Favorite blog posts, June 2013

Some of the best woodwind-related stuff I’ve read this month:

Enjoy! If you or one of your favorite woodwind bloggers writes something especially awesome in July, drop me a note and I’ll give it a look for next month’s list.

Bassoon F-sharp fingerings

I recently set out to try to make sense of the handful of bassoon high F-sharp fingerings that I was aware of. As it turns out, I had no idea what I was getting into. I looked at a number of online and offline sources, and ended up with about 60 fingerings (yes, you read … Read more

Learning fingerings as shapes

I observe that many woodwind players, when learning a new fingering—whether a beginner learning a standard fingering or an advanced student learning a new alternate fingering—tend to think of them as sequences: “This finger plus this finger and this finger and this key over here.” Sometimes my students even want to recite the fingering aloud … Read more

Playing full-spectrum music

I’m far from being a photography expert, but I do have one trick. (This is a music-related post, I promise.)

In general, good photos take advantage of the eye’s full light-to-dark range. In other words, the very darkest part of the photo should be very black, and the very lightest part should be very white.

Here’s a photo that doesn’t meet those criteria—the darkest and lightest parts of the photo are both sort of medium-grayish.

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But a quick “auto-level” procedure in photo-editing software (like the free Gimp) corrects this by adjusting each pixel of the photo, basically making the dark ones darker and the light ones lighter:

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