A newsletter for the Portland area Didjeridu player......Oct  2000 Volume 6 Issue 10

Beginner's Heart, Practice Exercises

by Ed Drury

 We'll start with some tone exercises which don't involve any technique except the basic drone and the voice. This is a warm up, it can be done with circular breathing, but I'm going to recommend that you start out without doing the circular breath. Take your deepest breath in through the nose and blow a long steady note. Concentrate on making the note completely solid. No vibrato, no fluctuation in tone, no shifting of harmonics. To do this, relax your tongue and all facial muscles. End your note when you must, but end it decisively with no tone drop or waver. Then take another deep breath in through you nose and blow your note again. Try to make this one last a little longer by controlling the air flow. Keep repeating this at least five times, trying to make each note more pure and last just a longer. Take all the time you need.

 Next we'll start humming some notes while droning. Kind of droning and toning. But what we are going to do with our hummed note is a little different. I want to keep the voiced note the same frequency through out (experiment with different vocal notes by all means and in the extreme, try high and low, but hum the same note once you start humming). But start the voiced note soft, build it up in volume and then bring it down soft again all the time keeping your droned didjeridu note flat and steady. This is about control and concentration. Spend a lot of time on this one. If you find it easy, good for you. I find it hard if I haven't been practicing it.  Ok, this part was for our head. You should have a relaxed calm feeling after going through this exercise. It takes about 10 to 15 minutes to do right and about three times a week is plenty to become very proficient at it. Let's move into so intense tonging exercises.

 From here on out, there is a tendency equate proficiency with speed. Obviously, speed comes with proficiency. But proficiency does not come with speed. From now on, practice all these etudes slow at first and only increase the speed as long as clarity and accuracy are retained. Once it gets sloppy, back off on the tempo as much as it takes to regain distinct clarity of articulations. Sounds simple, but I hear a lot of players who are just playing as fast as they can. I liken this point to my skiing. I  learned a trick a long time ago from really good skiers. If I start having a lot of falls, I head straight to the bunny slopes and practice my turns, my edges. If there is a mistake I'm making, I'll go down like a ton of bricks! And it's usually pretty obvious where the technical flaw is. I'm not up or down weighting at the right point, I'm forward or behind of center. The point is that "slow" often reveals what "fast" hides when it comes to technique. Don't skip over the slow tempos.

 We'll start with double tonging. For a review, check out my early article on rhythm Vol 4 Issue 2. We'll change a couple of things in the basic phonetics and add some overtones to a few beats.

First start out very slowly using the tuk ka tuk ka syllables and gradually build up speed. Then practice using Dug Ga Dug Ga Dug Ga Dug Ga. Then try alternating them so that your mouthing something like Tuk Ka Du Ga Tuk Ka Du Ga.  Keep practicing for both accuracy and speed. Now we'll make it harder. You see in the picture we have two groups of  four notes each? On the  forth note of each group, make that note an overtone. Tuk Ka Du TOOT tuk ka du TOOT. Now same practice, over tone on the third syllable. "Tu ka TOOT ga, Tu ka TOOT ga". Then second note, "tu TOOT du ga, to Toot du ga". Don't be afraid to hang out with each of  these for a long time at slow speed before increasing tempo. In many ways, these are harder to do slow that at moderate tempo! Then first note toots. Toot, ka du ga too ka du ga.... Then every other note, "tuk TOOT ga TOOT" reverse, "TOOT ka TOOT ga." Finally, randomize it something like TOOT ka TOOT TOOT ga Dug ga Dug Ga TOOT TOOT TOOT!

 Well that should do for the double tonging exercises for now. Let's exercise those cheek muscles. This exercise is simple and only takes your didj. You don't have to go out and buy balloons or fill your bath tub with cold water, ok? Just grab your didj and while playing squeeze your cheeks and then allow them to puff out fully over and over just as FAST as you possibly can. Faster! And keep it going for as long as you can then a little longer. Take breaths or release extra air out of your nose as needed, but keep those cheeks going! In fact, one of the purposes of this exercise, aside from building up strength in the cheeks (that can be done with balloons and other exercises) is to divorce breathing from cheek squeezing. Advanced players can breathe while in most any mouthshape. Doing this exercise, you should gain an appreciation of how mouth movement can sustain a drone with little or no airflow through the mouth. Work towards keeping this rapid cheek movement going to five solid minutes.

 Next we'll turn attention to playing from the gut. The so called, "bounced" breath. We'll use a couple of exercises which will isolate that diaphragm and use it as a rhythmic element. We'll start like we did in the beginning with the featureless drone, but this time putting in gut slaps in regular intervals. "huh huh huh huh" taking a breath on the first of every four. I recommend doing this for a good long time. In fact, devoting one hour a week to this is not too much!

 Next add double tonguing such that you make a two bounced breaths every cycle. Here's the exercise : "tuk ka tuk ka dug ga dug ga bounce bounce." This results in a 10 beat cycle. Try to make each syllable of the double tongue a perfect eight note such that you have an 8/8 and each bounce breath a quarter note (twice as long a duration as the tongued note) so you have a measure of 2/4 there. 8/8 alternated with 2/4. Before we get to developing additive time signatures lets add a simple variant to this one. That is to do a power bark on the second bounced breath. So now we're playing tuk ka dug ga tuk ka dug ga bounce BARK, tuk ka dug ga tuk ka dug ga bounce BARK , over and over. Now, add the overtones back into the double tonguing perhaps like so : tuk ka dug toot tuk ka dug toot bounce bark!  To play with the time signature, add or subtract bounce breaths. For example, here's a 10/8 rhythm with a nine beat  cycle : tuk ka dug ga tuck ga dug ga bark. If shorten the bark to the same duration as the tongued notes, your playing in 9/8. Now had these shorter bounced breath barks to make 10, 11, and 12 eight time signatures (eg. 10/8 = tuk ka dug ga tuk ka dug ga bark bark OR tuk toot dug toot tuk ka toot ga bark bark.)

 In any practice routine, I like to end with at least 15 minutes of improvisation. If you've done all the exercises so far, one thing may have become apparent, that whenever we try to play specific patterns over and over - that is practice them, weaknesses are exposed that are hidden in pure improvisional playing.  Not that improvisation is easy, quite the contrary. I think it's important to develope practice routines, try to learn existing parts (eg - emulating recorded or transcribed music) and improvising. So many of us, so much of the time,  get stuck in only doing one of these three aspects. But it's useful to devote some of our playing to playing with some type of intent or structure. I recommend you try this practice routine at least three times a week for as long as it seems useful and use it as a basis for developing your own practice routines. Create several, in fact. But always include a good measure of playing for fun. Out of structures like the one I've just outlined, come unexpected results in improvisation and composition. Look to create peices which use the fundamental elements practiced and see what rhythms and sequences are invented as a result.

         Ed Drury

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