Irish flute/whistle ornamentation symbols à la Grey Larsen, in Lilypond

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If you are nerdy/awesome enough to be into (1) the pedagogy of Irish traditional woodwind playing and (2) open-source text-based music notation software, then you may want to check out my set of symbols for Lilypond, based on the excellent ornamentation system by Grey Larsen. You can get the .ily file on GitHub (and submit your pull requests to make improvements to my code).

Cuts, strikes, rolls, cranns, etc.
Cuts, strikes, slides, rolls, cranns, etc.

If you are unfamiliar with Mr. Larsen’s system and you play pennywhistles or wooden flutes, then really I must insist that you buy a copy of his The Essential Guide to Irish Flute and Tin Whistle immediately—his ornamentation system is clear and logical and should be regarded as the standard for teaching and learning Irish-traditional ornamentation for wind instruments.

If you are unfamiliar with Lilypond, chances are good that you won’t like it even though it’s free and produces much better notation than the software you already spent several hundred dollars on.

Also, it’s worth noting that Chris Throup already had a similar idea a few years ago. Mine is a bit more complete, but his is really simple.

Sláinte!

Favorite blog posts, April 2014

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Hand-picked high-quality woodwind-related blog posts from around the web, April 2014 edition.

Practice technique: anchoring

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The “anchoring” technique helps you think about logical groups of notes, encourages effective phrasing, and trains your ears to hear notes in a new and useful way.

Novelty and solo multiple-woodwind performance

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I would like for my performances to stand on their own, regardless of how many or how few instruments I use, but it’s hard to tell when the audience is distracted by the parade of shiny objects.

Favorite blog posts, March 2014

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Hand-picked high-quality woodwind-related blog posts from around the web, March 2014 edition.

Answering equipment questions

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Factoids about which musicians use which equipment are a curiosity, rather than something of great importance.

Death from exposure

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Working musicians, especially those trying to launch their careers or take them to the next level, are all too familiar with the idea of playing for “exposure”—in other words, playing gigs for free with the idea that maybe it will somehow lead to paying gigs.

Playing for free is one thing; there’s no reason you can’t do a favor for a friend, or show up at a jam session for fun and/or practice. But it’s more insidious when your unpaid labor is fueling somebody else’s profits. This seems to be a phenomenon that particularly affects creative types: the same people who want your band to play at their event for “exposure” or “experience” are no doubt paying the waitstaff, stage crew, or what-have-you, because people in those jobs simply don’t work for free.

Photo, Mark Robinson
Photo, Mark Robinson

The fallacy here is that the prospective employer is offering you exposure and experience and networking instead of money, as if the alternative were gigs that paid money but didn’t offer those things. That simply isn’t the case: you get all those benefits from paid gigs, too, plus you get to pay your rent that month.

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Improvisation and doubling

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If you double on multiple instruments, the improvisational vocabulary pool isn’t really portable. You can bring your 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.