Didgeridoo Lesson 6 | How to Get a Better, Clearer Sound

Many didgeridoo players come to my masterclasses and ask me for tips, because they always have the same sound. They tell me: “My sound is not really clear. I don’t know how to make different sounds. I would like a very clear sound, but I can’t get it. Why, and how can I do it?”

The sound is the base of everything on the didgeridoo, and in music. If you want to play beautiful rhythms, you need a very beautiful sound, and you need to understand how to get it. In this lesson, I show you how to get a professional, very clean sound.

Two opposing forces

To make the sound of your didgeridoo, you simply blow into it. But you need to know that a beautiful sound comes from two opposing forces:

• The air going out. This force comes from your stomach: when you push with your stomach, you push on your lungs, and the air goes out.
• How you close your mouth. Your lips keep the air inside your body.

One force tries to take the air out of your body, the other tries to keep it in. The meeting of these two forces creates a tension inside your body. A good tension: not a tight one, a relaxed one, but a very important one.

This tension, or pressure, shapes your sound.

Too little or too much pressure

With no tension at all, the sound is poor and has little presence. With too much tension, it’s too much. Listen to both in the video.

To check your pressure:

• If your sound has too much bass, you probably lack pressure. Close your lips a little more and blow a little harder.
• If your sound is narrow and nasal, you are probably closing your lips too much, or not blowing hard enough.

The right way is to find the balance between the air you push out and the air you keep inside.

Hear the difference

In the video, I first play a rhythm with a bad tension: I don’t push much with my stomach, and I don’t close my lips much. The sound is bad, and the rhythm is not really clear.

Then I push a little more with my stomach, and a lot more with my lips. I only change these two settings, and you can hear the big difference.

Push more, close more

What I recommend every time: push more with your stomach into your didgeridoo, and close your mouth more. Your playing should be very dynamic.

The didgeridoo is a bass instrument. So when you play it, you think you need to be really relaxed, as if you were sitting on a sofa. No: you need to feel this power, this force inside you.

Play with the inside of your lips

One more thing: think about your lips. If you play with the inside, wet part of your lips, you will get much more harmonics, all those high sounds.

The harmonics come from the tongue moving. But you hear them because the vibration happens on the wet part of the lips, and not so much on the outside.

An exercise to find the right pressure

1. Start with your basic sound as usual.
2. Increase the volume by blowing progressively harder. Let your lips vibrate and settle. Again, the goal is to find the right balance without overdoing it.
3. When you start to hear your tongue movements (the harmonics) in your sound, you know you are on the right track. Your pressure matches the note of your instrument.

The lower the didgeridoo, the more relaxed you have to play. The higher the didgeridoo, the more you have to close your lips and blow harder.