When young musicians complain about their teachers, it's often because they can't see the sense of being told to play what seems like the same old boring exercise, over and over again. Where are the exciting tunes? How can you impress your friends or your family when playing them a lot of scales that just send them to sleep?

Later on, professional musicians learn to be glad of that repetitive discipline because it allows them to play exactly what they can imagine in their heads, not just a hit-or-miss version of it. If you have to play with other people, in a situation in which you need to be in tune and in time with everybody else, all that boring slog starts to make sense.

And later on, when the exercises have become something you do just to keep yourself in shape, the way you might if you were a professional footballer or a dancer or an athlete, they become as natural as breathing or walking.

There's a lot to learn about playing a reed instrument, but Julian Siegel found that a few important priorities occurred to him as his experience grew.