Nov 2013
On Practicing
17/11/13 22:04
Last week I wrote about the link between LISTENING and SLOW PRACTICE. Today I’d like to suggest that you spend a little time with your tuner during your warmup and beyond. And not surprisingly, that subject also links back to slow practice.
Spending even five careful minutes playing whole notes with a tuner will benefit all subsequent aspects of your practice session, just as slow practicing does, and for some of the same reasons.
Unless we are very careful players, most of us go through our practice routines doing the same, habitual things that make us feel comfortable; not the things that make us better. And one of those habitual, counterproductive things many of us do is backing off on our air to “favor" difficult passages, difficult attacks, out of tune notes, etc. We manipulate notes and lines, rather than using our air to play them.
Using the tuner at the beginning of the practice session helps us break that cycle of daily, counterproductive habits by forcing us to use our air. If our air isn’t consistent, some notes will be out of tune or “out of color” (sounding different from the other notes); we will see (on the tuner) and/or hear that immediately, and we instinctively use more air to fix it, because that’s the only thing that works.
So after (or even during) your warmup, pull out your tuner for just a few minutes. It will get your practice session off on the right foot in all kinds of good ways!
Spending even five careful minutes playing whole notes with a tuner will benefit all subsequent aspects of your practice session, just as slow practicing does, and for some of the same reasons.
Unless we are very careful players, most of us go through our practice routines doing the same, habitual things that make us feel comfortable; not the things that make us better. And one of those habitual, counterproductive things many of us do is backing off on our air to “favor" difficult passages, difficult attacks, out of tune notes, etc. We manipulate notes and lines, rather than using our air to play them.
Using the tuner at the beginning of the practice session helps us break that cycle of daily, counterproductive habits by forcing us to use our air. If our air isn’t consistent, some notes will be out of tune or “out of color” (sounding different from the other notes); we will see (on the tuner) and/or hear that immediately, and we instinctively use more air to fix it, because that’s the only thing that works.
So after (or even during) your warmup, pull out your tuner for just a few minutes. It will get your practice session off on the right foot in all kinds of good ways!
On Practicing
10/11/13 21:52
In this post, I would like to stress the link between two previously-mentioned thoughts: listening, and slow practicing.
LISTENING: Trumpet great Vince DiMartino tells his students, “Whatever time you have to practice every day, spend half of it listening.” And Mick Hesse, in his book Perfecting Your Practice, highly recommends, in several different contexts, listening to other great players for many reasons, including improving our pitch. While most of us depend on our tuners for pitch, Mick says, “I can’t emphasize enough the importance of listening to skilled musicians… [And I love this line] …Even trumpet players can learn to play in tune. We must fill our aural memory banks with what is in tune.”
Needless to say, we’re talking here about analytical listening. It’s fine to listen for fun—that’s why we all love music! But improvement dictates that some of the time we listen carefully, for specific things. How does a great player shape a phrase; prepare an octave leap; articulate difficult passages; vary volume to create a line; tune to the players around him/her, etc.?
SLOW PRACTICE: The importance of slow practice is often misunderstood. A frequent mis-application of it is to approach difficult passages by slowing them down only enough that we can play all the notes, however imperfectly, then speeding them back up. While better than nothing, that approach focusses only on “getting the notes”—it omits far more than it includes. Those notes that we’re “getting” may still be inconsistent in sound or pitch, lacking in line, or in other ways falling far short of our best efforts.
A far more productive use of this technique is to slow down difficult passages (or easy passages, or even single notes) to the point that we can focus entirely on producing the sound, musical line, phrasing, perfect articulations, and intonation that we are seeking—not just on “getting the notes.”
And though slow practice is, to some, boring, it pays an extraordinarily high dividend rate: even a short period of slow practice (the right kind—always reaching for that sound and that attack) doesn’t just improve the passage you thought you were trying to improve—it improves EVERYTHING. Talk about Bang for the Buck!
A specific example: if you’re not happy with, say, your attacks, just spend ten minutes—honest, just ten minutes—really focussing on nothing but playing perfect whole notes at, say ♩= 60, removing the instrument from your embouchure after each. You won’t believe how much that improves everything else you do in the rest of your practice session.
THE LINK BETWEEN LISTENING AND SLOW PRACTICE: At the risk of repeating the obvious, virtually all artist/teachers agree that the only way to get a beautiful musical sound to come out of our instrument is to first put it into our ears. So that’s the link: listening puts it in, slow practice brings it out.
And finally, here's a good link from Steve Ferrandino, MWS Baritone Saxophone (thanks, Steve!) with some additional thoughts on practicing in general, including some particular thoughts on getting the most out of time spent.
LISTENING: Trumpet great Vince DiMartino tells his students, “Whatever time you have to practice every day, spend half of it listening.” And Mick Hesse, in his book Perfecting Your Practice, highly recommends, in several different contexts, listening to other great players for many reasons, including improving our pitch. While most of us depend on our tuners for pitch, Mick says, “I can’t emphasize enough the importance of listening to skilled musicians… [And I love this line] …Even trumpet players can learn to play in tune. We must fill our aural memory banks with what is in tune.”
Needless to say, we’re talking here about analytical listening. It’s fine to listen for fun—that’s why we all love music! But improvement dictates that some of the time we listen carefully, for specific things. How does a great player shape a phrase; prepare an octave leap; articulate difficult passages; vary volume to create a line; tune to the players around him/her, etc.?
SLOW PRACTICE: The importance of slow practice is often misunderstood. A frequent mis-application of it is to approach difficult passages by slowing them down only enough that we can play all the notes, however imperfectly, then speeding them back up. While better than nothing, that approach focusses only on “getting the notes”—it omits far more than it includes. Those notes that we’re “getting” may still be inconsistent in sound or pitch, lacking in line, or in other ways falling far short of our best efforts.
A far more productive use of this technique is to slow down difficult passages (or easy passages, or even single notes) to the point that we can focus entirely on producing the sound, musical line, phrasing, perfect articulations, and intonation that we are seeking—not just on “getting the notes.”
And though slow practice is, to some, boring, it pays an extraordinarily high dividend rate: even a short period of slow practice (the right kind—always reaching for that sound and that attack) doesn’t just improve the passage you thought you were trying to improve—it improves EVERYTHING. Talk about Bang for the Buck!
A specific example: if you’re not happy with, say, your attacks, just spend ten minutes—honest, just ten minutes—really focussing on nothing but playing perfect whole notes at, say ♩= 60, removing the instrument from your embouchure after each. You won’t believe how much that improves everything else you do in the rest of your practice session.
THE LINK BETWEEN LISTENING AND SLOW PRACTICE: At the risk of repeating the obvious, virtually all artist/teachers agree that the only way to get a beautiful musical sound to come out of our instrument is to first put it into our ears. So that’s the link: listening puts it in, slow practice brings it out.
And finally, here's a good link from Steve Ferrandino, MWS Baritone Saxophone (thanks, Steve!) with some additional thoughts on practicing in general, including some particular thoughts on getting the most out of time spent.