Bends and Spit/Gargle Sound
Hey David,
I'm working on LOA 6 and trying to get my blues scale down. Something I'm really struggling with in that scale (and frequently in other songs/exercises) is this gross gargle sound I get during certain bends. With multiple attempts, I can usually reduce it, but I don't consciously know what I'm doing differently to not get it, which means I can't premptively avoid it.
I always tongue block, but I did experiment with bending while lip pursed, and when I do that the gargle goes away.
Do you have any suggestions of exercises I can do, cues I can give myself, or a mental model that will help me avoid this sound?
Fixing this would dramatically improve how happy I am with my playing.
Thanks in advance!
Played around a bunch with this. What I've found is that there are multiple "sweet spots" where the jaw position combined with the tongue position creates the resonant frequency to nail the bend. The spot I'd found for a handful of my bends happened to be one that generated the spit vortex. I think I may also have been slightly curling the back of my tongue towards a U shape.
By forcing myself to open my jaw a different amount, my tongue finds the sweet spot at a different, and quieter, place.
Just altering my mental model based on your feedback led to finding a solution. Now I just have to practice a few thousand times so the better positions become natural.
Thanks for the feedback!
Fantastic Alex, I'm glad to hear.
Hello fahall.
My gut is that you're humping your tongue too far back in your mouth and you're vibrating your soft palate. Work on controlling your bending slightly forward of that spot (keep in mind for your lower bends that if you lower your jaw a little bit, it will tune your mouth to a lower frequency, allowing you to not need to hump your tongue so far back).
After experimenting with this...
You may be humping your tongue too evenly across the range of the mouth (flat tongue and roof of the mouth can cause this). Experiment with humping more of a specific area for each bend, and not just raising the tongue (revisit Bending Study 1 for tips on this... the She Key Koo).
Report back in a couple of weeks and tell us what you've experienced.