Left Hand Dexterity: Improving your technique with Jean Jean

Join Heather Roche as she takes you through Jean Jean's Special Studies for the left hand line-by-line, helping you to build your dexterity, smooth your crossing of the break and develop your control of wider and wider intervals. Be sure to unpack your clarinet and play along through this unmissable class!

The left hand, when playing the clarinet, offers us some particular challenges. We need to have a great hand position for curved fingers that allow us to move freely, we need to have a great action through the index finger for the throat G# key, and it plays an equally critical role in developing fluency with crossing the break. 

If you've not worked on them before, Jean Jean's left hand study in his Vade Mecum is one of the best resources for working in detail on your left hand. He was himself a clarinetist and really understood all of the different hand and finger positions required to play any kind of passage on the clarinet. Every line, therefore, gives us something to talk about - so I'm going to go through this study line-by-line, sharing some insights and offering you different ways to practice. 

I'd highly recommend that you bring a clarinet along for this one so that you can try things out as we go!

Here's a link to the Jean Jean Vade Mecum on IMSLP. If you want, print out the left hand study to have on your stand (or you can follow along on the screen). 

Meanwhile, a question for you: have you tried studies from the Vade Mecum before? What did you find useful about them? What did you find challenging?