Category: Product reviews
Review and blindfold test: Légère Signature Series clarinet reeds
A few months ago, I posted about plastic reeds, and reported some of what I had read on another woodwind blog about the Légère Signature Series and Forestone clarinet reeds. For reasons unknown to me, the post from which I originally quoted has been removed, but there are similar thoughts expressed in a more recent post. …
Required recordings, spring 2010
As I explained back in August, I’m having my university students purchase a required recording every semester. The purpose of this, of course, is to help the students develop good aural concepts of tone, phrasing, expression, vibrato, ensemble, and so forth. To try to learn to play an instrument well without a solid aural concept …
10 jazz albums that should be in every music lover’s collection
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Hello, music fans! I’ve picked out, for your listening pleasure, ten essential jazz albums, as an easy introduction to the wide world of jazz. You’re welcome. I’ll assume that you already love music. But maybe you’re a lifelong rocker. Or a connossieur of the great classical composers. Or maybe you like both kinds of music: …
Required recordings, fall 2009
I’m requiring each of my applied students at Delta State to purchase a recording of their instrument this semester as a sort of textbook. A number of them have confessed to me that this will be the first such recording they will own. I plan to require a different recording for each instrument each semester, …
Know your foreign musical terms
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This is a bit of one of the excerpts that I provided for my saxophone students to play at their beginning-of-the-semester band auditions. I heard some very fine playing during the auditions, but many of the students were fooled by the “senza vib.,” with some going so far as to use fairly extreme vibrato at …
Review: The Woodwind Anthology
I recently got my own copy of The Woodwind Anthology, a massive two-volume collection of articles from The Instrumentalist and Flute Talk magazines. I’ve used this anthology from various university libraries throughout my long college education, and found it to be a go-to source for pedagogy classes and comprehensive exam preparation. Inexplicably, Instrumentalist is selling …
Review: The Woodwind Player’s Cookbook
I’ve been reading The Woodwind Player’s Cookbook, published last year by Meredith Music and edited by Charles West. It’s a collection of 57 pedagogical essays by a pretty impressive roster of woodwind folks. You can download the table of contents here to see the authors and titles. Most of the articles deal with technique fundamentals …
Review: Improve Your Doubling, by Chris Vadala
I only know of one etude book geared toward woodwind doublers, and it’s Chris Vadala’s Improve Your Doubling: Advanced Studies for Doublers (Dorn Publications, 1991). Mr. Vadala is on my list of “notable woodwind doublers,” and certainly he is an outstanding player on single reeds and flute, but I think what makes him really notable …
Instrument stands for doublers: mini-reviews and a wish list
Recently I have been getting a bit of pit work from a nearby community theater. They like to do month-long runs of their shows, which means that the musical director often hires two or more people for each seat in the orchestra, so that they can trade off playing the show according to their availability. …
Review: The Many Sides of Al Gallodoro
I recently picked up a copy of The Many Sides of Alfred Gallodoro, Vol. I from Half.com. (As of this writing, they don’t have any copies left, so you’ll either have to get yours from his own website or from CD Baby. There are sound clips at both sites.) Mr. Gallodoro is a living legend …