There’s a common idea with woodwind players and teachers that it’s important to keep your fingers close to the keys. Keeping the fingers within a certain reasonable distance does have benefits:
It’s easier to keep track of where the keys are and not “miss,” especially for beginners
Allowing the fingers to rise too far can introduce tension into the hands
But I think finger-closeness is a concept that gets over-taught and over-stressed. It seems to be motivated by a desire for finger speed (or some euphemism like “fluidity”).
Assuming the fingers are within a reasonable range, I think working toward extreme closeness probably doesn’t offer much if any speed increase, but does make tension more likely. It’s a micro-optimization only worth thinking about when you’ve solved every other problem with your technique, and even then your results may differ on whether it’s productive (or even counterproductive). Definitely don’t stress out your beginning students over it.
Try this if you like: bring a finger down onto a key from, say, 1-2mm above the key (about the thickness of a couple of credit or ID cards). Then try from ten times that distance, 1-2 cm (the width of a fingernail or two). What do you notice about speed? How about tension?
Keep the fingers close enough to stay in position and not bend backward, but don’t worry too much about dialing in extreme closeness.
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I’ve been having fun with woodwinds enhanced with pickups or microphones. (If you’re interested in natively-electronic instruments like wind controllers, I’ve written about those elsewhere.)
I still have a lot to learn about working with electronics. But here are a few observations in case anyone finds them helpful.
Which instrument(s) to use? I find lower-pitched instruments to be more fun, since they can provide convincing bass lines. Electronics can pitch a high instrument down, of course, but I haven’t had the success I would like making this sound good. So far I’ve installed pickups into a bassoon bocal, a bass clarinet neck, and an English horn bocal. I’ve used microphones for other instruments.
Which gadgets to use? I’m personally using the Little-Jake pickups, a looper, and a multi-effects unit. When I started getting into effects pedals, I found it alarmingly easy to accumulate quite a few. This was a good and inexpensive way to get started. But I quickly discovered that it was becoming unwieldy to try use use more than a few in performance (I literally had to walk back and forth across the stage to get to them all). A multi-effects unit turned out to be much more practical, with a few foot switches I can configure to operate a large number of effects. (I’m currently using one by Boss.) It takes a little more advance setup than individual pedals, but greatly simplifies the onstage footwork. And I was pretty easily able to sell off the individual pedals to fund the purchase.
Which effects to use? I think the best-known guitar-type effects are distortion, delay/echo, and reverb. Those are fun to play with, but I’ve become more interested in ones I can use to give my instruments new capabilities, rather than just give their sounds a little grittiness or echo. For example, smart harmonizers (which add harmony lines based on a selected key) and pitch shifters (which add harmony lines based on selected intervals) make my instruments polyphonic, a significant upgrade for a woodwind player. And a looper, or even a cleverly-used delay, can create counterpoint.
Here are a few examples of my experiments:
There are eight audio tracks here, but each one is performed “live.” I’m trying to somewhat replicate sounds from the original song: two vocal parts, two guitars, piano, electric piano, and electric bass, plus various synthesizer lines that I’ve consolidated into one. I’m using harmonizers and pitch shifters on the “guitars” and “keyboards” to perform chords in real time. I’m also pitch shifting the “bass” to let the English horn play much lower than its natural range.
I’m using a harmonizer here similarly to how I used it in the English horn video, but you can get a better view of what that involves footwork-wise. I’m using several carefully-programmed footswitches to change the harmonizer’s parameters as I go, in order to get the chromatic harmony that I want. On the A sections of the tune, I’m also using a pitch shifter to double the melody up an octave. The separate bass part that starts at about 0:28 uses pitch shift to drop the sound down an octave.
This is an example of using a looper (the red unit) to layer multiple lines, while using the multi-effects unit (black) to do real-time harmony and some other things. The “bass” part, shifted down two octaves, isn’t as convincing as I would like (you may have to use earphones to hear it).
Here’s a live-performance example using looper plus multi-effects unit.
Here I’m using the multi-effects unit to perform the melody “call” and harmonized “response” (unfortunately distorted and too soft), and using the looper to provide backing for an improvised solo.
Here’s an attempt to replicate one of Paul Hanson’s incredible electric bassoon “hocket” performances (I fell a bit short). The technique uses a delay to create a single well-timed echo, with the result being that I’m only playing every other note you hear; the in-between notes are echoes of previously-played ones. To get the full effect, check out Paul’s video.
This one you can actually buy sheet music for; the arranger, Melissa Keeling, provides parameters for using a harmonizer and a delay (which could be separate pedals or functions of a multi-effects unit).
I got an interesting email recently. I’ve edited it heavily and fictionalized almost all the details, since I’m using it here without permission, but you’ll get the idea:
Dear Bret,
I found your web page through a Google search. My company is presenting a themed cruise for classical music lovers departing from Seattle in February, featuring performances by a full symphony orchestra.
I am looking to hire a woodwind doubler to serve as a sort of human insurance policy, should something happen to one of our woodwind players while we are out to sea. I’m wondering if you know anyone in the area who would be interested. We will rehearse in Seattle before departure. Compensation is room and board on the ship and travel to the Hawaiian islands, plus $50 per service to attend all rehearsals, and $100 per concert if called upon to perform. I need someone who can play flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon, and the repertoire is standard symphonic fare: Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, etc.
Let me know if there’s anyone you could recommend for this. There’s a nearby university with a degree program in multiple woodwinds, so I figure there must be a number of students or graduates who are available. I would like to hire someone in the area, since unfortunately we can’t pay for travel to Seattle.
Thanks!
Eddie Skousen, President
Classical Cruises, Inc.
I’ll confess to being sort of fascinated by the idea of being hired as a kind of utility backup for an orchestral woodwind section. And I did put out a call for some potential hires, but didn’t get any nibbles. It’s a creative idea, but there are a number of practical obstacles: Read More “The woodwind doubler as orchestral utility player”
An important factor in improvising fluently (such as in a jazz context) is a collection of vocabulary. Broadly defined, this could include rote-memorized “licks” plus all kinds of other material: scale- or arpeggio-oriented patterns, for example. With improvisation, you don’t have the luxury of practicing your solo note-for-note; instead you have to develop a large pool of available material, and learn it so well that you can mix and match it on the fly.
If you double on multiple instruments, the vocabulary pool isn’t really portable. You can bring your improvisational ideas with you from instrument to instrument, but you won’t be able to execute them smoothly unless you have put in the practice hours on each instrument separately. If you are doubling, say, saxophone and flute, you might find that the fingerings are similar enough that you can make a few things work, but it’s too easy to paint yourself into a corner, or to catch yourself using “close enough” fingerings that really aren’t, or to play with unsatisfactory tone or intonation. To do it right, and have the colors of multiple instrumental voices available to you as an improviser, treat each instrument like it’s your only one.
If you are considering buying the newest, hottest instrument, accessory, gadget, etc., it’s worth asking yourself a few questions:
Is this item made out of materials that are usually used for fine jewelry or the dashboards of luxury cars?
How likely is it that the most visually-attractive materials also happen to have the ideal acoustical qualities? Is there really a good reason to believe that this particular material sounds better than other materials that happen to be less pretty and less expensive? Is there some reason to believe this couldn’t be made from practical and low-cost materials like steel or aluminum or oak or birch, or any of the incredible and endlessly varied synthetic materials?
Does the item come in a variety of materials at a variety of price points, with the most expensive materials being pushed as the best-sounding?
Does the marketing pitch sound like it might really be describing how the material looks, rather than sounds? “The brilliance of silver,” “the smooth dark sound of grenadilla,” “the rich sound of our proprietary gold alloy,” “the complex character of our highly-figured maple.”
You should use the instruments that work best for you. If precious metals and fragrant exotic woods make you happy and you can afford them, then you should have them. But be careful not to get caught up in a sales pitch that is more about bling than about real benefits.
Students in my woodwind methods classes are usually music education majors, planning careers as school band directors. In my class, they get their one-semester crash course in playing and teaching the flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and saxophone. Clearly there’s a lot of information that they will need but which will be easily forgotten—I can’t give a trumpet player three weeks to learn to play the clarinet, and then expect her to remember many fingerings once the playing test is done, the clarinet is returned, and I’ve given her a bassoon contend with.
So I have them prepare a woodwind notebook over the course of the semester, with lecture notes, class handouts, fingering charts, and other things that will hopefully be valuable resources to them in their teaching careers.
One of the things I ask them to include in the notebook is some resources that they have discovered independently. The idea here is to have them find things that they think they will need, and to become acquainted with some good sources for woodwind information along the way. I tell them that information found on the web will only count if I think it’s reliable, and I encourage them to send me links for advance approval.
Usually my classes figure out that I can’t very well reject anything they print from my website, so I usually see a lot of my own stuff appearing in their notebooks. I don’t object to this as long as they choose well, but sometimes they don’t. Last semester’s submissions included my review of the AKAI EWI 4000s, which, of course, is not part of our curriculum, and even some of my links pages, which become considerably less useful on paper, since you can’t click through to the good stuff.
Crazy for You is a Broadway-style stage musical by Ken Ludwig. The show, which premiered in 1992, uses songs written by George and Ira Gershwin for musicals in the 1930’s. In January and February, 2003, the Brigham Young University Department of Theatre and Media Arts and School of Music produced the show.
Synthesis, BYU’s award-winning jazz ensemble directed by Dr. Ray Smith, filled the role of pit orchestra. The five-member Synthesis saxophone section became an orchestral woodwind section, with a combined arsenal of over twenty instruments. The practice of “doubling,” or playing more than one instrument, is common in theater orchestra woodwind sections. A woodwind doubler may be expected to play instruments from all five woodwind families (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and saxophone) in a single show!
The woodwind parts in Crazy for You provide an excellent case study for the challenges facing the woodwind doubler. The show requires five woodwind players. The first woodwind part calls for flute and piccolo, clarinet, and soprano and alto saxophones. The musician playing this part is the primary flute, piccolo, and soprano saxophone soloist, as well as the lead saxophonist in saxophone ensemble passages. Special considerations include extensive use of the extreme high ranges of the flute and piccolo, as well as trills in less-common keys and in the high register; and jazz inflections, including pitch bends, in the saxophone parts. Read More “Woodwind doubling in musical theater orchestras: Taking the insanity out of Crazy for You”
Hi Bret, I could not agree more with you on this topic. As an Alexander Technique teacher (and saxophonist), this “micromanaging” tendency with the fingers often interferes with coordination. From a functional point of view, efficiency is not always found in “economy of movement” (i.e., limiting the movement of the fingers), so much as in “economy of effort” (allowing things to move in cooperation with our human design, with a mininum of misdirected effort/tension). Unfortunately, most of the woodwind players who have come to me for help with focal hand dystonia have spent a good deal of time in their practice trying to “hold the fingers close”. There are neurological reasons why this is counterproductive, and for some, potentially harmful. If you’re interested in the science of it, I recommend Gabriele Wulf’s (she’s a kinesiologist and researcher) groundbreaking book, “Attention and Motor Skill Learning”, where she explains (and supplies ample research data) why micromanaging fine motor skills is usually not the best approach. Thanks, as always for you thoughtful, very helpful posts.
As a former clarinet player, I remember that trying to keep the fingers too close to the keys (especially as a beginner in order to look more ‘professional’…) resulted in a possible quicker ‘winging’ of notes, but it resulted in a lack of precision and ‘impact timing’ especially when improvising.
However, having switched to an EWI 4000/5000 many years ago, I found something interesting: in the meantime I hardly lift my fingers more than a few mm, but have a very precise feel as for timing and accuracy, and at times can play at speeds unimaginable on the clarinet, like in Db or B over 3 or even 4 octaves (but still grooving/swinging!).
But: when playing more complex/multiple fingerings possible on the EWI, I still find my fingers lifting much higher and positioning themselves almost automatically into what feels like the ‘optimal’ height.
As the Romans used to say: Ne quid nimis (‘[do] nothing in excess’)…
Hi Bret, I could not agree more with you on this topic. As an Alexander Technique teacher (and saxophonist), this “micromanaging” tendency with the fingers often interferes with coordination. From a functional point of view, efficiency is not always found in “economy of movement” (i.e., limiting the movement of the fingers), so much as in “economy of effort” (allowing things to move in cooperation with our human design, with a mininum of misdirected effort/tension). Unfortunately, most of the woodwind players who have come to me for help with focal hand dystonia have spent a good deal of time in their practice trying to “hold the fingers close”. There are neurological reasons why this is counterproductive, and for some, potentially harmful. If you’re interested in the science of it, I recommend Gabriele Wulf’s (she’s a kinesiologist and researcher) groundbreaking book, “Attention and Motor Skill Learning”, where she explains (and supplies ample research data) why micromanaging fine motor skills is usually not the best approach. Thanks, as always for you thoughtful, very helpful posts.
As a former clarinet player, I remember that trying to keep the fingers too close to the keys (especially as a beginner in order to look more ‘professional’…) resulted in a possible quicker ‘winging’ of notes, but it resulted in a lack of precision and ‘impact timing’ especially when improvising.
However, having switched to an EWI 4000/5000 many years ago, I found something interesting: in the meantime I hardly lift my fingers more than a few mm, but have a very precise feel as for timing and accuracy, and at times can play at speeds unimaginable on the clarinet, like in Db or B over 3 or even 4 octaves (but still grooving/swinging!).
But: when playing more complex/multiple fingerings possible on the EWI, I still find my fingers lifting much higher and positioning themselves almost automatically into what feels like the ‘optimal’ height.
As the Romans used to say: Ne quid nimis (‘[do] nothing in excess’)…