Thoughts on Tonguing

  Still being in high school I get to watch a wide variety of players. From just in the band for friends, to aspiring to be the next big solo artist. One thing that I always notice is, everyone wants to learn double tonguing. While it's good to learn this technique at a certain point down the road I've found it to not be as valuable as you'd think.
  Now I have to admit I'm guilty of this as well. I've always been a quick talker (would've made a fine auctioneer) and when I picked up the horn, well you could say I had "The Fastest Tongue in the West." I could amaze people by how fast I could double and triple tongue, but sadly I still didn't know many scales or have much of a developed tone. Seems a bit "bass ackwards," right? Well now that I've progressed into a more solid player I've been trying to find ways to incorporate my stupid-fast multiple tonguing into a piece of music. To this day I haven't found a song where I can't play a moving passage cleaner with single tonguing and there's never been a passage where I can go as fast as I can and not rush the rhythms. You may say this could be used in a cadenza, and I wish I could find a tasteful way to add this skill into a cadenza. Alas that is not the case, and if anyone out there has found a way please send me a message or comment. That would really make my day.
  So what does this all mean? Develop your basic skills like tone production and single tonguing. In my experience even with the top professional music I've been able to play nearly all of it single tongued, including the triplets at the end of Gliere's 3rd Mvt. For the longest time I had always used triple tonguing on that section but then when enough people urged me to try single tonguing it I worked it up and I have to say it got about twice as clean with just that one change. 

  Having an incredibly fast single tongue is the key to playing the insanely fast passage like Dennis Brain, Hermann Baumann, and Radek Baborak. The double and triple tongue merely offer an aid on a repetitive notes and may be needed in special literature that are meant to test/show-off that area of player's skill. Once again let me reiterate this point again since it's of the utmost importance, master your basic skills because they are what you'll be using 99.9% of the time when your playing and they are the building blocks to everything else out there.