Time-crunch vs. long-term practicing

ByBret Pimentel

My approach to practicing has to adapt to deadlines. Sometimes the deadlines come up fast, and there isn’t time to make everything as perfect as I would like. Other times I have plenty of preparation time and want to make the best use of it.

Suppose the music I’m working on has one or two especially challenging spots, and I know I could put many hours into trying to perfect them. If I get bogged down trying to make those couple of spots perfect on a tight deadline, I might fail to adequately prepare the rest. It’s a better strategy to make sure I’m ready to play 98% of the music at tempo, make a reasonable effort with the remaining 2%, and hope for the best.

But if I have plenty of time to prepare, that approach can backfire. Getting the 2% “good enough” early in the process may mean compromises that I have to undo later. I’ll have a better final result if I’m not in a hurry to bring the tough spots up to standard. Instead, I give them time to settle deeply into muscle memory before pushing the tempo. I practice difficult spots for a few minutes every day, instead of cramming.

Think carefully about your practice approach, and adapt as needed. Good luck!

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  • Go ahead and use a fakebook

    ByBret Pimentel

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

    I felt a lot of stress and pressure during my years in college and graduate school, about jazz and Learning Tunes. Nobody who is anybody uses a fakebook! You have to Learn the Tunes! Do you know All the Tunes? Why don’t you know More Tunes?

    My teachers told me I would never make it as a jazz player unless I knew hundreds of tunes by heart. Melodies, chord progressions, and “standard” intros and outros. And since I’m a reed player, I would need to know them in at least a couple of keys. I tried, but I found it pretty daunting. My teachers seemed to think that meant I was doing it wrong, in some way they could not specify.

    And besides, fakebooks are bad! They have mistakes, unlike other kinds of sheet music! Plus, the fakebook version of that tune might not be the true and authentic secret original version, but merely a common and tasteful reworking! And if you’re looking at a fakebook, you’re trapped within the confines of the printed page, literally unable to play anything creative!

    My university degrees are in “classical” performance, and in multiple instruments, so jazz has never been my sole concentration. If I had done more focused and advanced study of jazz, I suppose I would have had to Learn All the Tunes, or flunk out and fail to make it in the business.

    But it was never my goal to be the next big name in jazz. I love to play jazz music, but I’m quite content to do my best impressions of my favorite players, take modest solos, and yes, use a fakebook. Of the musicians in the world who play jazz at some level, very few are recording on Blue Note or headlining at the Village Vanguard.

    For hobbyist or part-time jazz players, a fakebook can be very useful. Using a fakebook on a gig means I can just play the tunes the group wants to play, rather than slinking away in shame at my failure to Know them All. It means we’re all on the same page, so to speak, about keys, chord changes, forms, intros, and endings. The practicality of low stress and high versatility wins out over the ideal of never looking at a music stand. I can Learn Tunes by playing them frequently in a relaxed atmosphere. And if I forget a chord or a melody note, I can fall back on my musical skill of reading notation.

    Is learning tunes by heart preferable? Probably, ideally. If you’re in a jazz studies degree program, or trying to break into the top-level jazz scene in a major market, you may indeed find it necessary to memorize a whole lot of tunes as quickly as you can. But for the rest of us, there’s no shame in using a fakebook.

  • Make your musical lines sing and dance

    ByBret Pimentel

    In “classical” and related kinds of music, we are often asked to make our instrumental music sing or dance. In fact, most music of this type should do one or the other.

    Singing-type music may be labeled as such with markings like cantabile or vocal-ish titles like “Aria” or “Chanson.” Or it may be characterized by notational features like long, slurred lines. In any case, playing through the melody, you can probably intuit whether it is song-like (or dance-like).

    To give your musical line a singing quality, focus on making long, smooth, elegantly-shaped phrases. They should sync with the underlying pulse without drawing attention to it.

    Dancing music might have titles named after dances, like “Waltz” or “Bourée” or “Rumba.” Or they might include high-energy articulations like accents or staccato.

    To make your lines dance, bring out the meter, by creating a sense that the beats are not all equal. This might be indicated in the notation with accents (dynamic, agogic, tonic, etc.). Or it might require some brief research into the kind of dance: for example, a quick search will show you that a Sarabande is generally in a slow three, with stress on beat 2. Some dances have rhythmic characteristics like clave that puts stress on certain subdivisions of beats.

    If your music seems to have an unspecified dance-like quality, start by bringing out the typical hierarchy of beats: in 4/4, for example, beat 1 is the strongest, beat 3 the next-strongest, beats 2 and 4 less strong, and the “ands” weaker still.

    It’s common for a multi-movement piece to have both song-like and dance-like movements, and even for both approaches to appear within a single movement or short piece.

    Here’s just one excellent example of singing vs. dancing in instrumental music. Listen to ToniMarie Marchioni and Jacob Campbell play the beginning of the first movement (“Aria”) of the Dutilleux oboe sonata, and notice the smooth, shaped, singing oboe lines that overlay the pulse without emphasizing it:

    Now skip ahead to the beginning of the second movement (“Scherzo: Vif”) and notice how the oboe line is accented, bringing the pulse to the forefront in a dance-like way:

    The next time you pick up your instrument, ask yourself whether the music should sing or dance, and what you can do to make that happen.

  • |

    Persistence

    ByBret Pimentel

    A famous big-shot clarinet professor told me once that I would never really be a clarinetist.

    He was quite possibly correct.

    But for now I’m still at it.

  • Paul Hindemith and the Trio Op. 47: Steps toward a mature style

    ByBret Pimentel

    Paul Hindemith was born in Hanau, Germany, in 1895. Unlike most of his composer contemporaries, who came from the privileged classes, his origins were humble ones.

    Hindemith’s father, Robert, was a manual laborer and amateur zither player, who, despite a necessarily tight budget, saw that Paul and his siblings received musical training. Robert Hindemith raised his children with strict discipline, especially in terms of their music education. He took them to the local opera house, often on foot, and quizzed them on the way home, rewarding unsatisfactory answers with spankings. Later, Herr Hindemith organized his children into the Frankfurt Children’s Trio. Guy Rickards suggests that it was “despite” this “exploitative” upbringing that Paul and his brother Rudolf both went on to successful musical careers. Read More “Paul Hindemith and the Trio Op. 47: Steps toward a mature style”

  • How are you going to improve this?

    ByBret Pimentel

    I’ve blogged previously about getting my students to give more than pat answers about how they think their playing sounds:

    It’s an ongoing battle to get my students to listen more deeply than that. Was the articulation “not good” because it started with air noise instead of tone? Because it was accompanied by an unwanted percussive sound? Was the articulation technique perfect but you failed to follow the composer’s markings? Or was it something else?

    The next step is getting students to make a clear, actionable plan to improve. That conversation often goes like this:

    Me: Okay, what are you going to do to improve that aspect of your—

    Student [rolling eyes]: Practice.

    Me: Well, obviously. But how are you going to prac—

    Student [sighing]: Keep practicing until I get it right.

    Me: No, I mean what specific practice tech—

    Student [through clenched teeth]: Use a metronome.

    In other words, the “plan” is usually to suffer for a few hours in the practice room, and maybe, against all odds, emerge with the problem magically fixed.

    But practicing without a plan rarely produces the desired results. I’m much more optimistic about the student’s success if they can tell me something like: “Well, I need to slow this way down, slow enough that I can get it exactly right, and use the metronome to make sure I’m not rushing. When I can play this passage with the correct articulations 10 times in a row without mistakes, then I’ll inch the metronome up by a couple of clicks and try again.” That’s a clear commitment to a tried-and-true method. It will probably be a much more productive and satisfying practice session, which means the student is more likely to put in some more good hours the next day.

    Less-experienced students might have a smaller repertoire of practice techniques, and I consider it a lesson-time priority to teach them more of those techniques. Trial and error in the practice room will help them refine these techniques, and determine which ones are most effective for them.

    Productive practicing requires identifying an area to improve, selecting a technique (or series of techniques) to apply to it, evaluating progress, adjusting the practice technique as needed, and noting what does and doesn’t work for future practice sessions.

  • Thinking through scales

    ByBret Pimentel

    My university woodwind students have to pass a scale exam as one of the requirements to progress in their degree program. They have to be able to play major scales and three forms of minor scales, plus arpeggios, through the “full range” of the instrument, from memory.

    Many of my students learned their major scales in their school band programs, well enough to have most of them in muscle memory. But some of them are less familiar with the minor scales.

    It can be a little overwhelming to keep track of 48 different scales. With plenty of accurate repetitions my students can get to the point of muscle memory for all 48. But in the meantime sometimes they get stuck trying to remember the right notes for the next scale, or get mixed up and play the wrong one.

    I find it very helpful to have a mental roadmap for thinking through the next scale, and especially so if I can relate it to something I already have in muscle memory. My map might go something like this, but there are lots of possibilities:

    • C major scale: already in muscle memory, little or no “thinking” needed. As I play, notice the first, third, and fifth scale degrees, so I can use them in the next step.
    • C major arpeggio: first, third, and fifth degrees of the scale I just played.
    • C natural minor scale: since it’s a minor scale, I’m going to lower the third from E to E-flat. And E-flat major is the relative key to C minor, and I have E-flat major in my muscle memory, so I can play that same pattern of notes without too much thought.
    • C harmonic minor scale: now that I’ve got C natural minor under my fingers, I just need to change one note to produce the harmonic minor: B-flat becomes B-natural.
    • C melodic minor, ascending: this one is just like the C major scale I played a minute ago, but lower the E to E-flat.
    • C melodic minor, descending: this one is just like the C natural minor scale (related to E-flat major) that I played a minute ago. Notice the first, third, and fifth scale degrees, so I can use them in the next step.
    • C minor arpeggio: first, third, and fifth degrees of the scale I just played.

    Another approach that appeals to some of my students is to think in terms of scale degrees: start with the major scale that’s already in muscle memory, and remember that for, say, harmonic minor, you have to lower the third and the sixth.

    Having an organized way of thinking through the scales helps prevent the paralysis and overwhelm of trying to conjure up the whole scale from nothing. When my students take their exam, nobody minds if they take a few moments to think before they start playing, but getting stuck mid-scale would be a problem.

    As you get better and faster at thinking through the scales, a good way to push yourself is to use a metronome, and limit yourself to a pre-set amount of time before the next scale starts. Maybe a certain number of beats (or, ultimately, zero beats) before jumping into the next one. If that doesn’t go well in the practice space, you know that particular transition is a problem spot, and can reorganize your efforts accordingly.

    Happy practicing!

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