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.