Video Transcript

So getting the basic sound out of the didgeridoo. The way to start with this instrument is to begin with the lips. The lips are the thing that's going to induce that sound in this tube. The basic sound that you want to make is something like this. The way you get the right thing and not just kind of a goofy raspberry sound is to think in terms of anchoring the sides of your mouth and letting just the middle of your lips vibrate, pushing air past the middle of your lips like that. A few things to watch for; you don't want your lips to sort of perch out too much. They certainly shouldn't be clamped together too tightly. Think about just anchoring the size, bringing the lips together really naturally and just blowing the air past it. Once you can do that pretty comfortably, it really just as simple as then doing that into the instrument. If it's the first time you played the instrument, you may not really find the right pitch right away. The way to find that fundamental frequency for this instrument, and off the bat, it's probably going to be lower than you think if you're a beginner at this. Just start higher and just kind of move your lips down until you find the right note. Something like. We can hear it lock in on that one note. You're going to know when you hit the right note because the whole instrument and probably your face and your head are just going to vibrate like crazy. That's when you know you've hit that fundamental. Again, this would be too high. This would be too low. And right dead on is. Once you've found that pitch, the best thing to do is go back to our breathing exercises where we did the slow breathing, 5 counts in and 5 counts out, and apply that and get a nice sort of even tone coming out the instrument. Breathing in through the nose. When you first try it, you may not be able to hold a note that long. It might have some kind of wavers and funny sounds to it. That's fine. That's the way it's going to start out. Practice it with the breathing. Get yourself a nice steady sound going, and that's the way to get the basic sound.