When Should You Learn to Double Tongue?

As a recorder teacher, I field a lot of questions about double tonguing. What is it? Will it help me go faster? How can I learn to do it?

All of these are great questions!

But I think there are a couple of equally excellent questions that tend to get skipped over, and we really ought to answer them first.

Why do we double tongue? And what does that mean for when you should learn to do it?

in the simplest terms, double tonguing is category of tonguing in which you deliberately utilize different parts of your tongue or different ways of moving your tongue to increase the speed at which you can articulate.

There are many flavors of double tonguing, but they all share two important characteristics.

First, you can (after sufficient practice) produce them more quickly than you could your typical range of single syllables. If your tongue, and not your fingers, was the limiting factor in how quickly you could execute a particular passage, double tonguing will help you speed up.

Second, double tonguing forms consistent patterns of paired units. This gives you less flexibility in how you are able articulate, resulting in a more uniform, and typically a bit less interesting, articulation scheme. This is kind of a bummer, but if we really need the speed, it’s a compromise we have to make.

In short, we double tongue because we need or want to play faster than we are able to do gracefully using single tonguing.

What does this mean for when we should learn it?

Basically, if you are a beginning or intermediate player, double tonguing should not be a priority.

While it’s not a bad idea to begin to build some basic facility with double tonguing patters in advance of when you’ll need to use them, the real signal for when you need to up your double tonguing game is when your fingers move so fast that it becomes impossible for your tongue to keep up in a graceful and flowing manner.

Before that, you’re usually better off using a bouquet of more flexible and varied articulation patterns, because they’re going to be more interesting. But once your tongue needs to match the speed your fingers, it’s time to double down on double tonguing!

What to dive deeper into how (and when) to double tongue? I have a webinar for that.