Sometimes clean playing is like stepping on an asphalt road while messing up means breaking your way through a jungle with a machete. But after a while of this mess, the skill of nonchalant walking through the forest is gained.

We will explain one example from the realms of this sidewayof didgeridoo playing, and it is toots and spaces between and within them.

Maybe you have tried an experiment of starting to play the basic drone, and then – by slowly tightening the lips – you have passed through many strange sounds to come finally to the toot. It is possible to play all the notes in between, but because of a complete lack of impedance, no resonance can be achieved, and for a longer period of time, these sounds usually aren’t very pleasant to listen to.

On the other hand, you can use their magic differently. Try a deeper instrument with a deeper toot. Play the first toot softly. Feel your lips. Start to relax a part of the lips, let’s say the left part of the lips, so it releases air freely. Done? Good. It means you can control a part of your lips separately from the other part. Now try it some more to remember where this part is.

Remember it well!

You know that while playing a toot, it can either sound perfectly smooth, or sometimes very textured and coarse. Try to go from the smooth toot to the coarse. Get to know this feeling.

Now combine the two. Play a smooth toot and relax a part of your lips to grab textures. Hear how the smooth toot is still present and its frequency clearly booming, while on the other part of lips you can play with harmonics in a very strong textural sense. It is not the same way of playing with harmonics as usually done on drone, and can be repeated on the toot, but rather giving a textured design of the drone to the toot. If you take a tuner, you will see how this superposition can significantly change the drone pitch. But you are still using the resonance of the toot as the body of sound, so as not to get an empty sound as in our first example.

This technique can be applied between any toot but changes and to some extent loses its meaning in high toots. It is a very good practice for lips and still a world to explore in the “how to use didgeridoo” chapter of human history.

.