 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Kride
Date: 2011-07-08 17:30
Even after playing and teaching for many years I still am unclear about how to get a good structure for practicing. In other words , how good to get a passage before moving on?
I use the Spring Warmup every day for technique, where I run all my Major and Minor scales with a met at 60. Then its off to the Arpeggio and thirds exercises. But realistically I could spend all my time on just this warm up. (and sometimes wonder if I should get it up to 120 for all three?)
I give myself from 90 minutes to 2 hours on clarinet each day before I work on reading chops and improvisation work on the saxes. (where I gig and make most of my money) So, in my 2 hours, I am always fighting where to leave an exercise.
I am studying with a teacher but she is mostly into phrasing and musical aspects of playing and not so much into the intermediate things I'm talking about. In the last few monthes I have been working on the Weber Concertino, Rose 32 etudes and I play in a choro band (clips on my website).
Mostly my focus has been on getting to a playing level where I can demonstrate and mentor/teach high school kids on clarinet. Teaching has always been more gratifying than playing for me.
I have the ability to really focus and practice on a very small musical problem until its solved but I can also forget that I'm using a 57 year old body and get a lingering injury , if I overdo it.
I tell my kids they should know what they want to get done before they open the case and I can do that on sax but Clarinet has been a greater challenge than I ever thougth when I picked it up (again) some 3 years ago.
So, I guess what i'm asking is how do you set it up in your head when you approach something new. I usually sight read it or listen to someone play it and then divide up the piece into smaller parts.
I did that with the Rose in G but as I practiced it this morning I kept wondering? How fast should I try to get this? Should I play it at a comfortable level always or push it the way I usually do. Should I get just one measure up to my ending tempo and call that a day? Or work the whole thing slow but perfect?
I picked up clarinet initially because my best student on alto wanted to double on clarinet a few years ago. He quit and now I can't imagine not playing it for at least an hour a day. I enjoy playing it that much. I am not angling toward playing in a band or orchestra . I'm looking just to enjoy doing etudes , solos, or chamber music.
Any info on how YOU or your teacher recommends structuring working on a piece would be appreciated. Ksaxman.com
Ksaxman.com
Post Edited (2011-07-08 17:38)
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Author: EEBaum
Date: 2011-07-08 17:59
I'd say to spend a week (MAYBE two) at a time on any particular etude. Always learn the etude as a whole... the nice thing about etudes is that it's like a miniature piece of rep, allowing you to progress through the whole piece-learning process in a short time. See how well you can play it at the end of the week, then set it aside.
Same time frame for a scale or for a chunk of an exercise, though if you're working on Langenus staccato exercises, your goal will probably be speed and clarity, as opposed to an etude where it's more typically a matter of making it a coherent musical piece.
-Alex
www.mostlydifferent.com
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Author: Kride
Date: 2011-07-08 18:20
Alex, I went to your website. Very cool stuff you are doing. Thank god others think "outside" the box. K
Ksaxman.com
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Author: janlynn
Date: 2011-07-08 18:22
Alex - you say to spend a week or two. That makes sense. But I'm curious to know how much time to spend on what in a given practice session. do you spend 2 hours working on 3or 4 measures until it is up to speed - or half, or work on the whole thing and get it technically right but not up to speed. I would say to move on after a week or two - but what does one focus on during one practice session? How do you divide the time?
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Author: Laurelin
Date: 2011-07-08 18:55
First, work on the whole thing and get it technically right but not up to speed. Get it musically right as much as you possibly can as well.
Then, work it up to speed. Tempos on etudes are just suggestions, btw. Pick a speed that sounds good to you. I don't ever work on just 3 or 4 measures until they're up to speed, personally, but most of my reasons for that are personal. If I play something over and over again enough times, I end up feeling like I'm trying to go through a wall by banging my head against it when I should really just wander about until I find the door, so I put it away and come back to it later.
That, and it's really frustrating when you try playing the whole thing through - I'm skipping through the roses, admiring the rainbows, and then the part I didn't practice comes up and I'm reminded of thorns and rain.
So, I usually get it all right at low speed, then either pick out problem spots and practice those, until I can raise the entire speed of the piece - cause those problem spots were holding me back - or I increment my metronome up by 5 and play through it again, repeating until I find a problem, and then I go to the top of this paragraph and repeat the process.
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Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2011-07-08 20:13
"I usually sight read it or listen to someone play it and then divide up the piece into smaller parts."
At the risk of being simplistic, your question sounds overly complicated, or at least as though you're looking for an overly dogmatic or mechanistic answer. If the music you're working on is at an appropriate level, at least some part of it will be playable for you at sight. So the first task ought to be to find the spots you really need to practice - the ones that only tripped you up at sight because something was different from what you expected (it looked like a G major scale but had a D-sharp in the middle and no B in the second octave) and the ones that make you gasp. The hardest ones are then the places where you concentrate most. There are more than one procedure for working on these spots, but the point is, unless you've just described your process in too little detail, the entire piece is unlikely to need equal attention to every note (or you may have picked a piece that's just too hard).
"How fast should I try to get this? Should I play it at a comfortable level always or push it the way I usually do. Should I get just one measure up to my ending tempo and call that a day? Or work the whole thing slow but perfect?"
As to tempo, the most musical one isn't necessarily as fast as you can play, and there's usually little point in practicing much faster than the music demands. So, your approach to a vivace movement or etude has to be different from your approach to the adagio from the Mozart Concerto. There just isn't one approach to fit every piece. If it's a fast piece and I can't play any of it at a musically appropriate tempo, then my approach would be to slow it down to one I could maintain for most of the piece, then excerpt the passages that I can't do even at that tempo and work them separately. When I can plug them back into context at the general tempo, I can then try to speed the whole thing up a little at a time, taking the same approach of separating out anything I stumble on at the faster speed.
I know that there are some players who insist it's wrong to practice under tempo and instead take the smallest kernal they can play at the correct tempo and then add small bits onto either end of it, not adding more until they can play the bit at hand at tempo reliably. I've used this approach and sometimes found it useful for solving some problems in some pieces.
I'm afraid I'm not all that systematic about it, and I feel suspicious that people who are can sometimes simply waste a lot of time practicing things that don't require it. A lot depends on what kind of difficulty you have with a specific piece.
Karl
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Author: DavidBlumberg
Date: 2011-07-08 20:55
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I know that there are some players who insist it's wrong to practice under tempo and instead take the smallest kernal they can play at the correct tempo and then add small bits onto either end of it, not adding more until they can play the bit at hand at tempo reliably. I've used this approach and sometimes found it useful for solving some problems.
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I always suggest to practice under tempo first to just get the notes, then the rhythmic versions up to tempo (alternating long, short, etc) so that each note gets both a brain pause, and a muscle quick note. So I'd say use both, but the quick note version only after the slow version is perfected.
Though sometimes there are passage, or pieces which are above the player's technical level, and that's a rough time.
http://www.SkypeClarinetLessons.com
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Author: Bob Phillips
Date: 2011-07-09 04:55
Personally, there's no way I'd spend all that precious practice time on the Robert Spring "warm-up." The guy has phenomenal technique, and we might blame his virtuosity on his discipline (or obsession), but... ... really?
For fundamentals, work with things that support what you are currently interested in playing: that cleverly written gesture with the D# and no B --that ain't in my fingers either.
The best guys can play the fast Rose studies at phenomenal speeds and make them sound good. I don't think mortals need to do that.
Good advice from my teacher --start by marking the beginnings and endings of the phrases. The next step it to play them with a metronome slowly enough that you can play them without missing a single note. Then bring them up to a "performance" tempo. DUCK! There are some sneaky 1/32'nds in there that will tangle your fingers if you arrive there going too fast!
Have fun with it all and reward yourself.
Bob Phillips
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Author: EEBaum
Date: 2011-07-09 05:47
More or less what Laurelin says. First practice session, I start by going through and deciding on fingerings for everything that has multiple possibilities, finding passages that are similar to each other, etc. Then I'll plonk through a couple times at a reasonable tempo to find trouble spots if it's a more technical etude. Will play the trouble spots slowly to get the idea in my head and fingers, and maybe plonk around the passage a bit more. I might stop then... an etude tends to get 10-25 minutes in a session for me.
Further sessions, I'll tend to play it once at a manageable tempo, then work some trouble bits and practice things in chunks, then play it through once or twice faster at the end. Singing through it can also help immensely around now.
Not terribly methodical much of the time, but that's in the general neighborhood of how I approach it.
-Alex
www.mostlydifferent.com
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Author: EEBaum
Date: 2011-07-09 06:08
As an addendum, I also think it's terribly important to have musicality in mind as early as possible, spending as much attention making it a piece of music as getting it under your fingers. This is why I mentioned singing through the piece. It allows you to form a notion of what you want the piece to sound like before you can actually play it.
As an added bonus, I've found without fail that a piece is an order of magnitude easier to learn when I know what I want it to sound like. Sometimes I'll spend as much time singing through a piece as playing through it, and that time does pay off.
It doesn't have to be good singing... I'm a piss-poor singer and will wail through it horribly off key (or hum, or sometimes just do it silently to myself), but I'll have the rhythm, style, and general shape of the music down.
This helps to reinforce the process of learning an etude as a legitimate piece of music that I just happen to be playing on clarinet, more closely approximating the approach I take with significant rep (when time allows) and making it less of a technique-focused scale or study.
-Alex
www.mostlydifferent.com
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