At my birthday I got a really special gift from Barbara - a introductory course in playing didgeridoo. This 90 minutes course was held in a didgeridoo shop in Fremantle, Western Australia. The aim of this course is to show you the various ways of producing a tone with the didgeridoo.

We were a group of five people. For those who don’t have their own didgeridoo, like us, a didgeridoo is provided by the shop. At the beginning we got a little introduction in the history of digeridoos, or didges how our teacher called them.

Surprisingly the biggest didgeridoo community you don’t find in Australia but in Germany. Another intersting thing is that didgeridoos are built all around the world. For example in India they produce didgeridoos made from plastic. Traditionelly didgeridoos are made from branches which are hollowed out by termites. The didge cutter cuts the branch and processes it to a didgeridoo.

Ok, enough of history, back to the course. I have to admit that I have never learned to play an instrument and I am rather unmusical. But we sat on a comfi couch in the didge shop with our didges in front of us and all sorts of didges around us. So this is a perfect place to relax and start playing the didge!

Before you start playing the didgeridoo, you should loosing up your lips. We sat in a sort of circle and we shouted with wide open mouth a-e-i-o-u. This shall loosing up the diaphragm as well.

The first tone we tried to produce was the socalled “Drone”. This tone is a very low and droning tone and is the base of any jam session. Because every didge and every diaphragm is unique, the drone sounds differently with different didges and players. After some trials we managed to produce a real nice drone.

The next thing our teacher explained was how to play different sounds. The principle is always the same: you take the sound of an animal, e.g. from a dingo or Kookaburra (big Australian bird) and try to copy that sound. When you manage to make noises like this, you can connect these sounds and you have a very interesting sound combination. Well, to be honest, we could have listened to our teacher the whole night, very relaxing, but our animals sounded all a little bit sick.

In order to play the didgeridoo without stopping to take a breath, you should be able to breath circularly. This circular breathing means that you are breathing out with your mouth and breathing in with your nose. Biologically speaking this is not possible!

But with a little trick you manage to do so. You just keep enough breath in your cheeks. While you’re breathing in with your nose, you press the air through your mouth and in that way you keep the tone alive. We tried this in the backyard of the shop with water. We had water in our mouth and we tried to spit it out while we were trying to breath in through our noses. We didn’t manage this circular breathing, but we had heaps of fun spitting water!

After one and a half our the course finished and we were really done. So much air in our heads had made us a little bit dizzy and our muscles in our lips and cheeks were aching.

Conclusion: the course makes heaps of fun and you get a really good introduction in playing the didgeridoo for 30 Dollars. With a little bit of patience and exercise you will be able to produce beautiful tones after a short time. However if you plan to play the didgeridoo, think of your neighbors. The didge is certainly a very loud instrument.

Here you find the website of the didgeridoo shop in Fremantle, Perth:
www.didgeridoobreath.com
If you’re wonder how a Kookaburra sound, listen here to an example:
Kookaburra, the Laughing Jackasses of Australia