 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: WhitePlainsDave
Date: 2015-02-05 19:46
Particularly as it relates to the apps that appear on smart phones which offer metronome features, has anyone come across one that allows the user to program the metronome to increase by X number beats per minute after Y number of beats?
Case in point. While focusing practice time on the basics (e.g. scales and variations thereof), I find it useful to first approach the exercise at a easily manageable tempo. I'm forever stopping to increase the metronome's tempo by a beat or two per minute and repeating.
It might be nice to have that done for me automatically.
Thanks in advance.
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2015-02-05 20:22
My old timer's advise is to......PRACTICE S-L-O-W-L-Y period.
If you need something extra to do while you practice slowly, make sure you are always thinking the names of the notes. You build technique by hearing, feeling all the relationships done PERFECTLY. And how do you always play perfectly?
PRACTICE SLOWLY.
You can try every now and then to test at speed (once you 'own' slow practice, moving tempo up is a "shift" not necessarily an incremental one)
...............Paul Aviles
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Author: WhitePlainsDave
Date: 2015-02-05 21:55
Paul:
I respect what you say. Still more, from prior threads where you've discussed this idea of slow play, I beleive that you acknowledge the inevitable need to at some point bring pieces to performance tempo.
I too am a fan of playing things slower, at least at first, than I can comfortable take them at. This slow play allows me to examine slight deviations in my technique, that I couldn't notice at fast speeds, that might rear their ugly head once tempo is increased, like (one of my shortcomings) accidently actuating the L4 G#/C# lever when playing notes with fingers down with the right hand.
Actually, in this case, good ole ring finger L3's the culprit. He can angle and stray. ![[wink]](http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/smileys/smilie3.gif)
Towards your end, I recomment apps like iLift, which allow users to control pitch and tempo of music they hear on their smart phones independently. And on the evalutator's side of the audition table, I think I'd rather hear "it" done slowly and correctly, than at tempo and sloppy. If nothing else, in the latter case, I never know at what speed the auditioner could have done it correctly, which may be twice as fast as the other competitor who did it slowly and properly.
So, with acknowledgement of your opinions and wisdom sir, let me say I am more of the, if I may, Kathy Williams-Devries https://www.youtube.com/user/kathywilliams76 and Julian Bliss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUVNYVKA0z4 school of thought in only raising metronome speed slowly, and only after consistently accurate results at slower speeds. As Kathy says, and I paraphrase, by increasing the metronome at a rate of 1 BPM after each [series of] successful play(s), you don't even notice the increase.
And if yesterday I got the speed from 40 BPM to 60, tomorrow I'll start again at 43.
I think, if you haven't seen it Paul, you'd like Julian's talk here, which lends into both our schools of thought. Julian says, "practice slowly, INCREDIBLY slowly," among other things here. Coming from a guy who does Flight of the Bumble Bee with speeds only exceeded by mastery, it says a lot.
Ed: thank you for the reference. I will look into it.
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2015-02-06 02:07
In fact my reading of what Julian Bliss says is precisely that of speeding up over the course of years, not a few clicks every few minutes. And at very least he early on in that video refers to hearing results after the course of months of slow practice.
I still see the 'couple clicks' method as slowly getting used to less and less accurate play.
...............Paul Aviles
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Author: WhitePlainsDave
Date: 2015-02-06 06:14
Paul:
My reference to slowly speeding up, as indicated above was meant for a couple of measures out of an etude book, that focuses on some variation of a scale. It might be 10 measures in length, that an app would let me program to increase the metronome by 1 BPM, every 10 measures.
I think Mr. Bliss was talking more about performance pieces, particularly here Flight of the Bumble Bee.
Still more, like I said, Mr. Bliss said things that supported to some extent your school of thought about taking things slowly, both in tempo and over time, at around 1:45, even if he did concede that you do gradually speed the metronome up at around 2:10, my point.
This gradual speed up runs not only contrary to your advice, but I can't help but think that your advise runs contrary to itself. In the thread "Slowly make technical haste" you advocate to always practice slowly, and that doing so makes the shift to playing at tempo easier.
Here you write that you can in fact practice at tempo now and then, and that gains are made in shifts.
I could put this in my own words, better I'll use Karl's:
"there...must be...an intersection between JUST PRACTICE SLOW. ALWAYS PLAY PERFECTLY and "start slow AND then take up the tempo a few clicks..."
=======
From every experience I have ever encountered as teacher and student of music, the metaphor of "walk perfectly...walk perfectly...walk perfectly, now run!" is a receipe for failure. There may be applicability to this paradigm in certain targeted forms of weight training for example, but as a general rule, tempo must be increased in a linear fashion, without as you point out sacrificing technique. The line may not be perfectly straight, and like you, I am all about advocating patience, but I don't think it's your spike either.
When I have to perform something, and I know a lot of people who do this as well, I'm going to learn it perfectly faster than required tempo: sort of a "running with ankle weights" approach to training.
I'm curious. How many people think that learning a piece like Flight of the Bumble Bee comes by flawless repetitive practice at 40 BPM, and then occasionally taking it at 130 BPM? (If my tempo is off, my point isn't).
Paul, you don't teach driver's ed, do you? In fairness though, this is clarinet play we're talking about.
Sir, I respect your right to your beliefs, I do not subscribe to them, I suspect you don't subscribe to mine, and I hope you respect my right to differ.
Taking something from extremely slow to tempo now and then, knowing you can't play it at tempo, is worse than a waste of time in my book. It's downright counterproductive.
Post Edited (2015-02-06 16:58)
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Author: locke9342
Date: 2015-02-06 09:39
sound corset for android has this feature (unaware of an ios version)
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Author: tylerleecutts
Date: 2015-02-06 21:17
My Quartz metronome has the little dial that makes it really easy to increase the tempo. I only wish it could be more incremental.
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Author: brycon
Date: 2015-02-06 21:58
Quote:
My old timer's advise is to......PRACTICE S-L-O-W-L-Y period.
This is another clarinet board cliche that needs to be put to rest.
Slow practice is great, but as an all-encompassing practice technique (as in, "practice slowly period."), it can also be a huge waste of time. Slow practice shouldn't be your only strategy (or even your main strategy) for coming to terms with a difficult passage.
From a practical standpoint, practicing slowly takes up way too much time. You need to have faith in your own abilities: if you have a demanding performance schedule, don't waste valuable practice time by slow repetitions of a passage that you can already play reasonably well. (I suspect that an excess of practice time--or poor time management skills--has lead to the fetishizing of slow practice: it's Parkinson's law in action.)
Secondly, all of us have technical limitations, which, in the short-term, will not be surmounted by slow practice. If you can't single tongue sixteenth notes faster than 120, no amount of slow practice will get you prepped to play Beethoven 4 in a few weeks. In my own practicing, I've found that pushing against these limits has been helpful (for example, practicing the solo from the finale of Beethoven 4 by playing chunks of one or two beats at tempo).
Thirdly, if you always practice things at a tempo that allows you to execute the passage perfectly, you don't really know where the difficulties lie. If, however, I play the solo from Beethoven 4 at tempo and record myself, I might find that the beat with the grace note is the source of my problems. So rather than wasting my time practicing the other beats at a slower speed, I can devise practice techniques to remedy the exact problem.
Here, I should make a distinction in types of practicing: I may have long-term goals (playing all my scales at 140 slurred and articulated, three octaves) as well as short-term goals (being prepared to play Beethoven 4 in a couple of weeks), which may require different approaches to practicing. I'm sure that Julian Bliss was referring to his long-term practicing goals in the video excerpt of his masterclass (which raises the issue of people on the bboard hearing--often second hand--of something a pro said and haphazardly interpreting and applying it).
Slow practice (if that's the only thing you do) isn't a good use of time. And if you still struggle after many hours spent on the slow side of your metronome, it doesn't mean that you need more slow practice; you just need more intelligent practice. I think that a flexible approach to practicing--one that makes use of a variety of techniques--is the best.
Post Edited (2015-02-06 22:32)
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Author: CarlT
Date: 2015-02-06 22:50
Only a poor intermediate here, but...what Brycon just said seems to make a lot of sense to me.
Even with new material from my community band, I try to only practice "slowly" the parts that give me problems. Most of the rest of this music (which, I agree, would be elementary for you good players) I can do a tempo, but I slow waaay down for those passages that I struggle with (and then I don't always master them, but at least I can say I've given it my best shot).
CarlT
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2015-02-07 14:32
Some clarification may be in order. One doesn't need to "slow down a whole note," so yes, you need only use your time to practice technical issues (when technical issues are what you are practicing).
I probably should also add that I am not a fan of the idea put forth on a recent post called "chaining." This is an idea where you have a technical passage in front of you, set the metronome at speed and play just the first note (for a few iterations), then the first two notes (for a few iterations), then the first three.....etc. In this approach you get through the passage after about the same 20 minutes but you still "allow" some inevitable raggedness that you "work out in subsequent sessions."
All I'm recommending is to emphasize accuracy as the paradigm, rather than "get it done yesterday." Which (and I don't think I'm exaggerating) is what the vast majority of us do.
Alan Balter, Larry Combs and Julian Bliss have all said (that I know for a fact, but I'm sure most top players would as well) that slow practice is the key.
Of course this has been 'controversial' even within a single music school where one teacher's approach (and stable of students) differs from the other on this issue. I don't have to say which one's student's sounded better.
...............Paul Aviles
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Author: Daniel Frazelle
Date: 2015-02-07 18:57
I can't believe that nobody has mentioned Practice+! It has exactly this feature in it. Many of you may have seen or used Metronome+ years ago. Practice+ is the new app by the same team that was better designed for iOS 7 and has a number of new features, notably this one. It's incredibly clear on how to set up the tempo increases.
It's easily my favorite metronome app for iPhone (and I've tried them all!)
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Author: WhitePlainsDave
Date: 2015-02-07 19:54
No Paul.
I'm sorry but this is not a clarification. It's a restatement of your position--which by the way is fine--just as long as it's labelled as such.
The immediately above thread of yours does not build upon your initial ideas, here and in another recent post about always practicing slowly. It came as a response to my desire for a metronome that automatically speeds up, albeit slowly, as if to say 'why would one who always practices slowly, as I believe they should, even want that?'
As I've always agreed with, slow play has its place, just not in exclusion to other techniques.
Consider, although we're all human, trying to state all your points up front, rather than continue to solely profess "always play slowly" going forward.
Post Edited (2015-02-07 20:01)
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