From WindWorks Design: Wind controller in a pit orchestra

ByBret Pimentel
Photo, mabel.sound

“Gertjan” at the WindWorks Design blog posted some interesting comments about using a wind controller in a local production of Seussical the Musical. Gertjan (I wasn’t able to positively identify him from the WindWorks website, but maybe he will find his way here and let us know who he is) played saxophones in the show as well, and used the wind controller to cover a number of wind and non-wind instrument parts.

Although it gives me a little indigestion to see a wind controller substituting for woodwinds that might otherwise have been played by a doubler, I do think there is application for wind controllers in orchestra pits. Keyboard-driven synthesizers are ubiquitous in recent shows (or are sometimes used to replace other instruments, especially a string section), and, in some cases, a wind synth might be even better suited to certain kinds of synthesizer parts. Gertjan mentions some synthy sounds like “vocal doo,” “scary voices,” and “ghostly shimmering breathy sound,” all of which strike me as likely to be very effective with a wind synthesizer’s breath control. Some others, like “harp” and “tinkle bell” seem like they might be more intuitively assigned to a keyboard.

In the comments section one of my previous articles, I said this:

EWI seems like such an individualized thing—what with all the options for sounds, effects, etc.—that in most typical doubling situations it would take a fairly EWI-savvy orchestrator/musical director to use it effectively, beyond just using it to cover acoustic instrument lines (what a waste!). I think most would have to work directly with the performer to compose for the available sounds (or create new ones).

This certainly seems to have been the approach that Gertjan and his musical director took:

What followed was an intense e-mail conversation between the musical director and myself about the possibilities, what sounds I would normally use, etc. It ended with him visiting me at my house where we talked about it in great detail, with me demonstrating the various options and abilities.

It’s worth taking a look at both of Gertjan’s posts about his experience. Part 1 deals with the collaborative process between wind controller player and musical director, and Part 2 discusses some technical tips and other practicalities of using a wind controller in the pit.

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  • The role of tone exercises

    ByBret Pimentel

    Tone exercises are useful, sort of. Read last month’s post about tone for a reminder why tone exercises are only part of the process.

    photo, valentina
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    Here is what tone exercises do:

    • Excellent tone exercises demand solid fundamental tone-production technique, providing a chance to habituate useful muscular actions. Trevor Wye’s “Flexibility I” flute exercise is a perfect example. (I suggest you buy the whole Trevor Wye omnibus edition.) If your tone-production technique is correct, you can play the exercise successfully (in tune, in time, with all notes responding easily). But you will fail if your breath support, voicing, and/or embouchure are bad. If you are doing something wrong, you get immediate feedback.
    • Poorly-designed tone exercises lack that self-destruct trigger. Often the creators try to prop them up with text explaining fundamental technique: “Use strong breath support! Keep your embouchure flexible!” If that kind of textual instruction is necessary to make the exercise useful, then the content probably doesn’t really matter—it might as well be a single note with a fermata.
    • Regardless of quality, any exercise you do with tone in mind is an opportunity to focus on your tone. That’s a good thing.

    Seek out high-quality tone exercises and do them regularly, but don’t forget to listen.

  • Woodwind Doubler Census 2021 results, part 1: demographics

    ByBret Pimentel

    Thanks to all who participated in my 2021 woodwind doubling survey, and to those who helped spread the word. I’m releasing the results in installments, so be sure to use my social media links, RSS feeds, etc. to keep up.

    I got 284 responses, an improvement over 2011’s 187. The numbers for each of these questions don’t necessarily add up to exactly that number, since not everybody responded to every question.

    Gender identity

    I provided more options for gender identity than in 2011’s survey. Here’s the breakdown. (Percentages are of those who answered the question.)

    2021 Data
    Male 222 78%
    Female 49 17%
    Female, Transgender 1 ~0%
    Nonbinary/nonconforming 10 4%
    Transgender, Nonbinary/nonconforming 1 ~0%

    2011 Data
    Male 146 78%
    Female 41 22%

    Age

    As was the case 10 years ago, the numbers skew toward the younger end. I’m not sure if this is affected by the survey being distributed primarily online. No respondents claimed to be younger than teenaged or older than in their 70s.

    2021 Data
    Teenage 22 8%
    20s 72 25%
    30s 67 24%
    40s 40 14%
    50s 41 14%
    60s 35 12%
    70s 6 2%

    2011 Data
    Younger than 20 19 1%
    20s 54 10%
    30s 31 29%
    40s 36 17%
    50s 33 19%
    60s 12 18%
    70s 1 6%

    Region

    I provided options for this that broke down by continent. A few of you island dwellers responded with “other” and specified locations in Oceania and the Caribbean. I probably need to rethink this question for 2031, but for purposes of data reporting I have lumped everyone together into continents for now.

    The continued absence of responses from Africa and South America may be related to language barriers and/or other factors. I did get a few responses from Asia this year, which I didn’t in 2011.

    2021 Data
    Asia 3 1%
    Australia 11 4%
    Europe 20 7%
    North America 249 88%

    2011 Data
    Australia 11 6%
    Europe 12 6%
    North America 162 87%

    Which of these best describes where you live?

    The “city, but not a ‘major’ one” option was added based on feedback from the 2011 survey. A few of you used the “other” option to explain more complicated living situations (such as multiple locations), and for reporting purposes I’ve taken the liberty of lumping those into the categories I thought were the closest match.

    2021 Data
    major city or metropolitan area 127 45%
    city, but not a “major” one 69 24%
    suburb or exurb 63 22%
    rural or remote area 24 8%

    2011 Data
    major city or metropolitan area 93 50%
    suburban area 66 35%
    rural or remote area 23 12%
    other 5 3%

    Describe your current level of formal education (in any field).

    “Less than high school diploma” is a new option this yea. The categories in the graph are abbreviated; the full text from the survey is in the data table.

    2021 dATA
    Less than high school diploma 8 3%
    High school diploma or equivalent 6 2%
    Some college 33 12%
    Bachelors degree 70 25%
    Some graduate school 18 6%
    Masters degree 103 37%
    Doctorate 38 13%
    Other degree type or comparable certification 6 2%

    2011 Data
    High school diploma or equivalent 8 4%
    Some college 28 15%
    Bachelors degree 59 32%
    Some graduate school 16 9%
    Masters degree 53 28%
    Doctorate 16 9%
    Other degree type or comparable certification 6 3%

    Thanks again for your participation and stay tuned for more survey results.

  • Woodwind doubling and clarinet problems

    ByBret Pimentel

    Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no cost to you.

    Here are a few of the common problems woodwind doublers have with the clarinet:

    Flabby/saggy/tubby/airy tone and flat pitch. This is a dead giveaway for a self-“taught” clarinet doubler. The clarinet’s voicing is quite high, higher than any of the other woodwinds, and beginning clarinetists sometimes struggle for years to make that proper voicing a consistent habit. Once it settles in, pitch problems mostly evaporate, tone becomes clear and ringing, and notes respond beautifully and easily in every register. If you’re thinking about buying a shorter barrel because your “clarinet” is so flat all the time, don’t. Work on your voicing instead. Voicing is the #1 crucial technique for successful clarinet doubling, and will solve most of your problems.

    It may also be worth checking your mouthpiece angle—it should be quite steep compared to saxophone or double reed instruments. Keep your head up straight and eyes forward, and aim in the ballpark of keeping the clarinet around 30° from vertical. You can also use the paper trick to make sure you’re taking in the right amount of mouthpiece.

    Reeds can be a contributing factor, too. Often (but not always) saxophonists lean toward a slightly more open mouthpiece and softer reed, while clarinetists lean toward a little more closed mouthpiece and stiffer reed. The strength you prefer on a typical saxophone mouthpiece may not be right strength for a typical clarinet mouthpiece.

    Constricted tone. Bafflingly, there’s a common pedagogical idea that clarinetists should tighten their embouchures to fix various problems. This is nonsense. Keep your jaw open to make space for the reed to vibrate, and let your lips (not your jaw/teeth) close around the mouthpiece, not tight but just airtight. Notes will respond more readily, with a fuller, prettier tone, and you can throw away the tape or paper or dental appliance you have been using to cushion your lower lip from your teeth.

    Squeaks. 95% of the time this is an issue of fingers failing to properly cover toneholes. (And 95% of the time, struggling clarinet doublers blame it on something having vaguely to do with embouchure, reeds, or the clarinet somehow just being a squeaky instrument.) Use the large, fleshy pads of your fingers (not the tippy-tips) to cover the holes. Sometimes a quick check in the mirror can reveal that your fingers aren’t where you think they are.

    Fingering awkwardness. The clarinet’s fingering system and unique overtone series provide tremendous advantages: an expansive range, clean and precise technique, and lots of useful alternate fingerings. (It’s superior to the saxophone’s “easier” system with awkward palm keys and relatively few alternates. Fight me.)

    But if you’re coming from another instrument, you might find the 12th between the lower and clarion registers confounding. That’s because you’re still thinking about the fingerings. Practice your scales, arpeggios, and études until your fingers move on autopilot, like they already do on your primary instrument. It can be done.

    The clarinet’s dreaded “break” as a technique concern is mostly a myth. Keep your support, voicing, and embouchure well-formed and stable, and just move your fingers. Your left index finger should rock or tilt between its tonehole and the A key, not hop (losing contact with the instrument) or slide (dragging along the key). Work toward a tiny, efficient, relaxed movement.

    The clarinet’s clever system of redundant pinky keys enables lightning-fast technique in virtually any key, but it takes real effort to learn to use them well. Remember that for those pinky-finger notes there aren’t really “standard” vs. “alternate” fingerings—you need to know them all well enough to use interchangeably. And if you have beginner habits like using both pinkies for third-line B, you will need to learn to use a single pinky in many cases for the most efficient and flexible approach.

    Ledger line catastrophes. Because of the clarinet’s broad tessitura, clarinetists have to be fluent in ledger lines above the staff (maybe more than you’re used to if you’re an oboist) and below the staff (more than you’re used to on any treble-clef woodwind). Hit the Baermann or Kroepsh books for thorough workouts spanning the clarinet’s range.

    Remember the best money you can spend on your clarinet playing isn’t another mouthpiece or barrel or book—it’s some lessons with an excellent teacher. Learn the instrument on its own terms, and, whatever you do, try not to sound like a doubler.

  • Concept-based woodwind methods

    ByBret Pimentel

    If you are teaching a woodwind methods course, you might be interested in my book.

    Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no cost to you.

    Most college students studying instrumental music education have to take a woodwind “methods” course, a sort of crash course in teaching the woodwind instruments. I have taught woodwind methods classes for about the past ten years.

    A typical approach is to divide the semester into instrument-based units: x weeks studying the flute, x weeks studying the oboe, etc. I’ve taught woodwind methods that way, and it’s tough to get through all the material. How can you realistically cover the pedagogy of five instrument families in one semester? (Some schools offer this scant improvement: two semesters.)

    photo, Kerr Photography

    One big reason that woodwind methods teachers get stuck in the one-instrument-at-a-time paradigm is that existing textbooks, syllabi, etc. treat the woodwinds as being hopelessly different from each other. While the woodwinds are more diverse than the brasses or bowed strings (though perhaps not the percussion), the techniques of playing them are not as unrelated as many seem to believe.

    A symptom of this misunderstanding is the woodwind-methods-by-committee approach, in which a textbook has chapters written by five different authors, or in which a course is taught by a rotating cast of woodwind professors. This invariably leads to holes in the curriculum, confusion over vocabulary, and contradictory ideas.

    I have much, much better success when I focus on the basic concepts underlying good woodwind playing. My course addresses audible aspects of how woodwinds sound (tone, response, intonation, volume/dynamics, fluency), and connects them to elements of playing technique (posture/position, breathing and breath support, voicing, embouchure, tuning, articulation, finger movement, and selection from among alternate fingerings). When my students are conversant in those concepts, it’s almost trivial to apply them to a diverse group of instruments: “the clarinet uses a very high voicing, but the flute uses a very low voicing.”

    That’s still a lot to cover in a semester, but I actually find that I can get through the material efficiently enough to leave some days open for review, Q&A, or special/requested topics. And, more importantly, my students absorb widely-applicable concepts rather than trying to memorize seemingly unrelated factoids about seemingly unrelated instruments.

    This is a valuable approach for woodwind doublers, too, who have to parse out the differences in the instruments but also the differences in culture and tradition that have developed around those instruments and their pedagogy. Understanding the underlying concepts helps to make sense of the sometimes very different approaches to the same problems.

    Warning: commercial-ish plug

    I’ve hinted on the blog a few times about my upcoming book, based on materials I have developed for my woodwind methods courses. It clearly and concisely covers the most crucial concepts in woodwind playing. Since I usually teach a mixed-instrument class I pair it with a band method (such as Essential Elements or Accent on Achievement) for hands-on playing activities, but it would work just as well paired with an individual method (such as the Rubank series) if you have the luxury of a full class set of each instrument.

    I’m hoping to get the book launched before 2017 slips away. If you like, you can join a mailing list to be notified if when it becomes available. Update: the book is now available!

  • Quick tip: learn tenor clef

    ByBret Pimentel

    Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no cost to you.

    tenor clefIf you’re going to be serious about playing the bassoon, reading tenor clef is a requirement.

    If you’re unfamiliar with it, click through to Mike Spark’s website for a quick primer [update: link dead].

    If you could use a little practice reading the notes, try eMusicTheory.com’s C-clef trainer. Click on “Settings…,” choose “Tenor clef,” and click “OK,” then click “Start Drill.”

    The next step, of course, is to get your fingers to do their thing automatically as you read the tenor clef notes. Try Oubradous for a gentle introduction, then move on to the Milde “Studies in All Keys” Op. 24 (also found in this edition of the Weissenborn method) for a more serious workout.

  • Staying connected to the clarinet

    ByBret Pimentel
    Photo, KSMF Webmaster

    In general, I’m not that concerned about keeping fingers close to instrument keys. A lot of woodwind players and teachers seem to believe that “close” fingers mean more speed, which I haven’t found necessarily to be the case. To me, a much larger factor is tension: if my fingers are tense (because, for example, I’m trying really hard to keep them close to the keys), they move more slowly.

    But when I work with beginning clarinetists (whether first-time instrumentalists or doublers), many of them seem to have a great deal of trouble with squeaks and with notes responding sluggishly—problems that I think in most cases can be traced to fingers not completely covering toneholes, or not covering them in a synchronized way. And one of the major reasons that this happens is that the fingers are too detached from from the keys. It’s not a question of distance, per se,  but one of awareness.

    One reason this is such an issue for clarinetists in particular is that so many fingers have multiple jobs. The left thumb operates a tonehole/ring and a key, which must sometimes be pressed individually and sometimes together. The left index finger has a tonehole/ring and two keys. The right index finger has a tonehole/ring and four “side” keys. And the pinky fingers have responsibilities exceeded only by the bassoonist’s thumbs. Throw in a couple of sliver keys, and you’ve got a lot of fingers constantly in transit from one key to another. Read More “Staying connected to the clarinet”

7 Comments

  2. Oh God, this is stupid. Ok, so his two-bit theater company can’t afford a whole orchestra. So, like most theater companies, they have to boil it down to essentials. Since this guy doesn’t play another other than saxophone and EWI, he does the piccolo/clarinet/oboe sounds on it. Yuck.

    I play orchestra pits a lot. In fact, just got done with a production that boiled down Cinderella to 8 people from the 20 in the original score. No one used EWI. There was one keyboard player doing the strings. I can’t imagine how bad doing piccolo parts on EWI would sound. I mean……ugh. And the Yamaha MU100R is over 10 years old. So…….double ugh.

    I could see maybe…….maybe using a EWI with something like a good Kontkat library patch…..or maybe……not.

    I think the company would have done better to just have a keyboard player do it. I’ve done Seussical…..it sounds great with real instruments.

    Reply

  3. Thanks, Doron and Eric, for your comments.

    I have no doubt that everyone involved—Gertjan, the musical director, everyone—would agree that having a fully-staffed orchestra would be ideal. But budgets are tight and good doublers are sometimes hard to find.

    I tend to think that if you have to resort to synthesizers to replace orchestral instruments, a clarinet on wind controller is better than a clarinet on a keyboard, since you get at least some crescendo/decrescendo control, and hopefully some smooth slurs. And nobody is out of a job in this situation—you still need a real live musician to play the EWI.

    An argument could be made that even using woodwind doublers is an unacceptable substitute for a full orchestral woodwind section plus a saxophone section.

    Reply

  4. I have to agree with Brett! I’ve played keyboards for years in many different settings and would rather have someone playing parts on an EWI to fill in for missing wind players than on a keyboard! Unless of course you are using a breath controller with the keyboard. I think everyone would agree that it would be great to have a real player on a real instrument but who lives in THAT world?

    Reply

  5. Yes, I did find my way here. ;-)

    Thanks for your insights, Bret, and others for their comments. I’ll try to address some of them. First of all, our “two-bit company” can’t afford a full-scale orchestra, unfortunately (none of the players are paid!). The doublings that the Seussical orchestral score calls for are rare to find, and not cheap if and when you do find a professional that fits the bill, so we have to make do. Given the circumstances, I think we do a great job. And no, I’m not replacing any ‘live’ musicians (at least, I think I still have a pulse…), just “filling the gaps”, as it were.

    Some of the sounds I did (like harp) could have been done by keyboard, but at these points both keyboard players were busy playing other sounds. As for e.g. piccolo: the PLG-VL, that uses physical modeling, does a great job. Even both flute players in the orchestra were convinced. “This guy” plays other instruments as well (including duduk, hah!), but either they weren’t in the score or the positions were already filled. I’m guessing ericdano didn’t read my whole post, or he would have known that yes, we did it with real instruments. :-P (Curious to hear whether he thinks a keyboard is a real instrument, and whether a wind controller would be less so and why…)

    As for my hardware synth: I find my trusty ol’ MU100R is still a worthy competitor, especially the PLG-AN (virtual analog) and PLG-VL (physical modeling) cards. And in terms of reliability it sure beats a laptop with a software synth/library. Most laptops wouldn’t last three years, let alone a decade…

    Cheers all,
    Gertjan

    Reply

    1. Thanks, Gertjan, for stopping by and for the clarifications. Using electronics in music is a hot-button issue and probably will always be.

      It would be cool to see some future shows (if there are any currently, I’m not aware of them) that use both traditional woodwinds and wind controllers, each for their own strengths.

      Reply

  6. My how things have changed in the 12 years since these posts… I’m playing lots of musicals with my EWI, which I love, and NO ONE is complaining (or usually knows the difference)! Of course, the sounds are so incredible now that it really does make a difference. Check out the AKAI 4000s playing 21 different sounds or combinations with a professional pit for “9 to 5”.

    Reply

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