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For some reason a high percentage of my incoming students each year like to make a 3-ring binder for their sheet music and lesson materials. I don’t know why.
They apparently put a fair amount of time and money into this project, which often involves custom cover artwork, dividers, and plastic sheet protectors. As the semesters go by, the binder fills up with every bit of sheet music they have used, until the binder is so heavy that a music stand won’t support its weight.
I applaud and relate to their interest in keeping things organized and their enthusiasm for the course. But the big music binder just doesn’t work very well. Here are my complaints:
Putting everything in sheet protectors discourages marking, which is crucial to effective practicing. Even if your intention is to pull the sheet music out to practice and make markings, are you really going to go to the trouble every single time? Or will some things go unmarked when you feel too lazy to pull the music out for the umpteenth time?
You will discover quickly that sheet music doesn’t all come in a neat, uniform 8½”×11″ size.
Carrying everything with you is pointless and impractical. I do think you should keep basically all of the repertoire, etudes, and other materials that you work on. But unless they are part of your active practice regimen, they shouldn’t be cluttering your music stand or weighing down your backpack. Get a big cardboard or plastic file box (you will probably need “legal size”) and keep your older materials neatly organized in a safe place.
While good organization is important, sometimes it turns into an excuse to procrastinate the real work of practicing. Your organization system should suit you, but shouldn’t turn into a time drain.
I do think it’s handy to have something to organize and protect what you are currently working on, especially if you are a student and need your practicing to move easily between multiple locations. Consider a large manila envelope, a pocket folder, or even a commercially-available music portfolio.
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So, you want to hire a “horn” section for an upcoming gig or recording. Great! Horns can add a special touch to your rock, pop, blues, etc. performance.
If you haven’t hired horns before, here are some things to keep in mind:
A small thing: the word “horn” as it’s used in this kind of music usually means trumpet, trombone, and/or saxophone. In classical music it means one specific instrument, probably not the one you want for this situation. Just something to remember if you ask someone to recommend some “horn” players.
If you’re planning to play some covers and there are horns on the original, depending on the mix it can be hard to tell exactly which horns. A horn section might range in size from two to a half dozen players or more, with some combination of trumpets, trombones, and saxophones in various sizes. There’s no single, standard setup.
Good working horn players can learn their cover-song parts by ear from a recording, just like your guitar/bass/keys/drum set players probably do. But it can be tricky to get the chord voicings right, just like if you’re trying to get a group of backup singers to imitate the harmonies from a favorite recording. It takes some coordination to make sure all the notes are covered, nobody is playing/singing somebody else’s part, and it sounds like a cohesive unit.
One thing that makes a great horn section great is precision in executing the details. This includes things like the coordinating the exact moment that notes begin and end, their shapes (do the notes swell? taper? etc.), and the gentleness or aggressiveness of the notes’ beginnings. Plus, horns don’t automatically play exactly in tune or in balance, so each chord may require the players to adjust to each other. That kind of precision doesn’t come quickly or easily (or cheaply).
Here are some tips to make it all work:
Most working horn players read music well. (They often have some kind of formal training.) If you can get some professionally-prepared horn “charts” (sheet music) for the combination of horns you intend to use, and hire top-notch players, they will likely be able to nail the parts on stage with little or no rehearsal. Well-written charts don’t just tell each horn player which notes to play, but also have detailed markings that help a good section play together with precision and style. Good charts cost money, but once you’ve got them you can reuse them with another horn section next time, or even hire local horn players at each tour stop.
To put together a really polished, professional horn section without charts requires some rehearsal time to get all the notes sorted out and establish a unified style. This also costs money, because good horn players usually won’t rehearse for free.
Depending on the market you are working in, it may be possible to hire a pre-existing horn section. There can be advantages to this, like that they have already put in many hours learning to play together as a coordinated section. Some horn-sections-for-hire might have a set instrumentation, or they might revolve around a single player who provides services like contracting the rest of the section from a roster of top-notch players, and maybe composing or transcribing horn section charts.
One budget-friendly option to consider is a single horn player. It’s not the same as a tight, well-coordinated section, but it’s flexible and easy. (I think a single saxophone works especially well for this, but I may be biased.) If you hire the right person you can go without charts or rehearsal time. A good player will learn the most important horn lines from a recording, or even make up something convincing on the spot. I do a fair amount of playing that way—a band hires me to join them on a gig, and either I already know most of the cover songs well enough, or I can play something off-the-cuff that works. If the gig pays well enough, I can afford to do some extra homework in advance and learn the cover parts cold.
Horns are loud, but not loud enough to compete with amplified instruments. They will need mics and monitors. Basic vocal/general-purpose mics like SM57s or SM58s are a solid starting point, or your sound engineer may have some other options available. Include the horn section in your sound check so they can get monitor levels. (Generally they will need to hear fair amount of themselves in the monitor, like singers.) If you are providing charts they will also need music stands and maybe stand lights, but can probably bring their own if given advance notice.
Horn-playing freelancers are often accustomed to jazz gigs and maybe performances in a local symphony, so they should be ready on a moment’s notice to wear coat and tie (or equivalent female attire), “gig black” (all black, somewhat dressy), or “concert black” (tuxedo or similar dressiness). Decide whether you have any dress code expectations and communicate them.
A horn section brings some extra class and professionalism to your performance. Knowing what to expect helps things go smoothly. Enjoy!
Frequently I think about something one of my teachers said to me as an undergraduate student. I was preparing for a rapidly upcoming recital, and played one of my repertoire pieces in a private lesson. There was a tricky page turn in the printed sheet music, and my run-through came to a halt while I fumbled with the pages. A little embarrassed, I assured my teacher that I intended to photocopy a page at some point so this wouldn’t happen in performance.
“You know, it’s not too soon to do that,” he said with a tired smile.
Of course I learned many valuable lessons from that teacher, but “it’s not too soon” is one that has really stayed with me, and now I try to pass it along to my students. Here are some things they (and sometimes I) like to procrastinate, but I try to remind them it’s not too soon to do:
Photocopy pages to ease page turns
Mark in all the places you intend to breathe, and practice them
In the opening “Allegro” movement of his Wind Octet in E-flat major, Op. 103, Beethoven perpetrates a bit of mischief at the expense of the listener—and the analyst. In this paper, we will examine some analytical puzzles of this movement, then attempt to solve them by exploring a possible hermeneutical interpretation and applying Schenkerian techniques.
The hermeneutical narrative that we will attempt to apply here represents only one possible interpretation, but it is useful because it provides an accessible context for dealing with problematic elements (we will deal with an oddly recurring melodic motive, some unexpected harmonic turns, and a formal deformation). The Schenkerian techniques are effective here for identifying and explicating the essential harmonic motion.
A motivic troublemaker
"Troublemaker" motive
The first riddle of the Allegro is a trill-like motive (example 1) that dominates the opening of the movement. It appears in the first oboe, repeated in each of the first four measures. We will investigate a possible hermeneutic role of this motive: the impish troublemaker. (The troublemaker motive remains closely associated with the first oboe, though the first oboe also plays a part as a fully cooperative member of the ensemble. The oboe isn’t the troublemaker; the motive itself gets the blame.) Read More “A troublemaker in the octet: A hermeneutical approach to Beethoven’s op. 103”
Sometimes my students complain that they have had bad practicing days or weeks. Not that I have ever had this problem (ahem), but here are a few ideas for breaking out of a practicing slump.
Check equipment. Slightly-malfunctioning gear can make you feel like a bad player. Be sure to eliminate this possibility.
Are your reeds functioning well? Prioritize response-balanced-with-stability over more subjective and malleable things like tone. Many reed players use unnecessarily stiff reeds; consider trying something a little softer if you haven’t lately.
Is your instrument functioning well? If you know how, check the most important adjustment screws (oboe: left hand stack, left G-sharp key, F resonance; saxophone: bis, G-sharp, right hand stack). Re-check basics like alignment of bridge keys. And, of course, make sure your instrument gets regular (at least annual) maintenance checkups. Professional instruments should probably get full mechanical overhauls every 5-10 years.
Are you using the best equipment for you? Don’t let new purchases be your go-to solution for every problem, but in some cases replacing an instrument or accessory can remove a roadblock to progress. (Do a reality-check with your teacher to make sure you aren’t just throwing away money chasing a quick fix.)
Check technique. It might be you after all.
Have you warmed up thoroughly and correctly today? It’s best to do this at the beginning of your practice session, but there’s no rule that says you can’t warm up some more mid-session to double-check your tone production and reset your mental focus.
Have you reviewed all your fundamentals? Take a closer look at your posture, hand position, breath support, embouchure, voicing, finger movement, etc. Have you slipped back into a bad habit? Are you suffering the effects of a technique deficiency you know you should fix but haven’t gotten around to yet? If you don’t know how to fix it, check in with your teacher.
Can you release some tension? Frustration often goes hand-in-hand with tense muscles. Consider doing a little deep breathing, stretching, mindfulness practice, yoga, Alexander Technique, or whatever else puts your body back in balance.
Have you laid sufficient technical groundwork? If you are working on something especially difficult, is there something else you could practice as an intermediate step? Études, technical exercises, or other preparatory material can help bridge the gap between your current ability level and the ability level you need.
Check your health. If your body isn’t responding well, your practice sessions will be difficult and unpleasant.
Have you been getting enough quality sleep? Implementing good sleep habits is a major upgrade to the function of your mind and body.
Are you eating balanced meals? Are you eating enough? Are you eating too much? Is your diet too low on good stuff and/or too high in bad stuff?
Are you getting outside for at least a few minutes of sunshine and “fresh” air? Sunshine is important to your body’s vitamin D level.
Are you stressed, or otherwise not at your best mentally? In some cases, professional counseling and/or treatment may be needed. If you are a college student, there is a good chance there are free, discreet counseling services available on your campus. In other cases, taking a break, getting a little exercise, talking something out with a friend or loved one, or just getting a change of scenery might be enough.
Check your mindset.
Are you practicing mindlessly or without direction? Try making a short list of goals you would like to accomplish during this practice session. If you’re not sure where to start, make a quick recording (perhaps with the voice memo app on your smartphone) and listen to it to get some ideas about what needs improvement. If you don’t meet all your goals, you can tackle them again tomorrow or re-prioritize.
Check your environment.
At what time of day are your practice sessions the most productive and pleasant? Do you practice best in the morning before your body is tired and your brain is full? Or do you get a second wind after the sun goes down?
What locations are most conducive to good practice sessions? Sometimes just changing the scenery can revitalize your focus and productivity. Practicing in places with different acoustical qualities can make you hear yourself in new ways and get your creative juices flowing.
What distractions are getting in your way? Can you reduce or remove them?
Check your ego. Practicing should challenge you, but not overwhelm you.
Are you working on music that is inappropriately difficult for your current abilities? If you have some freedom to choose what you practice, consider working on something else for now and tackling this project later. If you are committed to a performance of something very difficult and have to make it work, be sure to include other things in your practice session that you can be successful at, to keep your motivation primed.
Don’t let poor practice sessions bring you down—use them to refine your habits and make the next session your best yet.
What I wrote was about university music students—students who, generally, have at least a half-dozen years of playing experience behind them, and who are planning to pursue a career in music. But I think it’s also worth considering the musical beginner (child or adult). Students who get a good start with their instrument have a better chance at success, no matter their goals.
Here are some habits that are characteristic of successful beginners, plus a bonus tip for woodwind doublers:
Get a teacher. This is the best money you can spend or your (or your child’s) new musical pursuits. And the sooner the better—don’t assume that you need to struggle on your own for a while before a teacher will take you on as a student. A good teacher can guide you through purchasing or renting your instrument, teach you good playing and practicing habits, troubleshoot problems, and model excellent playing. And you may be able to get good instruction cheaper than you think. Contact a teacher of reputation in your area and find out what they charge, and, if it’s more than you can spend, ask if they can recommend one of their top students as a beginning teacher. I’m a university music professor, and I charge more than some beginners would be willing or able to pay, but I’m pleased to recommend my advanced students who are anxious for some teaching experience, who work cheap, and who will teach you the same things I’m teaching them.
Get good advice on equipment purchases. See habit #1 for the best solution to this. Be extremely wary of advice from mail-order catalogs, internet message boards, eBay sellers, and commissioned music store salespeople who don’t play your instrument. My beginning woodwind students who start with inferior or poorly-adjusted gear often develop poor playing habits in an attempt to compensate for the instrument’s/mouthpiece’s/reeds’ shortcomings, and are far more likely to get frustrated and quit. You don’t need a fancy car to learn how to drive, but you do need working brakes, steering, and signal lights. Read More “Seven habits of highly effective beginners”
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!
At this point, why even bother with paper? PDF and tablets make so much more sense. All the time wasted printing, organizing the stuff. Ugh. Go get an iPad. They have the cheap non-pro ones for about $300 now. Or even an android tablet. You can easily take pictures of sheets, or scan them. And you can even get a PDF reader for Kindle’s now.
Just makes so much more sense. My iPad 1 from 2011 STILL is a great thing to read PDFs on. I can take hundreds of books, and it remembers where I was. I can make notes on the sheets. Game changing.
I look forward to the technology improving on this. I was in a symphony rehearsal recently and someone in the orchestra had scanned all of their music to read from an iPad. It seemed to work pretty well until the conductor made a comment. The rest of us made a quick pencil mark while the iPad user scrambled through menus. I’m a mostly-digital kind of guy, but I still need the immediacy of paper and pencil for score marking.
Bret, I agree that housing sheet music inside of 3-ring binders is a fruitless endeavor. I’ve observed that band programs today require their students to use 3-ring binders for storing and transporting sheet music. It’s especially common in beginning band programs, where uniformity using binders is useful for homogeneous instruction.
Nowadays the older oversized ensemble folders we’re accustomed only appear in all-state bands, collegiate programs, large orchestras, and community bands.
I use a notebook to hold the music for a specific project. For example, the music for an ensemble performance this weekend is in a notebook. The music comes out after the performance. No dividers, just removable tabs. The notebook keeps the music protected, easy to find, and safe from stray wind gusts. A notebook fits in my backpack. It also provides a way to neatly get blank paper into rehearsals for notes. I do agree with your objections to sheet protectors. Another problem with them is glare, especially when performing outside or with stand lights.
I also use an iPad for sheet music, mainly solos. I’m hoping the latest iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil solves the problem of quickly annotating music.
But for flipping pages when you’re playing, a ring-binder makes things much easier and “safer” (pages can’t go flying). And even when studying sheet music, a binder means that you won’t mis-order sheets or flip double-sided sheets the wrong way.
At this point, why even bother with paper? PDF and tablets make so much more sense. All the time wasted printing, organizing the stuff. Ugh. Go get an iPad. They have the cheap non-pro ones for about $300 now. Or even an android tablet. You can easily take pictures of sheets, or scan them. And you can even get a PDF reader for Kindle’s now.
Just makes so much more sense. My iPad 1 from 2011 STILL is a great thing to read PDFs on. I can take hundreds of books, and it remembers where I was. I can make notes on the sheets. Game changing.
I look forward to the technology improving on this. I was in a symphony rehearsal recently and someone in the orchestra had scanned all of their music to read from an iPad. It seemed to work pretty well until the conductor made a comment. The rest of us made a quick pencil mark while the iPad user scrambled through menus. I’m a mostly-digital kind of guy, but I still need the immediacy of paper and pencil for score marking.
Bret, I agree that housing sheet music inside of 3-ring binders is a fruitless endeavor. I’ve observed that band programs today require their students to use 3-ring binders for storing and transporting sheet music. It’s especially common in beginning band programs, where uniformity using binders is useful for homogeneous instruction.
Nowadays the older oversized ensemble folders we’re accustomed only appear in all-state bands, collegiate programs, large orchestras, and community bands.
I use a notebook to hold the music for a specific project. For example, the music for an ensemble performance this weekend is in a notebook. The music comes out after the performance. No dividers, just removable tabs. The notebook keeps the music protected, easy to find, and safe from stray wind gusts. A notebook fits in my backpack. It also provides a way to neatly get blank paper into rehearsals for notes. I do agree with your objections to sheet protectors. Another problem with them is glare, especially when performing outside or with stand lights.
I also use an iPad for sheet music, mainly solos. I’m hoping the latest iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil solves the problem of quickly annotating music.
But for flipping pages when you’re playing, a ring-binder makes things much easier and “safer” (pages can’t go flying). And even when studying sheet music, a binder means that you won’t mis-order sheets or flip double-sided sheets the wrong way.