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Re: Suggestions for practice time

Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2005-08-05 15:30

I think everyone should begin each practice session with scales and technical polishing. You're at your freshest and best then.

Robert Spring has described his monster warmup regimen at http://www.people.memphis.edu/~ggholson/unitus/clar/WARMUP.TXT.

No one but Spring could survive this, but anyone can work with total concentration on playing an exercise perfectly -- no fluffs, no blips.

Go dead slow. Set your metronome to 60 and play one note per beat. Perfect technique means getting rid of even the slightest unevenness. You can't go fast until you're perfect going slow.

At 60, you have time to visualize each movement before you make it, like an olympic diver visualizing the complete dive before doing it. Whether it involves moving one finger or all nine, your goal is to put everything into a single image, which you can trigger whenever you need it.

Getting each change exactly right improves your playing at all speeds. The changes from one note to the next happen just as quickly with the metronome at 60 as they do when it's at 200.

Do this for as long as you can hold your concentration. At first, this may be only 5 or 10 minutes. The moment you get tired and start to make mistakes, STOP and go on to something else.

For what more on this involves, see http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/read.html?f=1&i=178641&t=178641
http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/read.html?f=1&i=158256&t=158204
http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/read.html?f=1&i=160752&t=160676

Ken Shaw

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Suggestions for practice time new

missclarinetist

2005-08-04 15:07