David's Tip of the Day: Good Tone - Part 6 (Summation)

Let's now sum up everything we've discussed...

1) The larger the mouth cavity, the bigger the tone (large cavity = lower frequencies can be produced)

2) The most common cause of poor tone is to have your tongue raised (tongue raised = smaller cavity = lower frequencies cannot be produced)

3) With years of experience bending, a player develops the ability to tune their mouth to the pitch of each reed they play (or one of its harmonics). The tone produced is good and efficiency is high, i.e., the smallest movement of the tongue will create a bend when desired. The lesson here is that one should not feel that to produce good tone that their tongue should be lowered all the time, it just needs to not be in a place where you're tuning your mouth to higher pitch, and thus producing a thinner tone.

4) Use visual confirming with a mirror to check tongue location

5) Experiment and give yourself time... this is a process over years.