What is good recorder playing posture?

Two questions to begin:

  • Do you have good recorder playing posture? 
  • What do you think that might look like?

‘My posture is terrible!’

I ask my questions in that order because I strongly suspect that most players – if they ever think of their posture at all – would probably answer ‘no, my posture is terrible’. Our default opinion with regard to posture, whether holding a recorder or not, is that ours is almost certainly not very good. As an Alexander Technique teacher, I have lost count of the number of adults who still hear their parent’s voice in their head telling them to ‘stand up straight!’

‘My what?’

And that’s assuming we’ve thought about our posture as we play at all. Especially if you’ve started playing at a young age, your first thought on picking up the instrument is likely to have been more on what sounds you could make, rather than how you’re going to get the recorder most efficiently to your mouth! But thinking about what you are doing with your body as you prepare to play becomes very important as you become more proficient. Thinking about your recorder playing posture will help you to play more difficult music because your technique will be better, and you’ll be able to play for longer.

As a result, many players have developed playing postures that aren’t as effective or efficient as we would like. In Spring 2017 The Recorder Magazine had this image as its front cover. I adore it for the accuracy of the artist’s portrayal of some of the more common types of error one sees in recorder playing posture.

Collage image of recorder players, from Recorder Magazine, Spring 2017. Many recorder playing posture faults in evidence.

In the back row, 2nd and 3rd from the left, one can see players holding the instrument too close to their chests, with their elbows close to their sides. The one on the left is compensating by flexing their wrists too much; the one on the right is arching their wrists. The player on the far right of the back row is arching their back; this will make it very difficult to breathe in effectively as their ribs won’t move as freely. In the front row, the girl on the left is bending herself down over her recorder, instead of lifting the recorder to her mouth. This will cause her to lose breath pressure, and she’ll probably play flat. The boy on the right looks like he is raising his shoulders up to his ears as he breathes in. As I wrote recently, this isn’t actually necessary for good breathing.

So what is good recorder playing posture?

Principle 1: bring the instrument to you, not the other way around.

Don’t be like the girl in the front row! You don’t need to do anything with your spine to lift a recorder; use your arms. Hold the recorder with your arms down at your sides. Now lift your arms, but think of moving them from your shoulders so that the recorder almost creates an arc in the air as it moves to your mouth.

Moving in this way helps you to maintain a relaxed torso, and that will help you to breathe more effectively. Arms are appendicular structures, and we can move them without having to involve our spine or torso much at all.

Principle 2: allow your elbows to leave your sides far enough that your wrists are reasonably straight.

Don’t be like the two players in the back row! It really helps your fingers to move more easily if your wrists are not overly flexed or extended, but instead are left straight and relaxed. To achieve this, when you raise your arms from your shoulder joints, your elbows will naturally come out to the sides a little.

I think often we worry about taking up too much space. But we aren’t on a crowded bus! Nor are we often likely to be squeezed into tiny orchestra pits. This means that, particularly as a soloist, it really pays to allow yourself to take up the space to which you are entitled.

Tips for working on your playing posture

  • Spend a little bit of time every practice session working on how you raise the recorder to a playing position. 
  • Watch yourself in a mirror if you can. 
  • Try to move your arms while involving your head and torso as little as possible, using the two principles I’ve outlined.
  • Practise this as a separate discipline to working on scales or pieces. This will make it easier to integrate into your playing, as you won’t be trying to concentrate on posture, music, fingerings etc all at once.

Give it a go, and let me know how you get on.

Image from cover of The Recorder Magazine, Spring 2017.

Recorder clogging up? Try this.

Do you find your recorder clogging up frequently and sounding all muffled and horrible? Today I’m sharing a tip I learned just recently that solves the problem for wooden recorders…

A few weekends ago I attended the Society of Recorder Players Festival 2019 in Durham. It was a fantastic event (please do investigate going to the 2020 Festival in Norwich – you’ll have a ball), and had some brilliant tutors offering great advice.

Perhaps the most simple and practical piece of advice came from Joris van Goethem, who until recently played with the Flanders Recorder Quartet. I was playing with my group Pink Noise in Joris’ ensembles masterclass, and my recorder kept clogging. Joris gave a piece of potentially life-changing advice, and the reasoning behind it.

Moisture and recorders

When we play into a wooden recorder, we have to breathe into it, and the warmth of our breath creates condensation in the instrument. In a well-behaved instrument, according to Joris, the moisture should run in two neat streams down either side of the block:

Where condensation runs on a recorder

Sadly, not all instruments are well-behaved, and not all condensation follows the right path. Sometimes we might end up with a blob of moisture sitting right in the middle of the block. If this happens, it compromises sound quality, and the instrument starts to sound muffled. We could try covering the windway and blowing the moisture blob away; if we’re in the middle of playing, we could try sucking it back in. But just as with raindrops on a window, once moisture has an established path it will continue to follow the path already created; our instrument will clog up repeatedly.

Obviously, we don’t want our lovely recorder clogging up constantly and ruining our concentration and the flow of the music. So what to do?

A paintbrush and some water

Joris recommended throwing a bit of water at the instrument! Put the head joint under the tap, and trickle a tiny bit of water down the windway.

Where to aim water to stop your recorder clogging up

Or, if that scares you, get a little paintbrush, and get the bristles wet. Then paint the block of your recorder through the fipple, and get it nicely moistened. By doing this you create a smooth moist surface over the whole of the block, so there is far less opportunity for one rogue moisture blob to create havoc in the middle of the block. All the moisture should behave in the way we want, and move to the edges.

I’ve tried this with a recorder of mine that has been prone to clogging, and after a couple of seconds of extreme displeasure at being so wet, the recorder then played beautifully each time I’ve tried it, and for over 30 minutes of constant use. One of my colleagues has reported similar results consistently since he started using this method.

But I have a plastic recorder, and it’s clogging…

I haven’t tried the water trick with a plastic or resin recorder yet, so I don’t know if it works in the same way. Bearing in mind that water droplets will behave the same way and create tracks on a plastic surface as a wooden one, it would certainly be worth a try. The other thing that affects plastic recorders is build-up of residue in the recorder, and particularly in the windway. Any brass player will tell you that condensation isn’t pure water, and that instruments need cleaning regularly. The easiest solution for this is to give it a little bath in some diluted washing up liquid, and then let it dry.

Happy clog-free playing!

Why we should all start practising long notes

What do you do when you start practising?

A long note - because practising long notes is a great warm-up.

Most people, if they’re honest, generally start their practice session by picking out a piece and starting to play. A few minutes in, and a number of mistakes in fingering and tonguing later, they pause, take stock, actually look at the music, and start thinking about what fingers and tongue really ought to be doing.

Of course, I would never start a practice session this way… *tries to look innocent*

Why do we avoid long notes and technical work?

Here are my best guesses:

  • We think we’re saving time
  • We prefer playing ‘real’ music over exercises
  • We think (secretly or otherwise) that working on scales and technical work is boring and difficult

The fallacy of this as a practice strategy has been brought home to me by watching my son work with his trumpet. He starts nearly every practice session by ‘buzzing’ with just the mouthpiece, and then by running through basic flexibilities – a series of exercises designed to work on breath pressure and finger control. Once he has done these, he turns to his pieces. And what I have noticed is that he plays the pieces so much more effectively and accurately after the flexibilities, far more than if he skips the flexibilities (which happens rarely).

Recorder flexibilities?

So I am wondering what would happen if we recorder players behaved a bit more like brass players in our attention to warming up. It seems likely to me that we would benefit from spending some time on thinking about breathing, breath pressure and co ordination with fingers before embarking on repertoire.

So let’s have a go at playing long notes at the start of a practice session. I’ve been experimenting with it, and have noticed the following:

  • I think more about how I am lifting the instrument, so experience less tension;
  • I think about my breathing;
  • I listen to the sound of the instrument I’m playing. Each note has its own timbre, and varies depending on dynamic;
  • Playing long notes gives me time to focus my attention on the activity I am about to do. I find myself thinking about playing recorder in the present moment, rather than the rest of the things on my to-do list.

My experience is that playing long notes helps my focus, breath control, and the efficiency of my playing, and all of these help me when I start to work on scales or pieces.

So… will you give it a go?

Michael Grinter (1953-2018)

Michael Grinter at work.
Michael at work

I first met Michael Grinter when I was studying recorder as a teenager with Zana Clarke in Armidale, NSW Australia. Michael was up visiting from Victoria, and very kindly tried to make my inexpensive (and not good) wooden recorder play a little more reliably. He loaned me a recorder; I fell in love with his beautiful instruments, and ordered a 415 treble. It is my prize possession, and plays like a dream.

I kept in touch with him over the years, and he occasionally gave my 415 a once-over, just to keep it playing so beautifully. He was always unfailingly kind and friendly – an email from him always made me smile.

When I started playing in The Biber Duo with my lovely colleague Tim Lanfear, I let Mike know that we were playing his instruments in our concerts; Tim had bought a Grinter 415 secondhand, and even though they weren’t an exact match, they sounded very well together. Mike enjoyed seeing the videos of our performances, and even included one on his new website, grinterflutes.com. He was kind enough to write this: 

here’s a lovely video of Jennifer Mackerras playing in a duo with Pink Noise colleague Tim Lanfear.  This is the duo’s first concert playing the  Telemann Canonic Sonatas – exquisite playing

Last year my duet partner Tim and I ordered matching 440 trebles from Michael. He was thrilled at the challenge of making matching instruments, and our order came at just the right time as he was planning to come back to recorder making. Indeed, he was planning to visit the UK in Spring 2019 for this reason, and I was looking forward to his visit.

Tim and I took delivery of our lovely 440 trebles in October 2018, and we programmed a lovely Boismortier sonata in our December concert to showcase them. 

It is likely that our instruments were the last recorders he completed, and he died before we had the chance to perform and record the sound of his beautiful recorders playing together. I will always be sad that he never got to hear them.

He wasn’t just a very good recorder player and a great maker; he was a truly lovely and generous man, and I will miss him very much.

Breath control: How to cure unintentional vibrato

It’s a fairly common thing to meet amateur recorder players who are a bit worried about their breath control as they play. Some run out of breath; others struggle with a sort of unintentional vibrato that causes notes to wobble around. If I meet a player with this sort of problem, I listen to them play to see if they show any of these potential causes:

  • Playing too softly
  • Playing too loudly
  • Not noticing that the recorder does have a degree of resistance in the windway – it’s just really delicate compared with some other wind instruments.
  • Issues with breathing generally

In today’s post I am going to concentrate on that last point, partly because it is so fundamental to what we do as recorder players, and partly because so many of us feel we don’t do it very well. And if we feel that our breathing is problematic in ordinary daily life, then it is likely our worries will be amplified (quite literally!) when we put the mouthpiece of the recorder between our lips! To cure the problems of unwanted vibrato, we need to get to the bottom of our more general issues around breathing. Therefore, today I am going to give you a whistle stop tour of your respiratory system.

Do you know where you breathe?

It sounds like a silly question, but it’s something that is actually really important. Pretty much everyone knows that the air we breathe in goes into our lungs, but after that, all knowledge is up for grabs! Some people lift their shoulders up to their ears when they take a breath. Others try to ‘breathe into their belly’. Some suck their tummy inwards when they breathe (I’ve heard singers describe this as ‘reverse breathing’). But what is anatomically most appropriate?

It’s an important issue, and can cause a lot of issues around unintentional vibrato. So take a second, and put your hands where you think your lungs are.

Did you put them on your chest?

Lungs are surprisingly large: they start just under the collarbone, and go all the way down to the base of the ribs. They have a truly massive surface area, because we need it to be able to hold all the air we would need to take part in serious physical exertion (or, indeed, playing a contrabass recorder). 

Lungs and shoulders

If we think of the lungs as massive sacks for the moment, it seems reasonable that, if the sacks are filling with air, that there would be an expansion involving the ribs and the back. And seeing as the shoulder structures rest over the top of the ribs, it only seems fair that there should be a little accessory motion in the shoulders, too. Note that I say ‘accessory motion’ – raising your shoulders to your ears doesn’t really help you get any more air in your lungs. We don’t end to deliberately lift them, but we shouldn’t be keeping them absolutely still, either.

Diaphragm and belly

The diaphragm is a muscle that you may have head of, and it has an important function in the breathing process. It is the diaphragm contracting downwards that causes the change in pressure in the pleural cavity that starts the process of breathing in. Now, when the diaphragm contracts downwards, it runs into the organs beneath it – primarily the digestive organs. These don’t like being squished, and need to move in order to avoid it. They can’t go downwards, because there’s pelvis in the way, and can’t go backwards because the spine is in the way. So they move outwards as we breathe in – or should do, in a normal breathing pattern.

(If you want to watch a video explaining the system, try this one from Crash Course. The mechanics of lungs and diaphragm are about 5 minutes in)

Breathing control

The trick with breathing is that it is both autonomous AND voluntary. That is to say, we can choose to a large degree when and how we breathe. This is good, because it means that we’re able to talk and play musical instruments! But it also means we can impose ideas and beliefs that can really impede the normal action of the respiratory system. Anyone who has done any classical dance training, for example, probably won’t be comfortable with allowing their belly to move outwards, because it conflicts with good form in classical dance. Or if you’re like some of my classical singing Alexander Technique students, you’ve been told so many times that shoulders should not move while breathing that you actively hold them down!

Rediscover your breath

One of the best ways I know to rediscover the whole respiratory system, after doing a bit of research looking at anatomy books and YouTube videos, is to lie down and feel what you do when you breathe.

I would suggest lying on your back on the floor, with your feet flat and your knees pointing towards the ceiling. You can put some padding under your head if you like. And breathe. Notice what happens in your chest, shoulders and back. Notice what your belly does. Once you’ve started to acquaint yourself with your breathing patterns, start experimenting with allowing movement through your ribs, back and abdominal region as you breathe in and out.

Jen demonstrating position for investigating breath control

It is tempting, too, to focus solely on breathing in. I would strongly recommend that you spend just as much time noticing what happens as you breathe out. Notice which muscles are working, and which ones relax. See if you can make your out-breath more tension-free.

If you have problems with an unwanted vibrato, it is likely that you’ll have found some unwanted tension in your breathing, and that you may have had an incomplete notion of how the whole system works. So spend a couple of minutes each day investigating what your breathing is doing today, and think about allowing the process to be more closely aligned to an anatomic normal. Once you feel happy with what you are doing, get back up and start to play. Or you could even try playing long notes while lying down, and see what you notice about the sound.

Next time I’ll speak more about long notes, and about issues of dynamics and windway resistance. But for now, just enjoy experimenting with your respiratory system.