Bending
When bending are we supposed to be tongue blocking or puckering. Not sure if I'm doing the bending exercise if I should be doing tongue blocking.
The short answer is to tongue block. Learning to do it by pucker just means you will have to unlearn it later and that can be even more of a challenge. I would suggest you go to Winslow or David on the forum for a more comprehensive response. They have the skill and knowledge to teach you the best way. Just my opinion.
you are def meant to learn it with a tongue block. I learned it with a pucker first against all recommendations and it still worked for me. For reference I don't pucker at all today except on hole 10 and overblows but that's only till I can master it with tongue block.
Agree with the above comment - puckering may be easier at first, but limits you later on. Stick with it...you will scare away all the cats in your neighborhood, but eventually get it!
Being fairly new I'm problable not the right person to be answering here. From the videos lessons and the videos with David working with studends everything appears to be done using tongue blocking.
With that said, if you are having problems tongue blocking and feel more comfortable with puckering, I would suggest use puckering until you start to get the hang of bending notes then push for using tongue blocking.
I'm just getting started with bending notes using tongue blocking. As far as I can tell the important thing is to get the right size resonance chamber in the front of your mouth.