If you’ve ever been to a theater production, and then gotten to meet any of the actors up close, you might have been shocked by their makeup. You don’t notice it much when they are on stage, but up close it can be pretty extreme.
Stage actors need strange-looking makeup because they perform under bright lights, which can wash out their features. And they need their facial expressions to be unmistakable to audience members, even in the very back row. Their special makeup techniques, which look unnatural up close, help them look natural and communicate visually under the unusual circumstances of a stage production.
Musicians need to take this same approach. If I practice a piece of music in a small room, subtle dynamic contrasts seem like plenty. But in the very different situation of a performance, in a large and reverberant concert hall, those nuances can disappear. I need to go bigger, stage-makeup-style.
That means practicing my music in ways that sometimes feels over the top or even a little obnoxious. But on stage or in a recording it will probably be just right—my sweeping, melodramatic dynamic contrasts will come across as natural and tasteful.
It’s tempting sometimes to see my students as either left-brained or right-brained players—either the precise, technically-oriented type or the creative, intuitive type. The reality, of course, is that they are all some of each, but may have greater strengths in one area or the other. And good musicians need both.
Trying to get the more technically-inclined to play with imagination and spontaneity can be frustrating for student and teacher alike. And the more intuitive types sometimes need a little organization to make sure their creativity is focused into a cohesive musical statement. Here is a very simple technique that I use with “both” kinds of students to encourage creative exploration without wandering too far afield.
photo, Bernat Casero
First I select a brief passage and ask the student to imagine that it is part of the soundtrack to a movie, and start feeding them genres to try out: Can you play it like it’s part of a swashbuckling action-adventure movie? a slapstick comedy? a steamy love story? a tense courtroom drama? For the student who is tentative about playing imaginatively, this is a fairly simple, non-threatening way to experiment with some intuitive musical decisions. For a student whose flights of fancy need a little direction, this technique provides just enough discipline without suppressing creativity.
The next step is to ask the student to pick a few favorite genres on their own, or even specific movies, and let them explore the passage within those frameworks. Some students, the more technically-inclined in particular, seem a little embarrassed about sharing even that much of their creative process aloud, so I don’t push them to do so as long as they can use it to create a few interpretations that are convincingly distinct. The important thing is that they are discovering the ability to generate ideas and apply them to the music.
An additional step is to move beyond movie genres to something a little more esoteric. I have had success with having students play different colors (purple? yellow? black? fuchsia?), different moods or emotions (love? hate? joy? paranoia?), or different “instruments” (can you sound like a trumpet? a cello? an operatic soprano? a snare drum?). Sometimes I use this approach myself to tackle particularly tricky interpretive questions, like how to handle repeated sections that I want to sound just different enough on the second time through: maybe the first time royal blue, and the second time more of a navy blue.
Advanced musical interpretation can be much richer and more complex, but starting out with this technique seems to help many of my students get started, by opening up an intuitive path for some students and providing some useful creative boundaries for others.
Earlier this month I posted about a fundamental practicing concept that sometimes escapes my less-experienced students. Here is another:
Me: Play your D melodic minor scale.
Student: [Begins D minor scale, plays a wrong note in the second octave.]
Me: Whoops, remember to play B-natural.
Student: Okay. [Starts over, makes same mistake.]
Me: Please start at the second-octave A, and play just from there to—
Student: [Starts from second-octave A, makes the same mistake, proceeds to finish the scale.]
Me: No, I want you to start at the A, play just to the B-natural, and stop.
Student: [Plays.]
Me: Okay, that’s correct. Now—
Student: [Starts over, makes same mistake.]
Practicing in overly large segments is an issue for less-experienced students for at least three reasons. The first is that is it makes it difficult to notice exactly where the problem is happening. Students may tend to “power through” a section and evaluate it as a whole (“That wasn’t very good”), then simply start over again and hope for the best. Sometimes my younger students are surprised when I point out that they are actually making the same mistake over and over. In their minds, it’s a roll of the dice every time, hoping that everything turns out right, and if it doesn’t, then start again and hope for better luck this time. Practicing in smaller segments makes it much easier to identify and isolate problems.
The second issue is that even if the precise problem is known, practicing it within too large a segment increases the cognitive load—it’s hard to devote enough attention to the actual problem when there are so many other notes to think about. Plus, practicing too long of a segment raises the stakes in a way that often doesn’t work well for inexperienced practicers: by the time you actually arrive at the problem spot, the pressure is really on to get it right, since you’ve already invested a lot in this run-through. If you isolate the problem to a much smaller segment, it’s not such a big deal if you have to start again.
The third issue is efficiency. If your goal is to correct one wrong note, which lasts less than a second, and you play 30 seconds’ worth of music leading up to it and another 30 seconds’ worth after it, then you can only get about one repetition done per minute. Even if you get it right, it will take you hours to really solidify that passage. But if you can narrow the problem down to two seconds’ worth of music, you can do many repetitions per minute.
In most cases, the problem that needs fixing has to do with getting from one note to another successfully. It may be that the second note isn’t the right one, or that it doesn’t respond right, or that the articulation isn’t correct, or a variety of other things, but the crucial concept is that there is a pair of notes, and the first note is right, and the second one isn’t.
Step one is to practice just those two notes, not just once through, but many times. If this is only accomplished with difficulty, it may be due to the second note having a less-familiar fingering, or perhaps some kind of particular response difficulty. Practice those two notes—and only those two notes—over and over until they improve. If they don’t, consult a teacher who can help to you diagnose and improve your technique.
If playing the two notes is trivially easy, then the problem is something about the context in which they appear. Add one more note before the first one, and repeat it several times. If it’s still easy, add one more. Continue until the problem returns, and practice that sequence of notes slowly and carefully until it feels natural and solid. If it becomes clear that adding more notes before the problem isn’t what’s triggering it, then start again from the two notes and gradually add notes after them. Sometimes anticipating what follows can cause something to go wrong.
Don’t be overly anxious to put the (former) problem spot back into the “context” of a whole scale or etude or movement. Make most of your practicing small-segment work, and very gradually reassemble the small segments into slightly larger ones. Repeat the slightly larger ones many times, then combine them again into still larger ones.
Take the time to break your practicing down into smaller chunks, isolate the problem spots, and work them methodically and repetitively.
Since my post earlier this week about air travel with instruments, two of my favorite woodwind bloggers have also addressed the subject, both inspired by the “United Breaks Guitars” video phenomenon.
Sometimes when I struggle with a musical passage it’s because I can’t quite play it—maybe my fingers or tongue won’t move quite fast enough yet, or there’s a difficult slur or interval leap that I’m still mastering. The solution is methodical practice, which of course takes significant time and effort.
But there’s an additional set of issues that can be solved more efficiently: reading issues. These are caused by a variety of things: unclear printing, bad editing, poor eyesight, or something just not quite clicking in my brain for some reason. On flute I sometimes get a little lost in the ledger lines, and on bassoon my switches between bass and tenor clefs aren’t always as agile as I’d like. Plus I still sometimes stumble over a double-sharp or some other less-familiar symbol.
Reading issues aren’t shortfalls in my ability to physically operate the instrument—they are a disconnect somewhere in my eyes-to-brain-to-execution connection. And they often don’t need hours of drilling to solve.
Keep in mind that reading from your score is 100% optional. Would it solve the problem if you just memorized those few notes? Made some nice clear pencil marks? Rewrote that measure in a clearer way? Scanned the whole thing and reprinted it at a larger size?
Taking reading out of the picture when necessary can save many hours of frustration and tedium. Try it!
It’s common among non-jazz musicians to think of “swing” rhythms as having a triplet-like feel, and it’s equally common among jazz players to regard that as hopelessly incorrect. That conflict over swing style has been widely discussed elsewhere, so I won’t rehash it here.
But there’s another layer to the swing/triplets issue: It’s important to understand that real swing rhythms are essentially duple. The primary subdivision of the beat is into two parts, even though those parts aren’t equal in length.
So, writing or playing lots of triplets is a common mistake that non-jazz musicians make when they are trying to imitate a swing sound. That’s not to say that triplets can’t or don’t exist in swing rhythms, but they aren’t the underlying subdivision, and in most cases are best used sparingly.
For example, this can be played to sound like an authentic swing/jazz line:
And even this notation, while problematic, can be translated into something authentic-sounding:
But, to someone who knows jazz style well, this one never quite sounds like swing:
It might pass for a shuffle or something else, but it’s hard to make it swing.
When a well-written swing line does include a triplet, a fluent jazz player might play it to sound distinctly un-triplety:
That approach (one of several possibilities) might make sense to a jazz player because they are stretching the downbeat note, and letting the subsequent notes fall later in the beat—a very similar approach to playing a pair of swung eighth notes.
Written or improvised melodies, background figures, drum fills, and other things that are supposed to swing in an authentic way should avoid excessive triplets. Extensive listening and study of great jazz writing, interpretation, and improvisation are crucial to understanding real jazz swing style.
Sometimes a well-meaning composer or arranger will try to approximate a jazz swing style notationally in this way:
This is wrong.
Sometimes he or she will take this approach:
Also wrong. So is this one:
The idea of “tripletizing” eighth-note rhythms is especially pervasive, and misleading if taught without nuance. Composers are sometimes guilty of this; so are conductors, arrangers, and educators.
The issue with each of these bad notational approaches is that they try to approximate characteristic jazz rhythms with symbols that are rooted in the rather different rhythms of classical music. But real jazz swing rhythms aren’t necessarily dotted or 12/8 or triplets. This leads to problems both for composers and performers.
For composers, using a 12/8 time signature or eighth-note triplets in 4/4 too easily drags the work into a compound-meter feel. And jazz swing is decidedly not in a compound meter: the rhythms are very much duple in nature. Authentic swing almost always has an underlying feel of two notes per beat, even though those notes are not equal in length. Extended or frequent passages with a compound-meter feel (three notes per beat) are dead giveaways of a failure to really absorb swing style.
For jazz-untrained performers, seeing dotted or compound-type rhythms on a page simply doesn’t provide fine enough information to accurately reproduce authentic swing style. It’s perhaps a bit like baking a cake from a recipe with each ingredient rounded off to the nearest tablespoon; the result will approximate a cake but likely won’t be especially successful. And even for the jazz-trained performer, sometimes the dotted or triplety notation can obscure the intended sound, something like typing a sentence into Google Translate, translating it into some other language, and then translating it back into English. (The result definitely loses fidelity.) Or, the poor notation can simply dull or distract from the jazz musician’s more authentic approach.
All of this, of course, begs the question of what precisely is the correct downbeat-upbeat length ratio for a true swing style, if not the 2:1 ratio of the triplety approach or the 3:1 ratio of the dotted approach. That question is larger in scope than I intend to fully tackle here, but I think it suffices to summarize with a few brief points:
Firstly, there’s no reason for it to be a mystery or a matter of “opinion;” using very simple technology we can measure exactly what jazz musicians are doing.
The ratios, if we measure them, are very, very far from consistent, even taken independently of factors like tempo. (There’s a popular but not-uniformly-supportable idea that the notes swing “harder” [greater ratio] at slower tempi and less hard [ratio nearer to 1:1] at faster tempi.) The precise ratios are an expressive, interpretive matter, and ultimately up to the performers.
The rhythms themselves are not the only factors that make swing sound like swing; articulation, phrasing, and other elements are also important, and also beyond the scope of my intended topic here.
What, then, is the best way to notate swing rhythms? I sort of like this one, though it’s not the one I ultimately recommend:
What I do like about the weird grace note approach is that it makes fairly clear the idea that the exact “downbeat” (quarter note) to “upbeat” (grace note) ratio is an interpretive matter. It also evokes what I find to be the most successful method of executing swing rhythms: think in quarter note pulses, and let the upbeats lead to the following downbeats. What I don’t like about this method is that it’s a hassle to write and to read.
My best recommendation is this:
Note the absence of the “two eighths equal triplet quarter-eighth” indication. This way is simple to read and write, reinforces the duple nature of swing rhythm, and doesn’t prescribe a specific ratio. One might hope that a jazz-untrained musician encountering this would seek out some good training or at least listen to some good swing recordings.
This is wrong.
Also wrong. So is this one:
The idea of 
What I do like about the weird grace note approach is that it makes fairly clear the idea that the exact “downbeat” (quarter note) to “upbeat” (grace note) ratio is an interpretive matter. It also evokes what I find to be the most successful method of executing swing rhythms: think in quarter note pulses, and let the upbeats lead to the following downbeats. What I don’t like about this method is that it’s a hassle to write and to read.
Note the absence of the “two eighths equal triplet quarter-eighth” indication. This way is simple to read and write, reinforces the duple nature of swing rhythm, and doesn’t prescribe a specific ratio. One might hope that a jazz-untrained musician encountering this would seek out some good training or at least listen to some