The Clarinet BBoard

Re: Kroepsch 416 Revisited

Author: kdk  Date:   2014-12-29 07:44 CarlT wrote: > I'm thinking that these are so good that I might want to devote > the bulk of my practice sessions (total practice time of about > 1 to 1-1/4 hours per day) to these. These are good exercises, but I can't myself get up any kind of enthusiasm for making them the primary focus of anyone's practice routine. YMMV, but for me, it would be important to include more variety and more "real" music. These are certainly more rewarding - and fun - to play than straight scales or arpeggios, but in essence that's what they are - scales and arpeggios dressed up to be more varied. They are still very short spurts of technique with no real compositional content. > Do you think a reasonable > goal would be to try to get in one exercise per day, so that I > could be through book 1 (1st 167) in 6 months or so, given my > practice time limitations as stated? All of them aren't by any means equal. Some are more demanding than others, and that becomes even more true as the key moves away from C major. One-a-day might be hard to keep to consistently. You might take two or three chosen for different characteristics (based on a scale, on an arpeggio, a combination with added chromatic embellishments) - or maybe an easy one, a little harder one and one of the more difficult ones - to work on concurrently for a few days. You could swap out the easy ones more often and keep working on the harder ones until you're comfortable with them. Another valuable way to use material like this is to come back to the ones you've learned in order to stay fluent with them once you've gone on (exactly as we all do with scales and basic arpeggios). > > This would mean that I could start the practice session off at > a very slow tempo, and I would hope, within the hour or so, I > would have the exercise up to a reasonable speed, so that the > next day I could proceed to the next exercise. > This really depends on the specific number you're working with. And if you do perfect an exercise in one session and then can't play it the next day if you try to review it, you really haven't learned it. So, again, one-a-day may turn out to be a plan that's easier thought of than executed. > Oh, I also have community band music much of the year that I > would have to spend at least some of my practice time on. > The band music is valuable because there's an end goal of performance involved, but it has the disadvantage of not turning over very often, so you can get stale on it. The exercises - whether Kroepsch or something else - can go a long way toward developing technical fluency, but don't build a sense of extended structure. It isn't a bad idea to find some easy music in some kind of collection that's easier than your current level and spend just a few minutes sight-reading something each day. Even reading the melody (usually the soprano line) in the hymns from a church hymnal or the melodies in a supplemental book of any of the band methods on the market can provide a sense of structure while letting you relax and just enjoy the sound of your instrument. Playing doesn't always need to be hard work. Karl

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