Hi all, anyone got any good ideas about saliva production(!)EuuKK!! When my daughter is playing through her exam pieces she gets a build up and ends up having to do a "swallow" half way through! NICE. She had braces fitted in August and all seems to be going ok apart from this. Exam on 8th Dec and it would help if we could get through a piece with no obvious pauses! All ideas welcome!

You don't say what instrument your daughter plays, or which grade she's taking, which generally affects the length of the pieces.

Perhaps your daughter and her teacher could work out how long it takes her to swallow and roughly how far she can get without swallowing, then choose a couple of places in each piece where she can leave out enough notes for a swallow with minimum disruption to the music. Ideally they will be places where the accompaniment is more interesting to listen to than what she is playing at that point.

I'm afraid the first question that immediately came into my mind needed answering several months ago: Why take an exam with braces? It's possible to carry on progressing really well without being committed to an exam. The next question, also almost certainly too late: Was there nothing she could have played from each list in the syllabus that had rests long enough for her to plan to swallow? I know the solo lines in some pieces do go on pretty relentlessly!

Best of luck for solving the problem and for the exam itself. I hope your daughter will get a sympathetic examiner.

Which instrument?

I think this is fairly common on Recorder.

oops! Forgot to say that she is on grade 5 flute. Good point about the rests, will tell her to conciously swallow then and it should take her through to the next bit! Thanks. Am obviously feeling a bit slow today!

Other things to bear in mind - drinking a little water before the performance can help stop the mouth from watering. And be careful not to have spicy/salty/sweet food immediately beforehand as those can trigger more salivation too.

Is too much spit a common problem with braces? I've just started to teach a beginner oboist who has braces, and she is incredibly spitty, so it would make sense. (Luckily they're coming off in January!)

don't the grade 5 pices have rests in them as im praticing for them aat the momement and there should be anough time to swallow in mine. it wont so much a problem in some grade 6 pieces as the 1 im playing for a concert has like 6 - 9 bars rests all the way through.y
next time you pick pieces try picking pieces with rests in them but i know 2 people who play the flute with braces and they are fine 1 of them is know grade 7. so see if you can do anything about it.