- Stephen Caplan embraces plastic oboes. Related: Elizabeth Brown lists some signs that your wooden oboe has a crack.
- Clarinetist Miranda Dohrman gives advice on building a freelance career.
- Jennifer Mackerras provides solutions for recorders slipping and sliding around in your hands.
- Peter Westbrook shares a 2003 interview with Herbie Mann, covering aspects of jazz flute playing, woodwind doubling, and more.
- Oboist Jennet Ingle offers some suggestions on a good mindset for solo performance.
- Clarinetist Jenny Maclay lists some reasons you might not be improving as much as you would like.
Month: November 2018
How to get 10 good reeds from a box
If you are getting less than 80% playable reeds from the boxes you are currently buying, buy different ones.
Discount on book and new t-shirts
I’ll keep this short: there are new bretpimentel.com t-shirts available, and everything in the store (shirts and the PDF of my book, Woodwind Basics) is priced at 1/3 off through Christmas Eve 2018 if you use coupon code reeds2018. Your purchases help pay for hosting and other site costs, and otherwise support what I’m doing … Read more
Planning breaths
When learning a new étude or repertoire piece, it’s common to practice at first with focus on the notes, often playing them at a slow tempo and/or divided into chunks. This is a good approach for mastering the needed finger technique, but it may neglect one of the crucial parts of a performance: breathing. In … Read more
Using sticky notes to focus my performance thinking
I might put in weeks or months preparing for a high-pressure performance. But all of that can fall apart pretty quickly if my head isn’t in the right place.