Bassoon Lessons Podcast: Recent Episodes
Elizabeth Fetters
This podcast is intended to help students who are learning the bassoon. Each episode deals with different aspects of bassoon playing.
With tighter and tighter school budgets, here are some tips to keeping bassoons playable for students.
This episode shares 5 books that I frequently reach for when teaching young bassoonists.
Tips and comments about selecting a college, winning a bassoon scholarship and what to look for in a school.
This podcast is for the school band director, and has 10 tips for helping your bassoon students in your school band program.
This etude is tricky, only because of the way it is written. Re-write it in 4/4 time and it suddenly becomes much easier. As it is written in the book, you should play it in 4, counting the 8th note.
Here's the teacher's part for you to play along. There are 4 beats before you begin. Don't forget to rest on beat 1!
Here is the teacher's part for the duet so that you can play along. Listen to the beginning once before you begin to play, so that you know when to come in. I waited four beats before playing, but it sounds like the recorder did not start exactly on the first click. Enjoy!
This is another great duet in the Weissenborn Method. Watch out in the first measure: the two parts together create a compound rhythm. If played correctly, there should be a note on every beat.
This is one of my favorite duets in the whole Weissenborn Method. There are some tricky rhythms, so watch and listen carefully. Also, many of my students have struggled with the two rests on beats 4 and 1 in the 4th and 5th measures.
These two etudes together are another great tonguing exercise. The two etudes have the same note, but different articulations. Observe the slurs carefully! Remember not to fall into the "tonguing trap" that bassoon players love to do. Both etudes are played without repeats, there is a 4 beat silence before Meno allegro.
Watch articulations carefully in this etude. Tonguing covers a multitude of sins for us as double reed players. It covers a bad reed, support that wasn't quite there or a finger flub. Make sure you are slurring where a slur is marked! Don't let yourself fall into the temptation to tongue just because you're not 100% sure that next note is going to come out.
This is the second Allegretto in the lesson. This piece demonstrates what bassoon players have to do a lot: make it sound like there are two bassoons instead of one. Give more weight to the first note in every three-note grouping and back off the F-E. Sometimes in lessons I will play this one with a student as a duet; I play the first note and the student plays the F-E. Then, I have the student play all of it, while I continue to play the first note, giving it more emphasis.
I usually teach these etudes together. L'istesso tempo is almost exactly the opposite of Andantino.