Getting the most out of practicing your scales

ByBret Pimentel

When you practice scales (or arpeggios or, really, any other technical material) it’s not really about the scales. Nobody wants to buy tickets to hear you play scales.

Scale and technical practice develop the fundamental technique you need for doing more interesting things. You don’t learn multiplication tables or French verb conjugations so you can recite multiplication tables or French verb conjugations. You learn them so you can file your taxes or build a Mars rover, or order pastries or read Proust.

The habits you develop when practicing scales—the building blocks of your technique—will be with you in everything you play. So take them very seriously:

  • Go slowly, and be as precise and controlled as you can. You will work on scales for your whole life as a musician, so there’s no rush to get them up to a certain tempo. Don’t waste time playing them sloppily.
  • Listen deeply to the sound of each note. Scales are a great chance to understand and map the tone, pitch, and response nuances of your instrument. Get in the habit of playing with your most beautiful sound even on technical material.
  • Solidify your best practices. Choose the perfect fingering for each and every note (don’t just fall back on what is already comfortable). Program your fingers to move in the most efficient and precise ways. Stabilize your breath support, voicing, and embouchure.
  • Be expressive. No need to go overboard—just give a subtle crescendo as you ascend and diminuendo as you descend. Add a little vibrato to warm things up. Make it automatic to find and express phrases.

Whatever habits you solidify in your scale practice will be infused into everything else you play. A little carelessness with your multiplication tables or verb conjugations can result in a severe fault with your Mars rover’s circuits or a profound misunderstanding of French literature. Get the little things right.

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  • Jazz chord symbols: a primer for the classically-trained

    ByBret Pimentel

    Printed jazz music often uses chord symbols to indicate the music’s underlying harmony. As with the Roman numeral system used in classical music theory, jazz chord symbols may be used as a tool for analysis. But they are also used for performance, like Baroque figured bass notation, with the musicians using the symbols as a framework for improvising melodies and/or accompaniments. In jazz, the symbols are  generally non-specific with respect to inversion, and players of chord-capable instruments (such as piano or guitar) in jazz are accustomed to making independent choices about inversion and voicing. Depending on the situation, printed jazz music may include written notes only, or notes plus chord symbols, or even chord symbols alone.

    Simple major triads aren’t common in most “modern” (post-1940) jazz. But in the rare cases that they do appear, they are indicated with a single note name:

    jazz chord symbol: simple triad
    C major

    The letter “C” above the staff is the chord symbol. The notes shown on the staff here are the corresponding pitch classes, stacked in root position in the thirds familiar to students of classical theory, though a jazz musician, composer, or arranger would rarely voice a chord in this way.

    Almost always, there should some variety of seventh specified, using the numeral 7 (and when it isn’t specified, it is often implied). By convention, using the 7 alone with a note name indicates the lowered seventh:

    jazz chord symbol: seventh
    C seventh

    Read More “Jazz chord symbols: a primer for the classically-trained”

  • Music practice and technical debt

    ByBret Pimentel

    In software development there’s a concept referred to as “technical debt.” The debt is created when software code is written in a less-than-optimal way. The computer program works, but has some bugs or inefficiencies that will need to be fixed or improved later. Like other kinds of debt, it can be a useful way to get something done now, but will cost more (time, effort, dollars) in the long run.

    The metaphor works well for practicing music, too. Suppose I am working on a passage where a certain alternate fingering would be the most efficient choice. But I don’t use that fingering very often and I’m not completely comfortable with it, so I fall back on a more familiar solution. That gets me playing the passage now with some degree of success, but it also solidifies my attachment to the familiar fingering. Or perhaps my articulation is a little too heavy and thumpy, and I cover that up by adding some slurs in crucial places. That makes the passage work, but means that if I ever want to play it right I’ll have to improve my tongue movement and unlearn the slurs.

    In a perfect world I would always tackle the issue head-on: invest whatever is necessary to habituate the alternate fingering or clean up my articulation technique. In reality sometimes a looming performance means plastering over the problem and promising myself I’ll fix it later, at a greater price.

    I have found it useful to keep a running list of things I want to improve in my playing, including technical debts that need to be paid off. Incorporating relevant exercises, a few at a time, into my warmups helps me make small daily payments, so that hopefully the next time I need those techniques I own them free and clear.

  • Basic tuplet math

    ByBret Pimentel

    A young music student with some basic competencies might be comfortable with these kinds of rhythms:
    tuplet-mathBut these are a little trickier to pull off well:

    tuplet-math-1 tuplet-math-2

    Divisions of the pulse into twos and threes is simple enough conceptually, but in most cases we really learn those kinds of rhythms better by ear—we just learn what eighth notes or triplet eighths sound like against a quarter note pulse. A division of the pulse into fourths, like sixteenth notes against a quarter note pulse, is something that could ostensibly be derived: you could start from a duple subdivision, then make the mental shift to hearing the subdivided pulse as the new pulse, then subdivide that. But the quadruple subdivision is common enough that I think most of us ultimately learn to play it by ear, too.

    The quarter- and half-note triplets in the first two bars of the example above are a little harder to place accurately, I think, because the “extra” pulses are hard to ignore. If I can somehow mentally block out the pulses (audible or implied) on beats two and four in the first measure, then I’m playing three notes per pulse again, and that’s really no different than, say, eighth-note triplets in 4/4. Same thing for the second bar: if I can tune out the pulses on beats two, three, and four, then I’m just playing that same triple subdivision.

    One approach to this problem is to simply learn the less-familiar subdivision by ear. Music notation software is the perfect tool for this; with a little skill you can usually enter rhythms as complex as you like, and hear them played back with the utmost precision against a pulse of your choice. But here are a couple of other useful tricks.

    Trick #1: Subdivide long-duration triplets

    To play triplets against a duple or quadruple pulse, you can derive them from triplets played against a single pulse. For example, this rhythm…

    tuplet-math-1

    …can be derived in this way:

    tuplet-math-3

    Trick #2: Approximate complex tuplets with duple/triple subdivisions

    “Tuplets” that are prime numbers greater than three can be difficult to audiate on the fly. But in many cases (not all cases) there is some room for complex tuplets to be somewhat less than perfectly even. For example, a composer might write a scalar “run” that contains a certain collection of pitches that doesn’t divide neatly into the number of beats allotted, and use a tuplet to make them fit into the score in a legible way. In such a case, it might be appropriate for the run to accelerate or decelerate a bit. If so, the tuplet can be reimagined as a series of duple, triple, or quadruple subdivisions.

    This, for instance…

    tuplet-math-2…could be approached like this (with a slight acceleration effect on each tuplet)…

    tuplet-math-4…or like this (with a slight deceleration effect on each triplet:

    tuplet-math-5Rewriting the rhythms into duple/triple/quadruple subdivisions of the pulse makes it easier to practice these rhythms methodically and consistently with a metronome, and allows for some anchoring which ran really solidify longer runs. Even if the intention is eventually to play the tuplet with more exact evenness, practicing them this way can help to shore up technique in the early stages.

  • 10 ideas for more focused practicing

    ByBret Pimentel

    It can be difficult to keep practice sessions focused and productive. Distractions, burnout, boredom, and bad habits get in the way of progress. Try some or all of these, see what works well for you, and make the most of your practice time.

    Photo, woodleywonderworks. (license)
    Photo, woodleywonderworks. (license)
    1. Prepare yourself mentally. Before you start, take a few minutes for meditation, prayer, introspection, deep breathing, self-awareness, or whatever else helps you set aside the concerns of daily life and get in the zone.
    2. Prepare yourself physically. Stretch, hydrate, dress comfortably. Get enough sleep and exercise and eat a balanced diet. Protect yourself from repetitive-motion injuries and make sure your body can perform at its best.
    3. Embrace routine. Develop some habits around your practice schedule. A carefully-selected routine gets you into practice mode and reduces the chances of falling into procrastination. It also gives you a framework that can be fine-tuned when you have a new idea you would like to incorporate.
    4. Warm up. It doesn’t just mean bringing your instrument up to temperature. Do long tones, scales, articulation studies, or other things that get your instrument-playing muscles working together. Choose ones that demand your very best embouchure, voicing, breath support, finger technique, etc.
    5. Be goal-oriented. Know what you want to accomplish, as specifically as possible. Not “I’m going to practice my scales.” Try “I’m going to get my F-sharp major scale tempo up to sixteenth notes at 60 beats per minute with no wrong notes or hesitations.” Or even better: “I’m going to train my fingers to use that alternate D-sharp fingering in the top octave of the F-sharp major scale at 60 beats per minute with no incorrect or hestitant finger motions.” Goals shouldn’t only be technical; they can be expressive and interpretive, too. Make a list, and start checking things off.
    6. Seek variety. Don’t drive yourself crazy or die of boredom practicing one problem phrase for hours on end. Through experimentation, figure out how long you can really maintain focus and enthusiasm for a single practice task (10 minutes usually works well for me), and move to a new task when it gets less productive to work on the old one. You’ll come back to it later with fresh ears/eyes/fingers/lips.
    7. Take breaks. Take them frequently, but don’t leave them open-ended. Know exactly when you plan to get back to work, and what task you will be tackling next.
    8. Self-evaluate. You probably already have some kind of device you can use to record yourself. Listen back as though it’s somebody else playing. Make notes about what you hear. Pick the biggest-priority items and add them to your goal list.
    9. Escape distractions. You know what pulls you away from the task at hand. Hide it, silence it, power it down. How different would your practicing be if the only people or objects in sight were you, your instrument, and a music stand?
    10. Find inspiration. It’s hard to reach a performance goal if you aren’t sure what that goal sounds like. Don’t be afraid to listen to recordings or watch videos of your heroes—you will still sound like yourself, just a better-informed version of yourself. Listening to singers or players of instruments besides your can really open up your mind and ears, too.

    Have additional tips? Leave a comment!

  • Practicing, boredom, and guilt

    ByBret Pimentel

    In my first semester as an undergraduate music major, I struggled with practicing. I felt guilty about not putting in as many hours as I knew I should, but more than that I felt guilty about the reason: I was bored and frustrated in the practice room. I loved playing music, but going into the practice rooms felt like serving time: counting down the minutes until my hours were done, or sneaking out early with a pang of shame, while my playing more or less failed to improve. I didn’t talk to my teacher or my classmates about it because I thought my lack of enthusiasm for practicing was a sign of some kind of personal weakness.

    But things got better. I gradually developed better ideas how to practice, and started to see results from it. My progress motivated me to get back into the practice rooms even more, and over the next few years practicing became my favorite part of the day.

    photo, mandykoh
    photo, mandykoh

    As a teacher, I have tried to be sensitive to this problem. I find that my students who struggle with practicing are sometimes afraid to talk to me about it, and want to brush aside talk of their declining practice hours with thin excuses about having a “busy week.” But if we can address the problem honestly and openly, I can offer some suggestions to help them enjoy their practice time more and get more out of it.

    I don’t think that there is a one-size-fits-all solution for practice room boredom, but in general I think these are some good starting points:

    • Put practicing on your daily schedule, and stick to the plan. It’s tough to scrape up enough enthusiasm for practicing when it’s the thing you have been putting off all day, and now it’s the only thing standing between you and some much-needed sleep.
    • Be goal-oriented in your practicing. Make a list of things that need improvement about your playing, and tackle a few things during each practice session. If you’re not sure what needs improvement, be sure to take good notes in your next lesson—as a teacher, I consider it my primary responsibility to help students hear what they really sound like, and what they could sound like. Or, don’t wait: make a recording of yourself (a smartphone makes this super easy), listen back, and jot down a few things that need work.
    • Don’t just try to improve your playing, work on improving your practicing, too. It’s an art form of its own. Soak up new practice ideas from your teacher, your classmates, and anywhere else you can find them. (Here are some of mine.) And, of course, invent your own.
    • Know your limits. Personally, I find that I can give about ten minutes of good, focused attention to a practice task before my productivity starts to decline, so I switch tasks at least that often. If I haven’t perfected something within ten minutes (and usually I haven’t), I’ll come back to it later with fresh energy. Figure out your own attention span and work with it, rather than against it.
    • Be honest with yourself and with your teacher about how your practicing is going. I guarantee your teacher can relate. She or he will probably have some great new ideas you can try, but might not know yet that you are in need of them.
    • Ride out the tough patches. Even once I started to get better at practicing, there still were (and still are) days when I just don’t feel like it. But there are lots of things in my life that need to be done that I don’t always feel like doing, and I still seem to manage. Sometimes the hardest, most tedious practicing seems to happen right before a breakthrough.
    • Start. I asked one of my students once what he found to be the hardest thing about practicing. He looked me in the eye and said, “Getting it out of the case.” Once he had his instrument assembled, he explained, it wasn’t so hard to just start practicing.

    You know practicing is important, and you love to make music. If your practicing is making you miserable, don’t give up on it! Make it fun and productive.

  • Paul Hindemith and the Trio Op. 47: Steps toward a mature style

    ByBret Pimentel

    Paul Hindemith was born in Hanau, Germany, in 1895. Unlike most of his composer contemporaries, who came from the privileged classes, his origins were humble ones.

    Hindemith’s father, Robert, was a manual laborer and amateur zither player, who, despite a necessarily tight budget, saw that Paul and his siblings received musical training. Robert Hindemith raised his children with strict discipline, especially in terms of their music education. He took them to the local opera house, often on foot, and quizzed them on the way home, rewarding unsatisfactory answers with spankings. Later, Herr Hindemith organized his children into the Frankfurt Children’s Trio. Guy Rickards suggests that it was “despite” this “exploitative” upbringing that Paul and his brother Rudolf both went on to successful musical careers. Read More “Paul Hindemith and the Trio Op. 47: Steps toward a mature style”

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