Just like tying my shoes

ByBret Pimentel

I like to use shoe tying in my teaching, as an example of what regular practicing—even just a few minutes every day—can and should accomplish.

Playing a woodwind instrument involves a number of complex physical actions: coordinated finger movements, a delicately balanced embouchure, well-timed breathing, and more. And musicians mostly need to execute these physical elements without a lot of thought, so that they can mentally focus on things like expression and communication. The way to do this is to practice the physical stuff regularly and consistently, so that it happens automatically.

Like most people, I think, as a small child I found shoe tying to be a complicated proposition. It’s a sophisticated task for little fingers. But once I got the technique worked out, I just did it every day, day in and day out, until I didn’t need to think about it anymore.

Or so I thought.

Imagine my dismay when I discovered, just this morning, that I have been doing it wrong all my life.

Yes, I am the poor sap in the video who has been unwittingly tying the apparently much-inferior “granny” knot for more than 25 years.

So what does this mean for my practicing analogy?

Perhaps that it’s not enough just to drill my basic skills every day—I need to make them better than they were yesterday.

  • Can I move even one finger more smoothly, quickly, evenly, or efficiently?
  • Can I make my articulations more crisp, fluent, and poised?
  • Can I get fuller, deeper, more relaxed breaths, and make them go farther?
  • Can I further internalize and refine my sense of pitch and pulse?
  • Can I find any excess tension anywhere in my body, and release it?
  • Can I focus more? Tune out one more distracting thought?

Oh, and I suggest you check your shoes.

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  • What I learned about practicing from my summer fitness class

    ByBret Pimentel
    Photo, brendan-c

    Exercise has always been a challenge motivation-wise for me, but now that being over 30 appears to be a chronic condition, it’s something that I’m trying to do better about. I find it easier to motivate myself to practice my instruments, but I see connections between my exercise aversion and some of my students’ practice lethargy:

    • Unclear or undetermined direction and goals
    • Poor planning of exercise/practice sessions
    • Sessions are boring
    • Unfamiliarity with proper training/practicing techniques, or a mistaken self-evaluation of how well they are being executed

    I’ve previously attempted jogging routines, trips to the campus gym’s weight room, calisthenics programs, and various other workouts. All have fizzled out fairly quickly. Recently I had settled into a daily walk, which was easy and pleasant but wasn’t improving my fitness in any noticeable way.

    I decided this year to take advantage of a summer fitness class being offered for free on campus. It was my first time committing to doing anything like that, but the price was right and the time commitment seemed do-able.

    To my surprise, things went much better than in any of my previous attempts at regular exercise (after the first week’s exhaustion and soreness ebbed a little), and I found that a number of things that worked well for me in practice sessions were also clicking in my new fitness program:

    • Accountability is a big motivator. I knew the fitness instructor and my classmates would be expecting me every day, and that was enough to get me out of bed and into the gym for a full hour. Likewise, I need accountability in my practicing. For years I had teachers’ expectations to meet, but now I am accountable to myself. One thing that has worked well for me this summer is regularly-scheduled informal recording sessions, where I listen back to my playing, evaluate the results of my efforts, and write down some comments for myself.
    • Progress doesn’t always look like what you want it to. After my summer workouts, I still don’t have six-pack abs or a four-minute mile, but my pants are fitting a little loose, and my endurance is way, way up. Similarly, in the practice room, my summer’s efforts haven’t brought my recital repertoire to blazing tempi and groundbreaking interpretation, but I have shored up some fundamentals and made headway on some new techniques.
    • Variety is good. The fitness class was a “boot camp”-style regimen, with lots of short intervals of high-intensity (for me) exercise. It’s very similar to a strategy I use when practicing: pick a problem spot, and give it 10 minutes of hyper-focused effort. After 10 minutes, move on. It’s amazing how much gets done in a few hours’ worth of ten-minute chunks, and I enjoy it much more than long sessions working on the same problem.
    • Don’t fight your equipment. I bought new shoes partway through the summer, and the next day’s class was agony on my legs. I got some advice and bought some drugstore insoles that supported my feet differently, and the following class was 100% better. Same thing goes for my instruments and reeds: if something isn’t working efficiently, I’m unhappy and ineffective (and possibly even injured). Make sure your instruments are the best quality you can reasonably afford, and that they are kept in excellent repair and adjustment.
    • The fitness instructor was fond of saying, “If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.” (The phrase seems to get credited a lot to Fred DeVito.) It’s easy to fall into patterns of “practicing” what I can already do, rather than tackling something that will push me to a new level.
    • Progress feeds motivation. I found that sweating through a few weeks of exercise and seeing some improvement really boosted my enthusiasm for exercise. (To my own surprise, I’m even hoping to fit in another exercise class during the semester.) I recall as a freshman music major really struggling with getting my practicing done at first. But as it started to pay off, I got excited about what I was accomplishing, and it snowballed into more and better practicing.

    Go put in some hours in the practice room—and in the gym, too!

  • Fix fixable problems now

    ByBret Pimentel

    Just about every day I have a student show up for a lesson with an etude or repertoire movement they have been working on for a week or more, and there are little, silly problems that haven’t been fixed:

    • A spot where a fingering choice needs to be made, but hasn’t.
    • A page turn in an awkward spot.
    • An unfamiliar foreign term that hasn’t been looked up.
    • An ambiguous accidental that need to be double-checked against the piano part.

    It’s easy for them (or me) to ignore or procrastinate small but easily-fixable issues while busily drilling technical passages. But I know they—and I—are doing our best work when those details don’t slip through the cracks.

    It’s not worth it to spend a week practicing something in an incorrect or compromised way because you haven’t gotten around to fixing the fixable problems. Would any of these help you solve those issues more promptly?

    • Print an alternate/trill fingering chart and keep it with your practicing stuff, or bookmark an online one on your phone.
    • Put a few dollars on your copier/printer card/app so you can photocopy a page when needed.
    • Keep a good music dictionary in the pocket of your instrument case.
    • Keep your piano score and solo part together so you can always use them in tandem.

    Consider what other easily-fixable problems you haven’t bothered to fix, and ask yourself what you can do to remove friction so they get solved right away next time you practice.

  • Recommended: Jeanjean “Vade-Mecum” du Clarinettiste

    ByBret Pimentel

    Lately I’ve been doing some clarinet work out of the Jeanjean Vade-Mecum. The title page translates charmingly to:

    “Vade-Mecum” of the Clarinet-player

    6 SPECIAL STUDIES

    to

    render the fingers and tongue rapidly supple

    But this is what really sold me:

    NOTICE

    The aim of these 6 standard-studies (combining the essential parts generally contained in several exercise books) is to prepare instrumentalists in a very short space of time (about 1/2 hour) when, due to their occupations, they are not able to devote the time necessary for developed exercises and must nevertheless be ready to execute difficult passages, from the standpoint of lips, tongue and fingers.

    The movements to which these Studies oblige the clarinet-player to submit will rapidly overcome those imperfections, the diminution or the passing weakness that might result from either fatigue or irregularity of technical work.

    “…not able to devote the time necessary … and must nevertheless be ready to execute difficult passages…” This, in a nutshell, is the quandary of the woodwind doubler. Read More “Recommended: Jeanjean “Vade-Mecum” du Clarinettiste”

  • Ornaments are notes

    ByBret Pimentel

    I think there are some unintended consequences of the way ornamentation is notated in Western music. Often the ornaments are indicated with some kind of abstract symbol or with tiny “extra” notes (like grace notes), located visually outside of the music’s rhythmic structure. This sometimes leads less-experienced musicians to the conclusion, consciously or otherwise, that the ornaments do not have precise rhythms. Sometimes music teachers feed this problem by explaining the rhythmic aspects of ornamentation in a vague or misleading way.

    For example, many of my saxophone and oboe students are initially stymied by this moment in the first of the Ferling 48 Famous Studies:

    ferling-example.preview

    An unclear but common way to explain this is to indicate the pitch pattern of the turn—up a diatonic step and back down, down a diatonic (or maybe half-) step and back up—and then say something to the effect that these notes “steal” time from the F-natural. The grace notes in the next measure can be poorly explained by emphasizing that they go “on the beat.” These explanations aren’t factually incorrect, and make some sense to someone who already understands what the end result should sound like, but leave a lot of unanswered questions for students who are less experienced with ornamentation.

    To be clearer about the turn, I think it helps to think through exactly how many notes have to be played in the space of the F-natural (five) and some possible ways to fit them in. Here are a few: Read More “Ornaments are notes”

  • What really went wrong? Leaning into problem spots

    ByBret Pimentel

    I have a recurring teaching challenge with my saxophone students who are tackling the altissimo register for the first time. They play a passage, and when they get to the altissimo note, if it doesn’t respond perfectly, they immediately stop playing. When I ask why, they look puzzled. “The note didn’t come out.”

    “Well, what did come out?” I might ask.

    More puzzlement. Sometimes I have to prompt them to play it again, and remind them to play it long enough to really hear it.

    “A weird honk,” they might finally conclude. Or “a terrible squeak.”

    “That’s a note,” I point out. It might be too low (honk) or too high (squeak). But it has a pitch, right? It isn’t the note we wanted, but it was something. And understanding what something it is helps us know what to try next. If it was a honk, the instrument responded at a too-low partial, and if it was a squeak, it responded at a too-high partial. There’s work to do to fix it, but we’re much farther along than we were the diagnosis was only as specific as “failure.”

    This approach is helpful with a variety of woodwind-playing problems. Don’t bail and declare failure at the first appearance of a problem. Try leaning into it. What does the problem really sound like? Can you make the problem happen again, on purpose? If you change something about your approach, does the sound change (even if it just changes to a different problem)? All of this information is potentially useful in finding a reliable, repeatable solution.

    Additionally, this approach encourages an attitude of curiosity and exploration, rather than self-judgment. That’s a much more fun and productive way to practice. It lets you finish your practice session eager to try again tomorrow, rather than dreading more failure.

    Run toward your problem spots, not away from them, and see what they can teach you.

  • Recommending gear for beginners

    ByBret Pimentel
    Photo, sekihan

    A beginning instrumentalist needs good equipment. For young woodwind players that means instruments, mouthpieces, reeds, and probably a few other accessories. They aren’t cheap, and the array of options is bewildering. Where can students and their parents turn for solid recommendations?

    The ideal situation is for the student to connect with a qualified, conscientious private instructor before making any purchases or signing any rental agreements. In my private teaching experience, this has happened exactly 0% of the time. It’s a nice dream.

    For many young beginners, the best counsel they’ve got is the school band director. But what, exactly, do school band directors know about, say, clarinet mouthpieces? I have the greatest respect for school band directors. But I think that scenarios like this probably happen pretty often:

    • A fine, talented, studious young man or woman, who plays, let’s say, the trombone, signs up for the woodwind methods class required for their music education degree.
    • The brilliant and respected professor, who plays, let’s say, the flute, and who is doing his or her level best to teach several instruments in which he or she does not have any specific training, puts in phone calls to some colleagues and picks their brains for their best recommendations for clarinet mouthpieces. Several of them mention one particular model. The professor types up a class handout, listing that specific mouthpiece as an affordable and high-quality option, suitable to most beginners.
    • The young aspiring music educator accepts the handout, studies it, successfully answers a test question about good student clarinet mouthpieces, and files the handout away for future reference.
    • Ten years into the educator’s career, the mouthpiece company merges with another company. Decisions are made by non-clarinetists wearing expensive suits in a well-appointed conference room. The mouthpiece makers are laid off, and mouthpiece production moves to an overseas factory. The mouthpieces look much the same as before and bear the same brand name and model number, but the quality drops significantly, as does the manufacturing cost. The suit-wearing non-clarinetists get large bonuses. Read More “Recommending gear for beginners”

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