Technical limits

ByBret Pimentel

If I try to play too softly, sometimes my notes don’t respond as I would like. If I try to play too loudly, sometimes my tone or intonation suffer. I have similar limitations when it comes to things like finger or tongue speed, tone color or pitch flexibility, and more.

The way I deal with these limits is very different depending on whether I’m performing or practicing.

If I’m performing, I want to stay just within my limits. I want every note to be predictable and reliable. I want to take advantage of every bit of my dynamic range, but no more. I want to make wise, deliberate, professional-quality choices.

If I’m practicing, I want to explore those limits. Push those limits. Live just beyond those limits. It’s important to do this for couple of reasons. First, if I don’t go past those limits, I won’t know where the limits are for my upcoming performance. Second, if I’m too afraid to go past the limits in the practice room, I’ll never expand them. And if something goes wrong—a note cracks or fails to speak or is out of tune—that’s okay, it’s just practice.

Find your limits, know them well, and, in your practice space, break them.

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  • Is jazz swing triplety, or not?

    ByBret Pimentel

    The most important rhythmic concept in jazz is swing, an intentional unevenness of note lengths. In jazz swing, downbeat notes (and rests) are long, and upbeats are shorter and later. This phenomenon isn’t represented well by classical musical notation, but sometimes it is approximated like this:

    Or like this:

    The examples assign the downbeat notes a length exactly 2 times that of the upbeat notes—the triplet quarter note is twice as long as the triplet eighth, or, in other words, the swing ratio is 2:1.

    The debate over swing ratios

    The triplet method of explaining swing rhythm is unpopular with many jazz musicians and educators, who insist that a triplet-like 2:1 ratio is incorrect. Most of them, if pressed, are unable to provide a better ratio or formula. Instead they insist on the importance of listening to jazz to aurally absorb the “correct” ratio (or system of ratios, perhaps varying with tempo), or propose that swing can only properly be “felt” rather than explained.

    There are a number of things that these musicians and educators are correct about: a triplety ratio isn’t necessarily correct, and listening is important.

    What these otherwise fine folks sometimes get wrong is the idea that swing can’t be measured or analyzed. In fact, it has been extensively measured and analyzed by a number of scholars, and some useful generalizations can be made. (If you want to dig into the research, an excellent place to start is the article “Preferred swing ratio in jazz as a function of tempo” by Anders Friberg and Andreas Sundström, published in TMH-QPSR, volume 38, no. 4, 1997.)

    Some helpful swing generalizations

    • In general, yes, a swing ratio of 2:1, triplet-style, works fine for many situations, particularly at moderate tempos.
    • It’s fairly common for swing ratios to increase (something like 2.5:1 or even higher) at slower tempos. A higher ratio could be described as “swinging harder.”
    • It’s also common for swing ratios to get lower at faster tempos (like 1.5:1). This could be described as “not swinging as hard” or maybe playing “straighter.”
    • However, jazz performers’ ratios vary, depending on factors that are perhaps best summarized as “personal taste.” And, yes, the best way to develop this informed taste is by listening to and internalizing a lot of great jazz.

    It might be helpful for classically-trained musicians to consider how they interpret something like a grace note—its individual placement, length, emphasis, etc. depend on many factors, and a “swung” eighth note’s interpretation is similarly complex.

    Happy swinging!

  • How to behave at your first classical music concert, and why it’s so weird

    ByBret Pimentel

    I hope you enjoy your first classical music performance! Sometimes the etiquette can seem a little foreign. I’ll try to help you understand what to do, and why classical music fans do things that way.

    The most important thing is not to distract the audience and the performers. Some common concert etiquette “rules” include:

    • Be in your seat before the music starts. Then, stay there until intermission (if there is one) or the end of the concert.
    • Don’t talk, even at a whisper.
    • Keep cell phones silenced, screens off, and put away.
    • No snacks.
    • If you have kids who might have trouble staying still/quiet, consider leaving them at home. (Except for designated family-friendly concerts.)
    • Applaud only at the “right” times. (More on this later.)
    • Avoid unnecessary fidgeting, coughing, and anything else that makes noise.

    Why are the “rules” so strict? One reason is that classical music is usually performed in a special concert hall. Usually the music isn’t electronically amplified. The concert hall’s special design makes even the smallest sounds clear from a distance. That’s good when it’s a hushed moment in a violin solo. But it’s bad when it’s an audience member’s crinkling candy wrappers or ringtone. At an amplified rock, country, or hip-hop concert you can make noises like that, and no one will hear. But at a classical music concert people might hear those sounds even if they are far away. The performers can maybe even hear them from the stage.

    Classical music wasn’t always such a stuffy affair. Some of the music was originally performed in more boisterous settings. And there are people in classical music interested in changing the current etiquette. But for now, the (mostly-unspoken) “rules” lean toward pretty strict and formal behavior.

    And, for classical music fans, it’s one of the things they might love about it. The quiet atmosphere is a blank, unblemished canvas for the musicians to paint on. It’s a chance to hear every fine detail of a performance by highly-trained musicians. It can be immersive and meditative. You might find you enjoy it too.

    To seasoned classical music fans, a disruptive audience member (even unintentionally!) might feel like someone standing in front of the TV during a crucial moment in the big football game. And, unfortunately, they might react like a sports fan, with dirty looks, unkind words, or other rudeness. That’s bad too, because it can scare away potential new fans of classical music. But it probably comes from a place of wanting to experience the music in a pure, uninterrupted way.

    A polite audience member also shows appreciation to the performers, usually with applause (not so much yelling, whistling, “woo,” etc.). But pieces of classical music sometimes have multiple parts, with silence between. It can be tricky to know when is the right time to clap. If there’s a printed program, that might help you figure it out. But if you’re not sure it’s best to follow the lead of some of the other concertgoers. (There’s no prize for being the first one to clap.) Sometimes there’s a long silence between the end of the music and the start of the applause. Audience members may be waiting for the last note to finish echoing in the hall. And they might even wait a little longer to savor the magical moment of silence at the end. Don’t worry. The musicians will appreciate that too, and won’t take your hesitation as a lack of enthusiasm.

    If you find all this off-putting, there are ways to appreciate classical music performances from home instead. If you enjoy it you can work up to an in-person concert. Or you may be able to find free or inexpensive concerts in your area, especially if there’s a university with a music department. You can try one of those and leave at intermission if you’re bored or uncomfortable.

    Thanks for your interest in live classical music, and I hope you enjoy!

  • Three Fingering Diagram Builder tutorials

    ByBret Pimentel

    Back in the olden days (2002), I wrote a paper for a college class on Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s simultaneous playing of clarinet and saxophone on “Creole Love Call” from the 1967 album The Inflated Tear. (When I started up this blog, the paper retroactively became a blog post.) In my paper, I included two fingering charts—one for right-handed clarinet, one for left-handed saxophone—that I thought looked pretty good and only took me a few hours to make. Ah, how young I was.

    Right-handed clarinet fingering chart. Click for larger.
    Left-handed saxophone fingering chart.

    Clearly, the time has come to update these sad old charts, and the Fingering Diagram Builder makes it fast, easy, and, dare I say it?—fun. I’ll show you how it’s done, using three particularly cool features (if I do say so myself) of the FDB. We will take a look at the FDB’s custom styles, custom keywork presets, and Dropbox integration.

    Custom styles

    For now, my plan is just to create enough diagrams to replace the ones in these old fingering charts—just the fingerings I figure Kirk must have used. But I don’t think Rahsaan would want me limiting myself to just those fingerings in the future. I’d better set up this project in such a way that I can come back later with new one-handed fingerings I’ve discovered, and add them to the charts with a minimum of fuss.

    The problem is that, what with the FDB’s highly customizable diagrams, I may not remember tomorrow whether the ones I made today have lines that are “medium” or “thick” or “heavy,” or whether I sized them “small” or “tiny,” or whether I was saving the diagrams as .PNG files for onscreen use or .TIF files for better printed results. The FDB does, of course, remember my current settings between sessions all on its own, but I like to work on several projects at once (Rahsaan would approve, I think) and I’ll use the FDB’s “custom styles”  to keep each project’s configuraton a click away. Here’s how:

    1. First I will set up things just the way I want them. Currently, settings that can be saved as part of a custom style are: diagram size, line thickness, color, file naming procedure (let the FDB name them automatically, or specify each filename myself), file format, save-to location (my computer or my Dropbox), and, if I’m using Dropbox, which folder to save the files in.
    2. Once everything is just right, I’ll click over to the “Custom styles” tab in the FDB’s menu to review my choices, and select which ones I want to save.

      As you can see, I’ve set the diagrams to be small, heavy-lined, colored in gray, .PNG-formatted, and saved to Dropbox in a folder called “kirkismyhero.” I have un-checked the box for “File naming,” since I don’t want the FDB to remember that for my purposes on this project—I’ll just go ahead and use whichever system I’m already using that day.
    3. I’ll type in a name (“kirk project”) for my custom style, and click the “Save current settings” button (or press Enter).

      I’m done—that’s all there is to it. In the future, whenever I want to create more diagrams like the ones I’m making today, I can just go to the “Custom styles” tab and click on “kirk project.”

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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!

  • Confessions of a mail-order shopper

    ByBret Pimentel

    I’m not sure I can recall the last time I walked into a music store and bought something.

    I hear every so often that I should support local businesses and mom-and-pop shops, and I have to admit that this sounds vaguely like a responsible and virtuous thing to do. But here’s why I don’t—and can’t.

    1. It costs too much. Prices are inevitably higher in local stores. I understand that so-called “full-service” establishments have overhead, but so do I. If they can justify charging higher prices, it seems fair that I can justify shopping around.
    2. They don’t stock what I need. Other than a few scattered specialty shops, local music stores stock what they can sell in volume, and that’s inexpensive instruments and accessories for the beginning band market. I live in a small town, but even in the fairly large cities where I have lived, I have, more frequently than not, been unable to get what I like. A few months ago I made a two-and-a-half hour drive to go saxophone shopping with a student at a large music store in a large city. The store was large enough to have a saxophone specialist on staff. The store regularly stocks one brand of (arguably) professional-quality saxophone (and it’s not Selmer, Yamaha, Yanagisawa, or Keilwerth), and had exactly two major-brand instruments available, used. We also contacted a small saxophone specialty shop that was a little farther away, one that actually has “saxophone” in the store’s name. They had zero pro-line horns in stock.
    3. As far as I can tell, the “superior customer service” factor is largely a myth. I think most woodwind players have experienced the frustration of going into a music store and being “helped” by the heavy-metal guitarist behind the counter. And even in specialty shops, I’ve rarely found a salesperson who can answer serious questions with much more than regurgitated advertising copy or a personal opinion. And, while I don’t doubt that specialty retailers are passionate about what they do, it’s important to keep in mind that they are businesspeople and subject to motivations other than getting you the best possible product for the smallest possible price. Read More “Confessions of a mail-order shopper”

  • Did I play that “right?”

    ByBret Pimentel

    Sometimes my beginner students will play something for me, then ask, “Was that right?” What they generally seem to mean is something like, “Did I use the correct fingerings in the correct order?” A student who is slightly more advanced might ask the same question, but also wonder whether the rhythms were “correct.” A student farther along than that might take into consideration things like accurate observance of marked articulations and dynamics.

    Setting aside creative concerns and looking only at technical matters, when is a student’s playing “right?”

    I try to impress upon my advancing students that execution of musical passages isn’t really about “right” or “wrong,” but rather about degrees of rightness. To borrow an idea from manufacturing or engineering, we might think in terms of tolerances.

    In other words, for a beginner, a half-note rhythm might be “right” if the half notes are roughly twice the length of quarter notes, and a pitch of “D” might be “right” if it is closer to D than it is to D-flat or D-sharp. For a somewhat more advanced student, it might not be “right” until the rhythms can be played without wandering too far afield of a metronome and the pitches trigger the “in tune” light on a cheap electric tuner. For an even more advanced student, those tolerances wouldn’t be fine enough—we might expect the rhythmic ratios to be accurate to within a few percent, and the pitches to be accurate within so many cents.

    photo, Lewis Meyer
    photo, Lewis Meyer

    At the highest levels of musical technique, we question what tolerances are accurate enough for our audiences, or for someone with even more finely-tuned ears—a conductor, perhaps, or an audition panel, or collaborating musicians, or a record producer. Are my rhythms “right” when they are within a tolerance of a hundredth of a second? A thousandth? A ten-thousandth? Who will hear the difference if my pitches are within a tolerance of ten cents? Five cents? The more I think about it, the more I’m certain I can never really be satisfied, because as my execution gets more accurate, my ears get less tolerant.

    If your ears are currently “tolerating” your level of accuracy when you play, it may be time to listen more closely and critically. Don’t be satisfied with “right”—go for more right.

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