What Actually Happens When You Open Standard Of Excellence 2 Clarinet
It picks up right where volume 1 leaves off, which is not as smooth as you might hope. Volume 1 gets you through basic fingerings and simple two-note slurs. Volume 2 assumes you can already play in first position without staring at your left hand the entire time, and frankly, a lot of students cannot do that yet when they start this book. The method itself is fine. It covers key signatures beyond C and F — B flat major and G major get real attention here — along with eighth notes, sixteenth notes, basic dynamics, and an introduction to alto clarinet excerpts that most teachers just skip anyway. The orchestral etudes start appearing. There are passages that require actual breath control instead of just holding your breath and hoping.
Standard Of Excellence 2 Clarinet Download Options
The official book is published by Kjos and sells for roughly $17 to $22 depending on where you buy it. The PDF exists in various corners of the internet, mostly hosted on teacher resource sites or file-sharing platforms. I am not going to link any of those because that is a legal gray area I do not want to be responsible for. What I will say is that most band directors who have been doing this for twenty years simply photocopy pages for their students or assign the workbook separately from the skill sheets. That second book, the one with the repetitive technical exercises, is where most of the actual learning happens. Each unit follows the same pattern: a new concept gets introduced through a method page, then there are skill sheet drills, then ensemble pieces, then a performance piece. The problem is the drill pages are where people stall out. They do not actually practice the drill. They flip through it during class and move on. Here is what I tell my students: you need to do the skill sheets at home, not in rehearsal. Rehearsal time with a group of thirty beginners is exactly forty-five minutes and there are thirty kids. You are going to get maybe two minutes of individual attention per person per week. The skill sheets are designed to be done slowly, with a metronome, at about 60 beats per minute for the eighth note exercises. If you are not using a metronome on those pages, you are not actually practicing them.
I ran into a specific issue last year with a student who was working through the B flat major scale section in unit 5. He kept flubbing the F sharp in the top register every single time he played it. Not sometimes. Every time. The book has you play the scale up and down, which seemed like the obvious fix, but it was not working. What actually solved it was isolating just the top four notes — D, E, F sharp, G — and playing them as a repeated four-note figure with the metronome at 50 beats per minute, dotted rhythms, both ways. That took about three weeks of him doing it for five minutes before class. The problem was not the scale. The problem was that his lip tension was inconsistent on the upper register register transition, and running the whole scale up and down let him hide that weakness by falling back on muscle memory in the lower register.
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Counter-Intuitive Things About This Book That Nobody Tells You
First, the orchestral etudes are not meant to be performed yet. They are meant to be played very slowly, ideally at half tempo or slower, so you hear every note cleanly. I have seen teachers make this mistake repeatedly. They put an etude in front of a student and say "get this ready for concert" and suddenly the student is playing it at performance tempo with sloppy articulation and then they sound bad at the concert and feel like failures. The etude is diagnostic. It tells you what you still need to work on. Play it at 40 beats per minute and figure out which notes are tripping you up before you ever think about speeding it up. Second, the alto clarinet parts that appear sporadically in the ensemble pieces are almost never actually played by students in middle school band programs. They are printed there because the book wants to be comprehensive. If your program does not have an alto clarinet, do not waste time on those pages. Your director will just have you play the B flat clarinet part anyway. It is fine to skip them entirely and come back to them in volume 3 if you end up picking up the alto.
Where The Method Falls Apart
The biggest gap in Standard Of Excellence 2 Clarinet is that it does not address embouchure development at all. It assumes your embouchure is already solid from volume 1, but volume 1 barely touches it. If you have a student who is biting too hard or whose bottom lip is rolling inward, this book will not fix that. You need external resources for that. The method is strong on notation reading and rhythm, weak on tone production. That is a deliberate choice on the publishers' part — they treat embouchure as something the individual teacher handles separately. Another limitation: the repertoire choices are dated. Some of the ensemble pieces sound like they were written in 1987 and nobody has updated them since. A few of the melody lines are pleasant but generic. If your students are comparing their playing to what they hear on recordings or in pop music, these pieces will not impress them. That is a real problem for motivation. I supplement with modern method books or contemporary pieces to keep engagement up, especially for students who are starting volume 2 after a year of playing. The workbook that accompanies the main book is essentially the same material rearranged. Some teachers assign both and some assign neither. I assign the workbook selectively — only the pages that target the specific gaps I see in each student. Using it as a blanket assignment for everyone is a waste of time.
What Actually Works When Teaching From This Book
Work through the skill sheets in order but do not rush. If a student finishes a skill sheet in one session and gets everything right, that does not mean they have mastered it. Come back to it three days later and see if it still sounds clean. Muscle memory takes about a week to lock in at this level. The pieces themselves should be practiced in sections, not run from start to finish. Most of the ensemble pieces in volume 2 are eight to sixteen measures long. Practice the hardest four measures first, then add the measure before it, then the measure after. That is the only way you actually learn the piece instead of just repeating the parts you already know. If you are a self-studying adult or a parent helping a child through this method, you will need a metronome and a tuner. The book does not include either of those and it assumes they are already part of your routine. If you do not have them, get them. The tuner is especially important in volume 2 because intonation issues become more apparent once you start playing in different key signatures. The F sharp in B flat major and the E natural in G major tend to sit poorly in the tune on most student clarinets unless the player is actively listening and adjusting. The method is not perfect. It is not revolutionary. But it is consistent, it covers the right ground in the right order, and it is used in more band programs than anything else for a reason. It will get you through the second year of clarinet instruction if you actually do the work outside of rehearsal time.
