amateur player, professional musician or someone who is wanting to return to the instrument after a long hiatus, it’s never too late to continue to develop your skills in music. There’s no substitute for regular practice and hard work as you would need to put in the time and energy in the instrument to make progress.