photograph of flutes near a cup of coffee

Q&A: Woodwind doubling advice

ByBret Pimentel

A couple of weeks ago I put out a call for questions, in honor of today being the fifteenth anniversary of this blog. A bunch of the questions boiled down to: what advice do you have on woodwind doubling? Here are a few answers:

  • Be a beginner on each instrument. Take the time to work through beginner materials (starting probably with pages of whole notes!), scales, and so forth. Resist the temptation to dive in on advanced or even intermediate repertoire.

  • Get comfortable with a long timeline. You can’t reach the highest levels of playing on a bunch of instruments in the same time that your peers are reaching the highest levels on single instruments, unless you’re a lot more talented than me. And you can’t afford to buy a section’s worth of top-quality instruments in that same time frame, either, unless you’re a lot richer than me.

  • Prioritize what motivates you. Lots of aspiring doublers seem very concerned about what instrument they “should” learn next. There’s no roadmap, and it’s hard to predict what gigs might come your way in the future. So you might as well devote your time, effort, and money to whichever instrument you feel most excited about adding to your collection.

  • Be skeptical of instruments, accessories, method books, etc. that are marketed as “for doublers.” If you want to play clarinet like a clarinetist, use what the clarinetists use.

Some other readers asked about the “secrets” to practicing multiple instruments.

As far as I know there aren’t any; if you want to play three or five instruments well, plan to put in three or five times as many hours. I’ve posted previously about an approach to an instrument rotation for practicing, but it really depends on you particular set of instruments, abilities, and goals.

Another reader asked how hard it was for me to learn secondary instruments.

Beyond general musicianship skills (like reading music or blending into an ensemble), I don’t think there’s a lot of useful cross-training effect. In other words, no instrument is a good shortcut to learning another, at least not learning it well. But I do think there are underlying concepts that can be useful for thinking of the woodwind family and its techniques as part of a unified whole. (I address those concepts in my book Woodwind Basics, or sprinkled throughout the last 15 years of blog posts.)

Someone else asked about when to get serious about woodwind doubling (high school? undergraduate studies? graduate school?), which is something I’ve opined about previously.

Everyone’s circumstances are different, but for my undergraduate music majors (and for me when I was in that stage) there are a couple of things that need to happen in their development: gain a certain level of mastery at operating the instrument itself, and develop a certain maturity of musicianship. While these things should be in development concurrently, achieving the first is ultimately a prerequisite to achieving the second. (You can’t fully execute a mature musical idea if you’re held back by technical deficiencies.) I think it can be a fun side pursuit to pick up an additional instrument or two in high school or college, but I think many people won’t be ready to pursue professional-level playing on multiple instruments until graduate school, and then won’t achieve it within the time frame of a graduate degree.

Another reader asked questions about pursuing a career in playing in musical theater orchestras: is it worthwhile to go on to graduate school? How do you get more gigs (cold-call theaters? take lessons with Broadway players)?

Graduate degrees (or any degrees) aren’t necessary for just about any kind of gig work, although they can provide useful training to improve your skills, gain some experience, and network with fellow musicians.

I would say don’t call theaters. Venues are unlikely to hire musicians directly. Instead, you want to connect with the musical directors or contractors who are likely hiring the orchestra members. Direct outreach to those folks might be effective in some cases. But a lot of musical directors, if they call their usual players and find them unavailable, will ask them for recommendations, so the musicians already playing the gigs you want are both your competition and your best chances at getting hired. Taking lessons is a possible way to get a foot in the door. Sometimes just catching them after a show, introducing yourself, complimenting their playing, and handing over a business card can be enough to get you on their radar.

Additionally, a career exclusively playing musicals would be an oddity. Most woodwind players who do musicals do lots of kinds of gigs. Develop your skills, build your network, and see what possibilities come your way.

Someone else asked a question about the history of multiple woodwinds degree programs.

This isn’t something I have dug into enough to answer with any confidence, but it would make a nice thesis or dissertation for someone working on a multiple woodwinds graduate degree. I do know that I’ve heard lots of folks confidently make conflicting claims about which degree programs were first or biggest or best, or about how the number or configuration or quality of degree programs has changed.

Thanks for the thoughtful questions!

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  • Homemade EWI stand

    ByBret Pimentel

    Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no cost to you.

    There are a few stands commercially available for the Akai EWI, and lots of folks have made their own or repurposed other items. I wanted one that was inexpensive and compatible with the Hercules stands I mostly use these days, and decided to try the DIY route. I came up with something workable but not perfect, so I’m sharing my finished project in case anyone is inspired to improve upon my design (please share!).

    I built mine mostly from 3″ (~7.5cm) plumbing pipe and fittings. (I’m including some product links in case they are helpful, but mostly I was able to buy these things locally for much cheaper.)

    I bought a 2′ (~.6m) length of pipe, but only ended up needing half of it.
    Cut mostly with a hacksaw, and refined a little with some files and sandpaper. Good enough.
    3″ end cap, with a hole drilled to fit the bolt. The bolt is 3/8-16 (imperial), which fits the peg sockets in my Hercules stands.
    Disk cut from EPS foam (“styrofoam”) and hot-glued into place. This is where the end of the EWI will rest. (The pipe piece is shown here inserted into the 22.5° elbow.) I picked foam because it is lightweight and easy to cut to shape.
    Bolt secured with 5-minute epoxy.
    This nut will help lock the stand in place on the Hercules base, sort of.
    I didn’t bother gluing the parts together, since they fit pretty tightly anyway and I’m considering this a prototype. Some paint…
    …and some craft foam, secured with spray adhesive.
    Works ok.

    It’s more stable than it looks, even on this small Hercules base, because its center of gravity is so low. The end cap and elbow are heavier PVC while the taller part is made of lighter foam core pipe. As always, don’t leave instruments on stands any farther than you can sprint to catch them falling over.

    Things I like about the stand:

    • It was cheap and not hard to make. The worst of it was cutting and shaping the foam core pipe, and someone with cooler tools than I have could probably make quick and accurate work of it.
    • Does work with the Hercules stands I already have. If you can figure out what bolt thread to use, you could easily adapt this to other commercial stand bases.
    • The instrument just rests in the stand, no clips or straps to unhook. Plus the whole upper key “stack” is exposed 360°, so the EWI is easy to grab even during a quick instrument switch.
    • No interference with any of the power/line/MIDI jacks.

    Things that I don’t especially like:

    • On the 3-peg Hercules base shown, the stand has to be oriented as shown to stand up properly, which puts the EWI a little bit in the way of using other pegs on the stand. It works better on one of the larger Hercules stands, like the saxophone or bass clarinet stands.
    • Since the stand isn’t symmetrical like a typical flute/clarinet peg (because it leans 22.5°), it doesn’t always work to just screw it all the way into the base—it may end up leaning in an inconvenient or unstable direction. The nut helps lock it in place when it’s leaning the right way, but it’s fussy and not as secure as I would like (the stand tends to rotate a little if I bump it wrong).
    • It’s pretty chunky. I made a previous attempt to build this from 2″ pipe, which would work okay except that the EWI’s side keys protrude too much. (I did consider sticking with the 2″ pipe and making little cutaways for the keys, which could still be a possibility.)
    • The plastic-specific spray paint I used didn’t turn out well. I had trouble getting an attractive finish, and the paint tends to scratch off without too much effort. I’m not sure if the paint just isn’t well suited to these specific plastics, or if maybe it’s because I applied it in the extreme humidity of a Mississippi summer.

    Anyway, this is a usable though imperfect design, and may be a jumping-off point for future versions by me or you.

  • |

    Planning breaths

    ByBret Pimentel

    Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no cost to you.

    When learning a new étude or repertoire piece, it’s common to practice at first with focus on the notes, often playing them at a slow tempo and/or divided into chunks. This is a good approach for mastering the needed finger technique, but it may neglect one of the crucial parts of a performance: breathing.

    In some music, it’s obvious where to breathe. But in a page of nonstop sixteenth notes, it’s harder to find the right places, and to execute them gracefully. Adding to the problem, I find that when I am nervous or playing under pressure, my breathing is one of the first things that falls apart: I start breathing in unaccustomed places, or skipping breaths that I know I really need.

    I recommend establishing a breathing plan early in the process of learning new music. That way you can practice the breaths just like you practice the notes—they become a part of your muscle memory, and will happen automatically even under pressure.

    The first step for a wind player should be to mark in the musical breaths, the ones that demarcate phrases. These are breaths that you will take (or possibly fake) regardless of your need for oxygen, because they serve the music. How exactly to do that is beyond the scope of this post, but here are a few quick tips:

    • Beware breathing at bar lines. They look like nice stopping points, but often don’t make musical sense. (They are there only for your convenience in counting.)
    • Background in music theory helps a lot, but you can also use your ears to help you figure out intuitively where a phrase comes to rest, or steal ideas from a good recording.
    • To go deeper, consider studying phrasing, perhaps from a book like David McGill’s. (Put that one on your wish list if you haven’t read it already!)

    Once the breaths required by the music are in place, you may decide you need more, perhaps because you haven’t worked the piece up to its full tempo yet (or because the piece isn’t written with sensitivity to your desire to survive). Mark in-between “survival” breaths as needed, perhaps in parentheses so you remember which ones they are. Put them in the best places you can find, and execute them as musically as you can, but as your tempo increases you may be able to skip them. If so, be sure to erase them so your marked-in plan stays up to date.

    Choosing places for survival breaths is a trial-and-error process. Mark some in and give them a try, then adjust as needed. If you feel uncomfortable while playing, this can lead to panicked decisions on stage, so choose breaths for your comfort.

    Particularly for the oboe, you may find you need some “breaths” where you can actually exhale stale air. Mark these clearly, too.

    Always update your pencil marks if you decide to change the plan at all, so that your plan is 100% clear and you can practice it in a consistent way. You can change your mind later, as long as you change your marks.

    To summarize:

    • Start early in the process of learning a new piece.
    • Mark in musical breaths, which you will observe even if you’re capable of playing longer without stopping.
    • Mark in survival breaths, if necessary. Use trial and error to get them right.
    • Practice the breaths just as diligently as you practice the notes.
    • As you get closer to the performance, you might alter the breathing plan as your interpretation evolves, or as you no longer need some of the survival breaths.
    • Be strict about keeping the markings current, and about playing just what is marked.

    Well-planned, thoroughly-practiced breaths contribute to a relaxed, musical performance.

  • Breath support, register breaks, and resistance

    ByBret Pimentel

    A few months ago I wrote this about the clarinet:

    If breath support, embouchure, and voicing are correctly established, then Crossing the Dreaded Break ceases to be a Thing. It’s just another note: a moment ago you were playing B-flat, and now you are playing B-natural. As long as your fingers get where they are supposed to go, then that’s all there is to it. Personally, I don’t even use the word “break” with a beginning student—there’s no need to get them all uptight about what really is a non-event.

    My point was that crossing a register break is merely a fingering issue, and shouldn’t be turned into a big to-do about embouchures and equipment purchases and so forth. And I stand by that, but there is something I glossed over a bit that perhaps ought to be revisited in more detail, and that applies to register break crossings on all woodwind instruments.

    The point that I want to return to is that of breath support. If it, and some other basic tone-production matters, are “correctly established,” then break-crossing is indeed nothing more than a new fingering or two. But assuming that breath support is 100% correct with a student just reaching the break-crossing stage is often a mistake.

    Each note on the clarinet (and on any woodwind) has a certain level of resistance—that is to say, it requires a certain amount of air pressure to get the air column vibrating. Some notes are more resistant, and some are less resistant. As a sort of general oversimplification, we might assume that a long-tube note (with more toneholes closed) is more resistant than a short-tube note (with more toneholes open). Other factors do apply, of course: the size of the toneholes, whether the fingering is a “forked” fingering, and more, but let’s isolate tube length for the moment. So for the clarinet, having a break between A-sharp and B, we would expect to see this kind of resistance change while crossing the break:

    Taller grey bar = higher resistance
    Taller grey bar = higher resistance

    (Note that the bar graphs here are strictly illustrative and not based on any real measurements.)

    A beginner who is accustomed to the lower resistance of a few chalumeau-register notes might have intuitively developed just enough breath support to make those notes respond. When he or she attempts to cross the break, the breath support isn’t enough to overcome the increased resistance: Read More “Breath support, register breaks, and resistance”

  • Not making your own double reeds

    ByBret Pimentel

    I’ve posted a few times over the past year about making double reeds (cf. here, here, and here), and I maintain that this is the truest way to abiding oboe/bassoon satisfaction. If you consider those instruments to be serious parts of what you do as a musician, you need to learn to make—or at least skillfully adjust—reeds.

    But, frankly, not everyone is up to the challenge.

    The basic reedmaking process can be learned within a few lessons, but developing the skills well enough to make good reeds consistently can take years, and most reedmakers will continue to develop and modify their approach over a lifetime.

    Reedmaking is expensive, too. A set of the most basic tools for making reeds from preprocessed (gouged, shaped, and, for bassoon, profiled) cane costs as much as several boxes of clarinet or saxophone reeds, and the cane doesn’t come cheap, either. If you want the control of doing your own gouging, shaping, and so forth, the additional equipment may cost you nearly as much as a pro-line clarinet.

    And, of course, reedmaking takes time. I’ve heard the “rule of thumb” that an oboist, for example, should spend an hour making reeds for every hour he or she spends practicing. I don’t know that I agree entirely, but you get the idea of what kind of commitment is involved.

    So, if I’ve now talked you out of making your own reeds, what are your options?
    Read More “Not making your own double reeds”

  • Preparing for a multiple woodwinds recital

    ByBret Pimentel

    Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no cost to you.

    For over a decade, all of my solo recital performances have been on multiple woodwind instruments. Last month I performed (twice) a recital program with pieces played on flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and three saxophones. Here are some of the things I do to prepare.

    multiple-woodwinds-recital_mini

    • Practice the physical changes. I opened my program with an oboe piece, and followed that with a flute piece with a delicate entrance. As the recital approached, I made sure to follow each oboe practice session by practicing that flute entrance, to be sure I could do it under those conditions. Something that didn’t work very well: after the oboe, flute, and bassoon pieces, my hands and jaw tended to be a little tense for clarinet playing. If I were preparing this recital again, I would bump the clarinet to the end of my practice sessions to work on playing relaxed even when fatigued.
    • Practice the mental changes. If I can put myself into the right place mentally for the instrument I’m about to play, my physical technique seems to fall into place. Sometimes I will do some rotating warmups—play, for instance, some scales on one instrument, and then immediately play them on another, and another. That gives me a chance to practice shifting mental gears. Once I have my program order set, I also make liberal use of Post-it Notes to give myself reminders between pieces: “take a moment to relax embouchure,” “keep breath support strong in low register,” “clear moisture from octave vent.”
    • Make thorough checklists. With seven instruments on my most recent recital, I surely would have forgotten something—a bassoon seat strap, a case of clarinet reeds, a piece of sheet music. I made a detailed list and used it to set up for a dress rehearsal. Sure enough, there were a few things that hadn’t made it onto the list, and I was able to retrieve those items and add them to the list before the first public performance. When I traveled a few hours for another performance, I was confident that I had everything I needed.
    • Use good stands. Good ones are sturdy and make it easy to set down or pick up an instrument without fuss. Since I played flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon on the first half without leaving the stage, having some good stands kept things moving smoothly and let me stay focused.
    • Do thorough warmups. As the performance approaches, it’s tempting to practice in panic mode, and skip over things like warmups. I always play much better if I do my warmups faithfully all the way up to the day of the performance. I find that if I warm up slowly and thoroughly on each instrument before the performance (this might take a few hours with multiple instruments! I usually do it in the morning), then I’m able to switch between them more easily.

    Break a leg!

  • Clarinet/saxophone doubling and “loose” and “tight” embouchures

    ByBret Pimentel

    I have been watching with dismay some recent online message board conversations about clarinetists picking up the saxophone and saxophonists picking up the clarinet. I am of course a big supporter of doubling, but much of the discussion seems to center around embouchure, and the language used is not only misleading but also vaguely pejorative. Clarinetists seem to regard the saxophone embouchure as “loose,” a term I think most saxophonists would take exception to, and saxophonists consider the clarinet embouchure to be “tight,” a concept I would expect clarinetists to shy away from.

    Photo, Adrian Midgley
    Photo, Adrian Midgley

    I am not aware of any difference in looseness/tightness between the embouchures of the two instrument families, and can’t think of a reason why there should be one. In both cases, the embouchure—the lips and surrounding facial muscles—need to be “tight” enough to form a non-leaking seal around the mouthpiece and reed, and “loose” enough to allow the reed to vibrate at the desired amplitude (volume). The most common looseness/tightness problem I see in teaching both instruments is excessive tightness, often used in an attempt to compensate for pitch stability problems caused by poor breath support, and resulting in sluggish response, restricted dynamic range, and stuffy tone. Read More “Clarinet/saxophone doubling and “loose” and “tight” embouchures”

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