Tag: practice

Some ideas on playing semi-quavers easily (and musically)

It is a common experience of the improving player to feel anxious about trickier music – the more notes on the page, the more worried we feel! But there are strategies for improving the way we can approach ‘note-heavy’ sections of music so that we can play them without feeling concerned. We can apply practice techniques to get the semi-quavers under our fingers, and we can work on grouping notes so that they sound beautiful while still being relatively easy to play.

This week we’ll talk about strategies for learning the notes. Let’s get started.

Learning the notes, AKA taming the semi-quavers!

The first challenge with tricky passages is learning to play them! There are a number of practice strategies that you can use to help you become familiar with fast or tricky passages. The ideas below are the ones that I and my colleagues use most frequently to help learn the tricky bits.

Playing slowly

I’ve talked about this before in a previous blog, but it’s so important that I’m going to mention it again. The best way to learn to play things that need to be fast is to start by playing them slowly. In the words of YouTuber and bassist Adam Neely, you should begin by playing glacially slow.

I know that this takes a degree of discipline. Particularly when you know the work, it is really tempting to try to play at something approaching concert speed. The trouble with doing this is that you are likely to ‘fall off’, make mistakes, or find ways of ‘fudging’ your way through the passage and never really learn how to play it properly. Whenever you come up to that section, you’ll become tense because you’re not quite sure whether you’ll manage it today. It is SO much better in the long run to do the work playing slowly – and even more slowly than you think is reasonable – until you have developed the procedural memory to be able to play the passage more quickly.

Working backwards and ‘chunking’

In combination with playing slowly, you could try this technique – one of my personal favourites for learning a passage. You start with the final few notes and work on playing those well. Once you feel you have that final ‘chunk’ under control, you work on the few notes that come immediately before it, and work on playing them securely. This is your second ‘chunk’. When you can play the penultimate chunk well, you can try to join it and the final chunk together. Keep on working in this way until you’ve ‘chunked’ the whole of the passage you are trying to learn.

Why work backwards? For the simple reason that you will have repeated the end of the passage more often. Typically, when a player works from the beginning, they learn the beginning of the run very successfully, but their knowledge tails off towards the final sections of the run. This is problematic, because their concentration is likely to become harder to sustain as the run continues. So by the end of the tricky passage, they are at the limit of their concentration just as the security of their knowledge is also lessened!

If you work in the way I suggest, you actually know the semi-quaver run more securely as it goes along, meaning that you won’t have to worry about taxing your concentration.

Playing with rhythms

This is a favourite strategy of my duo colleague. Basically, if you have straight semi-quavers in front of you, try playing them in a dotted rhythm. Then try playing them with the dotted rhythm reversed. Be creative, and try to find other ways of breaking up the notes into different rhythms and patterns.

This strategy helps because it encourages you to loosen your ‘tunnel vision’ focus on the phrasing as it stands in the music. You are spending extra time on half the notes, giving you time to think about what note comes next. It seems likely that it also helps to formulate stronger and broader traces in your procedural memory. This will help later if you need to change your interpretation in order to fit with other players/accompanists.

Alternate fingerings

I and my colleagues are firm believers in using alternate fingerings to make life easier. The principle I follow is to try to keep at least one finger still on the instrument to help keep it steady while all the others are flying about! So if I have the following pattern in a passage for treble recorder:

Using alternate fingering to play notes like these helps make fast semi-quavers easier.

I will be using the 0 34 fingering for the E rather than 0 1, as it entails fewer finger movements.

Go through your passage, and if you come across something involving a lot of finger movement, see if you can find an alternate fingering that will make it easier.

Playing with articulation

Sometimes you’ll run across a passage with semi-quavers all slurred, or in groups of 2 or 4. If a passage has a lot of slurs, work on learning the notes without the slurring, or by changing the slurs to every 2 or 4 notes. Sometimes just playing with the articulation is enough to make the notes easier.

You may also find that if you have difficult jumps that the notes sound more clearly; at this point you may even consider whether the articulation in the printed music is playable for you. As a rule, I would rather the note sounded well and clearly than get the articulation score-perfect and have notes not come out clearly.

Little and often

When learning difficult passages, working on them in small concentrated bursts tends to be more effective than devoting a long practice session to just a few bars. There is a limit to what our powers of concentration can manage, and current advice from learning experts is that you will do a better job of strengthening the memory traces if you come back to the passage after a break.

Even 5 or 10 minutes can be enough to make progress on a chunk or two. Do that three or four times in a day, and you will have made significant progress on your tricky passage.

If you don’t have the time or it isn’t practical to keep coming back to your instrument over the course of a day, then do 5 minutes on the tricky passage, change to a different piece and work on it, and then come back to the tricky passage. Interleaving your practice in this way is a tried and tested practice technique.

I hope these practice ideas come in useful! Next time I’ll talk about the concept of grouping semi-quavers so we can make them both more musical AND more playable.

Why a pre-performance performance is a good idea

Having all the gear - like the guitarist's footstool - is part of the pre-performance performance

You’re ready for the performance. You’ve done your pre-performance checks. You have your recorders, music, stand; the really organised people have stands or blankets for resting instruments waiting to be played… But have you made sure you know which recorder to pick up at which time?

I have a clear memory of the last time my son played in the classical guitar classes at our local Festival. (By the way, entering Festivals is a great idea for learners, no matter what level you’ve reached – you get performance practice, you can trial new pieces, and you even get feedback from a professional. Bonus!) He was fine walking out to the stage area and setting up his music, footstool and guitar. He played beautifully. But then…

It took him ages to get offstage again. He had an expensive guitar, a footstool (awkward to hold), and a music book. Three things, but only two hands. It took him a while to work out how to hold them all in order to walk off!

It’s a classic illustration of the importance of doing run-throughs in performance conditions: you learn what little things you haven’t accounted for. A few years ago, I learned the hard way that one needs to practice drinking water from a bottle while running, if one is to avoid drenching oneself during the race! My son now understands the importance of doing a pre-performance performance, so that he can rehearse those little things like picking up a footstool.

Why a pre-performance performance is good

There are huge benefits to organising for yourself a pre-performance performance. You can:

  • pick up the little things that might trip you up (like a footstool)
  • test out playing under performance conditions. Having an audience, however small, forces you to play through any mistakes you make.
  • help yourself smooth over nerves for the actual day. You’ll prove to yourself that you can do the task of performing, and as FM knew, success builds confidence.
  • learn where you need to do more work. You’ll find the places where you need to think again, both musically and logistically.

Organising a pre-performance performance gives you a chance to use one of the key tools FM Alexander used to solve his vocal problems: you have the chance to analyse the conditions present. This was the first step in FM’s short protocol for working out how to best organise himself in any given activity. He would analyse the conditions present, then use that information to reason out the best means to achieve his goal, and then work on doing just those things.[1]

I was reminded of this recently because at a recent gig there was no time for a pre-performance run-through (through illness and injury we had to organise a fresh set less than 24 hours before the performance). My mind was so busy with doing the chat to the audience between pieces that I forgot what was coming next, and picked up the wrong recorder. It caused great hilarity, but I would have been happier not having it happen at all!

Giving a pre-performance performance helps you to analyse the specific set of conditions present in the actual performance, so that you have a better idea of how to approach it. You’ll be able to reason out a plan so as to give yourself the best chance of success. And that can only be good.

[1] FM Alexander, The Use of the Self, London, Orion Books, p.39.

How you breathe in is vital to a good recorder tone

Do you sometimes feel as though you struggle to get a good tone when you’re playing recorder? Good recorder tone is affected by many factors, including posture, instrument, humidity levels… But have you considered that how you breathe in also has a direct and dramatic impact upon the quality of the sound you make?

In my other life as an Alexander Technique teacher, I know that the way people organise their heads in relation to their bodies is vitally important to the ease and flexibility of the way they move. This is also true of recorder playing. And importantly, the quality of your playing tone will also change according to what you do with your head in relation to your body as you breathe in. So let’s investigate!

Two ways of breathing in

If asked, most players admit that they take their air in through their mouth as they begin to play. And everyone knows that you have to open your mouth in order to do so! But did you know that there are two different ways you could do this?

Method 1: leave your skull still, and let your jaw hinge downwards

For the purposes of today, I want you to imagine you have two bones (functionally speaking) in your head: your skull and your jaw. They articulate at the tempera-mandibular joint, which is located close to your ear. The simplest solution to the problem of opening the mouth is to leave the skull still and just let the jaw drop downwards, hingeing from the tempero-mandibular joint. This is a very simplified diagram to illustrate:

The advantage of this is its simplicity and economy of motion. It also just uses muscles crossing the jaw joint to make the movement, which is economical on muscular involvement. This means that the whole breathing mechanism is in a more free and flexible state, and you’re more likely to get a good recorder tone.

Method 2: leave your jaw still, and hinge your whole skull backwards

Unfortunately, this is what I see most of the time! In this highly simplified illustration, you can see that the jaw is kept still, and the whole head is thrown backwards. This is achieved by the use of a whole clutch of muscles in the back of the neck:

throwing the head back does not promote good recorder tone

I think it happens a lot with woodwind players because they know that the weight of the instrument partially rests on the lip of the player. That is to say, the recorder is partly held ready to play when its beak is resting on the player’s lip. The player understandably doesn’t want to disrupt the balance of the instrument, so they hold their lip and lower jaw in place, and throw their skull backwards to breathe in.

Why is this problematic? It uses a lot more muscles than just dropping the jaw, and all in the back of the neck. It sets up a series of contractions all the way down the spine and breathing mechanism that ultimately interfere with the way the whole mechanism works. By making the larger movement, the player is involving more muscles in a way that negatively affects what they want to achieve.

It’s also based on a false assumption: that the balance of the recorder will be badly affected if the jaw moves. Actually, especially if you are using a thumb rest on your recorder, you can rest your recorder on your lip and your right thumb, take away your left hand, and open and close your mouth quite easily. I’ve held whole conversations like this – recorder resting on right thumb and lip – with my most expensive hand-made instruments! If you can talk and the recorder stays still, you can most certainly open your mouth a little to breathe in.

But does this really help with good recorder tone? Try it out!

But don’t just believe me – experiment with the two different ways of breathing in. Experiment with dropping your jaw; see how little you actually need to move in order to take a full breath. You may be pleasantly surprised at how little effort it takes.

When you become proficient at dropping your jaw to breathe as an activity in itself, try using it as you play. I recommend that you watch yourself in a mirror to check that you aren’t throwing your head back – it can be a tricky little habit to break.

And record yourself playing – I think you’ll be pleased with the increase in tone, resonance and volume that you can achieve. You may also find you get fewer headaches! And, as always, let me know how you get on.

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.

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?