Learning to play the didgeridoo and growing your skill-set is hard, as is perfecting any skill. I will share with you my philosophy of what I think matters and what I focus on, to give you the mental and practical tools I used for a smooth transition period from being a beginner to growing beyond previously perceived limits. I strongly believe that with an analytical approach to your own playing, and to that of others, you can benefit from using the rational side your brain to develop a better understanding, and with practice and certain practices, use the emotional and intuitive side of your brain to help you propel into a new orbit of didgeridoo skill.
Listening to Didgeridoo
Do you remember what made you embark on your journey to become a didgeridoo player? I do remember. It was listening to it in the first place. Listening to the sounds of the didgeridoo and wondering what hell of magic vibration it was that I felt pulsing through me, resonating with my very core, and drawing my mind out of its rational resting place and into different planes of existence. I didn’t pick up a tube and began trying to fart a tone out of it without having been enchanted first.
I also was lucky enough to have a close friend who was actively playing the didgeridoo as well (he could drone, do a few tricks with his voice, had one or two articulations down and could do circular breathing). I had to use him to identify the source of the magic for me (Yo, Freddie, this is a didgeridoo and look, I have one here!), and then I obviously used him to send me to another dimension immediately (Oh, great! Can you play it for me?).
Listening to live didgeridoo was a trance experience. Especially as we tend to go to very reverberant spaces, naturally. We want to be engulfed by the sounds. They should come from everywhere and anywhere. Experiencing didgeridoo music by itself is already charming, but being completely immersed takes it to another level, especially with the timelessness of the typical drone-and-voice playing we often hear at first. When time and timing doesn’t matter, the reverberant wash of hard edges in the playing also paints over imperfections of the circular breathing, adding to the awesomeness of the never-ending vibration.
Things change though when you begin playing yourself. At first you may think that it’s your lack of didgeridoo prowess that makes such a great difference in the sounds which drew you to the instrument, and the sounds you now produce yourself. Especially if playing outdoors, in the wilderness…
Learning Didgeridoo Playing
You see, the big difference when you begin playing the instrument is where you’re placed on the tube relative to where the sound comes out. Back when you fell in love with the sound, you were at the receiving end. Now you switched positions. The sound waves travel away from you, and they emanate a meter, a meter and a half, maybe two meters or even more away from you, away from your ears. The sound you produce does not want to resonate with you, but with everybody and everything else. Such a pity!
Then you remember the reverberant spaces and all is well again. I myself practiced didgeridoo in a basement room, all concrete and relatively small – a wash of reverb and echo of all sorts of frequencies, the sound locked into the room with me, and everything I produced sound-wise sounded so intricate, layers upon layers of bass vibrations with bright sparkles on top, sigsawing its way into my mind, my body, my soul. I was happy, and though I sounded powerful, perfect.
But then I left my preferred space and took my didgeridoo with me to a camp-fire to play for friends. What a disappointment! Again, I couldn’t hear myself, aside from the resonance within my head, and even the fire seemed to crackle on louder than I did!
Fast forward a few years of learning how different spaces sound, yet I was constantly unsure of how I actually sounded. Until I had this – in hindsight painfully obvious – idea of recording myself and listening back to what I sound like. That was about the time I got myself a Zoom H1 Handy Recorder to record live band jams of befriended musicians, and I thought, I’d give it a shot myself. I still have the Zoom H1, by the way, and use it as a basis for my Budget Recordings I regularly share on YouTube. And I have to say, what wow-effect was it to listen to myself for the first time as if I was present in front of the tube, the right end pointed at me! Then I also learned you can plug in headphones into the mic and don’t even have to press record, you can just listen to yourself playing just as a listener would! Wow, monitoring (mind blown)!
Performing Didgeridoo
In a constant wave of emotions, my belief in myself changed constantly: “I’m doing great!” – “I suck!” – “Oh wow, this sounds so new and different!” – “It’s all the same but for that tiny nuance”. My personal progress stalled, but I continued playing for myself. Either against a wall, or monitoring myself through the Zoom H1. From time to time, I even pressed the ‘record’ button. And this is when I visited Dubravko Lapaine’s Didgeridoo Masterclass in 2018.
Dubravko explained, among many, many other things (some of which I only now begin to comprehend), the obvious truth: We hear sound twice, once in our head, and once from the tube. The tube is playing away from us. Any way to get the sound back to us will “color” it. There is no good or bad “color” per se, but there always is. Recording and processing didgeridoo sound is not taking away from its sacred nature. It is important to critically listen to what you’re playing. Certain styles of playing even benefit so much from recording and processing that it is a necessity in reality.
This, together with other lessons I took away from the master class really changed the way I approached my own didgeridoo playing. I no longer expected to find a magical path-way into an unknown sound territory. I didn’t expect big leaps anymore. I didn’t think there’s some unknown magic technique that will unlock a new universe of sound for me. Instead, it’s all little steps and careful refining and training. So I changed my outlook on what is necessary to grow and thrive as didgeridoo player, and leave the beginner’s stage behind. Lo’ and behold, my Didgeridoo Learning Philosophy.
Didgeridoo Learning Philosophy
So here is the didgeridoo learning philosophy I developed. It consists mainly of pathways to joy, maybe even to enlightenment. By following along those lines, I strongly believe you will have a good time for yourself, and at the same time understand what others can enjoy from your music as well. Maybe you will even go full circle and understand what it was that drew you to didgeridoo music in the first place, and be able to reproduce it! So without further ado:
- Have fun!
- Enable listening to yourself.
- Understand what you’re hearing
- Lie! Present your best self to others!
- Don’t lie to yourself, though!
- Record as much as possible.
- Compare yourself to yourself from some time ago.
- Set a goal, and make one step in its direction.
- Keep at it!
Let’s explore each and every one of these steps separately.
Have Fun!
It can be easy to see learning a instrument as a chore. “I have to practice”, “this is hard!”, “I don’t seem to progress very quickly!” etc. etc. Well, don’t. Remember what drew you to the didgeridoo in the first place. Its sound, its mythical nature, its vibrations, its meditative impact. Find a way to harness this for yourself even while playing and practicing.
Picking up a new technique indeed is hard, but as you do, you can feel the excitement and promise of it. You can dream and imagine having mastered it already, and what it will do to the extent of your sound, the scope of your ability. You will have grown as a person and as a didgeridoo player once you have arrived at the place you are setting out to reach. So don’t see it as a struggle, but as a transformation process.
And it’s a transformation process you can enjoy. The outlook is great, so even if you’re down in the trenches of practice, repetition, critique – you’re on a journey from a great place to another great place. After all, you are playing a magical instrument that can catch minds and souls of people alike. Keep that in mind. Enjoy the voyage!
Enable listening to yourself
For a proper critique, it is absolutely essential that you can hear yourself properly. Well, also for the previous point. It’s the sound after all that drew you to the instrument, isn’t it. So part of the fun is also being able to hear yourself clearly.
For both maximum pleasure, and analytics, I suggest that you:
- use a microphone to capture your sound
- record yourself
- monitor through headphones (or in-ear monitors)
I would also add that, if you’re able to, add processing in this monitoring setup, i.e., compression, equalization, maybe even “special effects” such as reverb or delay. But if you do, you will have to figure out how to still record the unprocessed sounds. This is part of the “Don’t lie to yourself!” point.
In my case, listening to my sounds (slightly processed) opens up new spaces of self-confidence, inspires me to experiment, practice mindless stuff, get lost in rhythmic cycles, meditate, enjoy! Without monitoring, practicing is more of that, practicing a technique, tempo, articulation, whatever. With monitoring, I at the same time can employ my critical listening to fine-tune the practice work, and enjoy what I’m doing at the same time!
Understand what you’re hearing
Begin practice by listening to the greatest of didgeridoo players you can find. Whether that’s contemporary artists, traditional players, street musicians, beat boxers or … whatever, frankly; make a habit of repeatedly listening to their material. Try to get to know the material so good that you know what’s going to happen before it happens. Try to get to know the material so good that time itself seems to slow down as you listen to it, and you seem to have a uber-human focus on detail as the sound flows through you. Use this to determine what the hell these folks are actually doing. Try to work out an understanding of how they – maybe, possibly, or, certainly! – produce the sounds you’re hearing.
Use cues to realize when they are breathing. Hear the hard edges of articulation to recognize where there’s a “t”-sound, or learn to recognize the overtone modulation that comes from using different vowel-induced mouth shapes and tonal focus points. Hear the different uses of voice, whether it’s the subtle thickening of an expression to give it more tonal character (e.g. more bass punch), whether it’s the emancipated back throat dance of seemingly a second sound at the same time, or whether it’s the dominant, singing voice that sits atop of the drone foundation.
And then go ahead and use that skill of critical and discriminating listening on your own recorded material. Use your memory to compare the level of sounds you produce to the level of sounds your heroes produce. See where there’s a difference, see which part of the difference you can explain, and which are just inexplicable. Use the first half for further practice guidance, and the second half for future curiosity and even deeper listening. Or maybe write your heroes and ask! Some may even respond …
Lie! Present your best self to others!
Now this is probably going to be the controversial part of my philosophy, but please, give it a chance. The idea behind this is for you to harvest good vibes from an audience and use that positive energy to further yourself!
Don’t be ashamed to present yourself in the best light possible. Nobody wants to hear the “bad but true” sound if they can hear the one with make-up, push-up bra and yoga pants, so to speak. There’s nothing wrong with being true to one’s capabilities, but at the same time, presenting yourself in the best light possible goes along with a self-concept as performer, artist and entertainer. What does that mean? I believe this to mean three things:
1. Edit your recordings. Leave off the beginning where you’re looking for inspiration. Cut off the ending where you’re losing yourself. Maybe even cut out the middle parts where you tried to play something nice four times and failed the first three attempts. Present a coherent edit of your work that may as well have been played live, but which is as-perfect-as-possible
2. Process your recordings. While unprocessed, live didgeridoo sounds great, the variety of sounds it can produce is limited. With processing, specifically dynamic processing and equalization, it is possible to carve out whole new universes of sound from the didgeridoo. This allows more expression for you as an artist, and the consumption of completely unexpected sonic landscapes for your listeners. While it’s nice to be able to play something mind-blowing just acoustically, there’s nothing wrong with presenting a mind-blowing sound that has been made by processing your analog input!
3. As a corollary to the recording and processing techniques: Play what you can play easily and with conviction! It’s nice that you’ve just uncovered this new trick, but frankly, the thing that you’ve been practicing for the past few weeks, months or years will sound way better than the things that you’ve just began practicing, or practiced for the past few minutes, hours or days. Make a wise selection.
This may sound like “cheating” to you at first. But think about it differently for a moment: First of all, presenting yourself and producing yourself is part of being a performer. Secondly, the better you sound, and the “sexier” you can present yourself to your audience, the more positive feedback you will evoke. And this positive feedback, a standing ovation, a cheering crowd, a recurring stampede of listeners coming through … is something that will boost your self-esteem wildly and engulf you in a completely new flame of passion for performing. This is addictive, and adds to your innate drive to learn and grow.
One may also note that it is easier to satisfy an inexperienced (at didgeridoo listening) crowd. The more distinguished and experienced listeners are, the harder it will become to please them. In a sense, if you think of your skill at didgeridoo playing as a level that you can pin a number on, with higher numbers being more skill: It will be easy to please someone with a lesser level than you have, and harder to please someone with a higher level. The feedback will also differ: People with a lesser level will rave about your performance, and people with a higher level will give you more critical feedback. Use both to your advantage!
Don’t lie to yourself
With all that being said, lie to your audience as much as you want to, but there’s got to be at least one person that you’re truthful to: yourself. If you’ve managed to edit and process a recording of your best tricks to a cohesive unit, a complete song that is awesome and free-standing, you should ask yourself: Could I perform this without editing and that level of processing? Could I play this with just a “live” setup of audio gear? With a single setting of the compressor, equalizer and volume fader? Could I play this, or at least a fitting approximation of it “un-plugged”?
If you truly believe yourself to be the best that you already possibly can be, there is no room for improvement. And the lies you keep up for your audience, your layer of presentation, makes you sound better than you really do, underneath all that. That’s fine in itself, but you need to know where your weaknesses are. You need to be brutally honest with yourself and acknowledge where there is room for improvement. This will determine your practice regimen. If your transients sound great with a compressor, but weak without, for example, you know what to work on. But you need to realize that your transients sound weak in the first place!
Record as much as possible
Without recording yourself, you are not able to rewind and listen to a passage again. More often than not, when I re-listened to a recording of a practice session, or a capture of an idea, I found a detail that I hadn’t noticed before, and learned immensely from analyzing that detail. Recording your playing will give you an archive of ideas, showing you details of past (practice) performances that may inspire you going forward, and giving you the possibility to analyze your playing in detail.
Another aspect of getting into the habit of recording is that you improve in the recording process itself. Didgeridoo is not the typical instrument for a studio to record, so the more experience you yourself have in recording didgeridoo, the easier it will be to tell a pro what you’re looking for in your recordings. And even if you never collaborate with a pro, you will no doubt benefit from an ever-improving quality of recordings!
Within your practices, you may even find unexpected gems of performances that you can polish and share.
Compare yourself to yourself from the past
While we all may want to grow to be as good players as the best there are currently on our planet, without the proper investment of blood, sweat and tears (nah. It’s all about time!) we won’t get there. Yet. So it can be disheartening to compare your state of playing to a world-class didgeridoo player. They might even do things that you cannot explain yourself. How would they get these sounds? There is, however, one source of music that you will always understand: Your own music.
So don’t compare yourself to others. Or, at least, not exclusively. Do compare yourself to yourself from a week ago, from a month ago, from a year ago, maybe even further back. With the level of critical listening that you will have developed after a year’s worth of practice, you will hear fundamental differences in the quality of your playing back then and now. The things that seem easy to you now may have seemed near-impossible or at least very hard back then – and your recordings from then and now will reflect that. So enjoy your progress!
Pleasure is a fuel for continually making the necessary investment of blood, sweat and tears (er, time. I mean time. It’s all about time).
Set a goal, and make one step in its direction
Nobody climbed Mt. Everest with a single step, but everybody who climbed it did climb it one step at a time. Even the hardest challenge can be overcome when it is broken down into the smallest possible bits that will give you progress. Atomic steps, so to speak. You may even fail to make atomic steps in the beginning, because you lack … power, punch, perception, prowess. It doesn’t matter, because by making step after step you will continually improve. And no matter where you are skill-wise at the moment, you will reach the level where you can make the atomic steps necessary to achieve any of your goals.
The importance lies within not letting your goal out of sight, while not concentrating on the vast distance between you, here and now, and you, then and there. Instead look at the direction that the path will take you. It may not even be a straight path, and you might not know yet where the path will take you. There may be short-cuts you cannot see now, roundabouts or necessary diversions. It doesn’t really matter. When you keep one eye on the next step, and one eye on your goal, you will progress. Your previous recordings will tell you the distance you have traveled so far already.
Keep at it!
If you give up, you will get nowhere. If you settle down at a plateau, then that’s your home. Practice brings growth automatically. If you stop practicing, you will shrink. At some point you will have reached a level where practice is necessary to keep the level you have achieved. Congratulations, this is world-class. Once you’re there, practice will be something that is part of your essence and you will be able to teach me something. I’m looking forward to it!
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