It has been a while, and for any absolute newcomers with the same problem, I'll share what I found to fix the problem.
First, I took my teacher's advice to heart and ignored tounging until I had (within reason) gotten my pitch stable and with stable intonation across both registers. For me, that took getting really deep on the mouthpiece for about a week, then gradually loosening up and moving back out to a spot that was actually far closer to the tip than before. The tone was stable, and it took only the smallest of changes to move the problematic notes on my bari.
Once I was sure of where the mouthpiece belonged for me (this is more personal than anyone can put into words I suspect), I added tonguing practice to my routines. I concentrate on two things: Consistent air and using the smallest possible area of my tongue to the tip of the reed. That tends to be a bit behind the tip for me with my Gene Simmons-esque tongue, but your mileage may vary. Keeping the tongue to a minimum is my constant battle right now, but it is getting better by leaps and bounds.
Thanks to everyone with their helpful advice. My next battle is keeping the second octave G & G# stable (every other note from top to bottom is within 3 cents when I'm fresh, but G goes way sharp and then prefers to growl between octaves or jump to a higher harmonic. A harder reed immediately fixes that, but I'm still working on my chops for playing anything harder than a rico orange 2.5 consistently)
Thanks again.
First, I took my teacher's advice to heart and ignored tounging until I had (within reason) gotten my pitch stable and with stable intonation across both registers. For me, that took getting really deep on the mouthpiece for about a week, then gradually loosening up and moving back out to a spot that was actually far closer to the tip than before. The tone was stable, and it took only the smallest of changes to move the problematic notes on my bari.
Once I was sure of where the mouthpiece belonged for me (this is more personal than anyone can put into words I suspect), I added tonguing practice to my routines. I concentrate on two things: Consistent air and using the smallest possible area of my tongue to the tip of the reed. That tends to be a bit behind the tip for me with my Gene Simmons-esque tongue, but your mileage may vary. Keeping the tongue to a minimum is my constant battle right now, but it is getting better by leaps and bounds.
Thanks to everyone with their helpful advice. My next battle is keeping the second octave G & G# stable (every other note from top to bottom is within 3 cents when I'm fresh, but G goes way sharp and then prefers to growl between octaves or jump to a higher harmonic. A harder reed immediately fixes that, but I'm still working on my chops for playing anything harder than a rico orange 2.5 consistently)
Thanks again.
