To my own amazement, this blog is rapidly approaching its 10-year anniversary later this month, May 24th. (Some of the content is dated even earlier than that, because I wrote it before starting the blog and retroactively turned it into blog posts.)
If you like, send me question(s) about whatever you want, about woodwind playing, doubling, blogging, teaching, or whatever. You can remain anonymous if you like. If it makes sense to do so based on the responses, I’ll answer them in one or more blog posts starting on about the 24th. If the response is low or the questions are not particularly of interest to my audience at large, I’ll answer as many as I can privately.
Here are some highlights (to me) of what happened on the blog this year. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for new, non-meta content once the holidays are over.
A couple of new software projects designed to help bloggers and other web-dwelling folk to use proper musical accidental symbols, and a diatribe about why they should. Some significant improvements to these tools are on the way.
He’s hoping his skills on multiple instruments will eventually land him commercial gigs or even a position playing in a pit for musical theater performances.
…
“The most important thing now is to find something unique about my playing that I can market in a positive way.”
Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no cost to you.
I had a blast at the 2016 International Double Reed Society conference, hosted by Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia. As I have said before, the IDRS puts on an outstanding conference, maybe my favorite of the various woodwind conferences I attend. Very well organized, with lots of outstanding talent, varied events, and presences from all the top makers and dealers of double reed instruments and gear.
A few personal highlights:
Excellent evening concerts, some with chamber music and some with orchestra. Too many great performances to do justice to them all, but a couple that stood out in my mind were the premiere of Alan Elkins’s double oboe concerto with Elizabeth Koch Tiscione and Kathryn Greenbank, and Cary Ebli‘s performance of his own edition of the Donizetti Concertino for English horn.
Paul Hanson sound check, with appropriate reaction from conference volunteer
Some very interesting lectures and presentations. A few favorites were Mark Eubanks‘s on bassoon reed tuning, Jamie Sampson‘s on her methodical research into bassoon multiphonics, and Janet Grice‘s on adapting Brazilian choros to double reed instruments.
I gave a presentation on teaching multiple instruments. You can check out my handout/lecture notes if you like.
I got to meet or reconnect with lots of cool people, including some who, to my delight and surprise, introduced themselves as “fans” of this blog or of my other online stuff. I’m always happy to connect with nice people who find my stuff useful or interesting in some way.
Here’s a little web app that I put together for quizzing my university students on their scales. (The music majors all have to pass a scale exam, playing randomly-selected major and minor scales.) I hope it’s useful to somebody out there:
Quiz students (or yourself) on scales, arpeggios, fingerings, key signatures, ii-V7-I patterns, chord voicings, or whatever. Click “Show options” to pick which notes you want to include.
Set “How many?” to 12, and generate 12-tone rows.
Set “How many?” to three or four, and generate chromatic or diatonic motives for inspiration for your compositions or improvisation practice.
Or whatever.
As always, feel free to contact me with bug reports, feature requests, or mockery of my humble coding skills.
Half-holes on the Fingering Diagram Builder aren’t a new feature, but I get lots of questions about how to do them, so here are some instructions I can refer people to.
Easiest way
If you’re making diagrams for flute, (French) clarinet, (German) bassoon, or recorder, and you don’t need anything especially complicated, you can open the “Keywork details” menu and click the option to turn “Half-holes” to “Upper,” “Lower,” or “Off.” For flute the options are a little different, to allow for half-holing in four directions.
Once your desired half-holes are enabled, you can hover your mouse over the keys (or look for the grey outlines on a touchscreen device) to see them. Click/tap on the desired half of the hole to “close” it, or again to re-open it. The “open” ones will not appear in your downloaded image.
clarinet
bassoon
recorder
upper
lower
flute
Lengthwise upper
Lengthwise lower
Widthwise proximal
Widthwise distal
More complicated but flexible way
If you need to turn on only certain half-holes, or mix upper with lower, etc., you will have to roll up your sleeves a bit more. Open the “Keywork details” menu and look for the top-level “Half-holes” heading. Organized beneath this you will see all the available half-holes, organized into groups like “Lower half holes.” I suggest adjusting the settings as follows:
“Half-holes” = Always
Each subgroup containing a desired half-hole, such as “Lower half holes” = Always
Each desired individual half-hole = “As needed”
Each undesired individual half-hole = “Never”
That will make the desired half-holes visible when you “close” them, and invisible otherwise.
In the following example, I have set the clarinet’s left hand first finger upper hole and the left hand third finger lower hole as described.
If you anticipate using a certain half-hole configuration frequently, you can save it for future use. Set the half-holes (and other keywork) up how you want it, open the “Keywork details” menu, and look near the bottom of it for the “Custom key sets” submenu. Open that, type a name for your current set of keys, and click/tap “Add.”
I always think that the worst blog posts are the ones where people blog about their blogs. So brace yourself. Sorry. I try not to indulge in this kind of thing too often.
Anyway, today is the fifth anniversary of my first, rather inauspicious blog post. (You might notice that I do have posts dated older than that; those are older writings, many from college courses, that I retroactively turned into blog posts.) Five years isn’t that long by most measures, but it seems that, in the sea of abandoned blogs out there, five years and still active isn’t something to take for granted.
What excites me even more than the traffic is the engagement. I’ve been pleased and flattered to hear from many, many of you—everyone from young, aspiring doublers to old friends to colleagues in academia to musicians who are some of my real heroes. Thanks for your emails, blog comments, content contributions, donations, and other shows of support.
