 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Exiawolf
Date: 2016-04-14 08:06
Greetings!
Dear board members, I'm looking for some extra insight to a problem I have (and probably some others on this forum) to add to what I hear from those around me. As I've gotten better at fundamentals on the clarinet (Tone, leaps, tuning), I've had the opportunity to play harder and harder music. I felt like I was doing great up until recently, when it's become very apparent that my technical proficiency (Ability to play fast AND accurately) is lagging behind. Alot. And it's really starting to hurt me. The only thing I've heard is that when you're given a fast passage, you need to slow it down and speed it up VERY slowly, and that works for me only to an extent. I almost always seem to hit an impassable wall and I'm looking for ways to break through...
Music is definitely what I want to end up pursuing in college, but my lack of technical agility is really starting to scare me. I don't want to give up in any way, but I NEED to find a way to pass through this.
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Author: locke9342
Date: 2016-04-14 08:16
I hit that wall with glissing I read all the responses on the board watched youtube videos and kept trying, but nothing happened. But eventually literally a year later I was messing around with it in a practice room and it just happened. It was the most glorious moments I have had playing clarinet. But the gist of it is that you may hit a wall, but if you keep practicing it, despite the lack of progress, you will get it
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Author: sfalexi
Date: 2016-04-14 09:57
Change the rhythms. If you're "speeding up" has hit a wall at, say, 120 for a run of sixteenth notes, play different rhythms. slow it down to 80 and play triplet rhythms. It's easier to show than type, but imagine that L=a triplet eight and S=a triplet 16th. So one triplet at 80 would be L,L,L or L,SS,L
Take the run and play it like this till it's clean....
L,L,SS L,L,SS L,L,SS Then the next day....
L,SS,L L,SS,L L,SS,L then the next day....
SS,L,L SS,L,L SS,L,L Then the next day....
S,L,L,S S,L,L,S S,L,L,S Then....
keep it at 80, and play dotted 8th/16th.
Doo-dot, doo-dot, doo-dot, doo-dot.
And lastly.... 16th/dotted 8th (the hardest to keep as you always want to feel the 16th as a pickup to the beat but it needs to stay ON the beat)
Dot-doo, dot-doo, dot-doo, dot-doo.
That'll take about a week, and then the changes between notes should be under your fingers much better and you should be able to go back to your regular rhythm and break through that plateau.
Alexi
US Army Japan Band
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Author: seabreeze
Date: 2016-04-14 14:52
Yes, playing technical passages in a first slow and then gradually increasing dotted eighth and sixteenth pattern to increase finger memory and finger speed is a favorite technique among classical flutists. Marcel Moyse was a great believer in this technique. and if you are patient with it, it produces a very sure and distinct finger action. Something in the little "snap" that you have to do to get the sixteenth notes precise must fix the patterns in the brain and nervous system in a very solid way. It is a sort of "plyometric" training for the fingers.
Practicing the Baermann (or Jettel) scales and arpeggios (from Baermann Method, Book III) in both slurred and articulated dotted eights and sixteenths notes is a great way to improve technique. The Robert Stark arpeggio book is good too.
Post Edited (2016-04-14 19:15)
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2016-04-14 15:26
For me, it IS all about playing at the slow tempo over and over and over. And keep in mind, slow is relative. "SLOW" means that you set the tempo so that what you are practicing is stupid easy. And then you stick with that, over and over. After a certain amount of time (and that's always longer than you want) you can check at a much faster tempo and you'll usually surprise yourself.
So I don't follow the slow progression idea of one (or just a few) clicks at a time. I don't find that instructive for me.
...............Paul Aviles
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2016-04-14 16:24
The secret is to practice slow enough to be errorless. One of the most effective methods is to work out each individual change and sequence of changes, using the method Alexi outlines.
When you work on Baermann 3, it's very important to get comfortable in the extreme keys. You'll probably never see a piece in F#, but even music in the easier keys moves through the extreme ones for short passages. Unless you have these patterns in your muscle memory, you'll stumble every time.
If you think you're OK, just try playing Three Blind Mice, going up a half step each time. Until it's just as easy in F# as in C, you have some woodshedding to do.
Ken Shaw
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Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2016-04-14 18:06
I have to add a comment from my own personal experience. I've always felt uncomfortable with fast passagework, and I always assumed it was because as a student and a young player, I hated practicing and didn't do enough of it (I still don't, really). But at some point later in life than I want to admit, I realized that a good parts of the problem wasn't not having the notes "under my fingers," it was not being able to play them *cleanly*. I could play the right notes but with sometimes sloppy connections that drove me crazy. It wasn't wrong notes but bad finger coordination that was causing the problem.
My solution has been to rethink the positions of my fingers as I play and the direction in which they move. For me, making sure my fingers are moving toward and away from their tone holes in an up and down direction with no rotational movement from the front side has been key. The movement of all fingers involved in an interval ought to be as nearly as possible of uniform distance (not necessarily as close as possible, but the same), or one may arrive at its hole or key earlier than the other(s). The mechanics of moving the fingers involves a good balance of flexion and extension so that neither of the opposing tendons is ever dominant enough to lock the finger (releasing it takes extra time and can destroy coordinated movement).
In other words, a good deal of attention needs to be paid to how you move while you're teaching yourself the movements themselves through slow practice. One of the reasons why at some point you run into a wall is that you reach the point where the tendons controlling the movements need to work slightly differently beyond a certain speed, and it's at that shift point that you need to be especially aware of the mechanics as well as the fingerings themselves.
Karl
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Author: johng ★2017
Date: 2016-04-14 18:49
As noted, slow practice and scale work is important, and I would like to offer another method of practicing that I use myself and with my students. Basically it involves playing a difficult musical passage at full tempo, but pausing at the last easy note, giving the opportunity to think about what comes next....what you must do to successfully complete the passage.
For example, playing a rising chromatic scale where the fingers are not executing well in the throat tone area, pause for a bit on throat tone f before moving on to f#, g, g#, etc. During that pause (a held note) consider what comes next....in other words, get your brain involved rather than just playing by rote.
I learned this effective method from a scale book by Fernand Gillet, a fine oboe performer and teacher. (Exercises for Scales, Intervals, and Staccato for oboe...also in the book for flute)
Here is a quote from the flute book in a forward by Joe Armstrong:
"I think it’s also important to emphasize that the way Gillet had me work on this passage, and countless others, didn’t involve “slow practicing” as such. Not that he felt that practicing slowly doesn't have its place; but it obviously alters the character of the expressive energy of the passage or figure you are working on in this way. On the contrary, in this note-value altering approach, when you keep the actual tempo going throughout so that even the note you extend in length is played with a steady beat continuing underneath it, you are still infusing the whole passage with full performance energy and aliveness; so there isn’t such a drastic change in overall character when you finally play the passage as written. Since most passages and figures tend to have fingering, embouchure, or articulation imbalances in them somewhere, going over each phrase in a piece with caring attention to this kind of constructive reinforcement very seldom hurts. In fact, I find that working in this way on passages I don’t seem to have any difficulties with often helps to discover and bring out their full character in a way that slow practicing never does. Passages whose depth of beauty and excitement you thought you had fully plumbed will frequently reveal ever newer dimensions of expression when “processed” in this way."
John Gibson, Founder of JB Linear Music, www.music4woodwinds.com
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Author: seabreeze
Date: 2016-04-14 19:33
The technique described by Joe Armstrong in his forward to the Gillet book is based on a principle in cognitive psychology known as "chunking." Patricia George and Phyllis Louke have written a very useful book on chunking, "Advanced Flute Studies: The Art of Chunking" (published by Theodore Presser, 2014). Should be required reading for any clarinetist working to perfect technical passages. Also, in a more general way, Keith Stein's old advice to practice everything at three different speeds, slow, medium, and fast, still holds true.
Post Edited (2016-04-15 01:15)
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Author: WhitePlainsDave
Date: 2016-04-14 19:58
Clearly, your not tightening the bottom screw on your ligature enough.
I kid.
The suggestions already provided are excellent. They cover 99% of how one achieves on clarinet.
Some more refined insight along these themes:
* Never take a passage faster than you can play it accurately with no tonguing mistakes or misbehaving fingers. If you do, all you're doing is reinforcing, through repetition, mistakes. They will be harder to unlearn down the road.
* Recognize that no matter how diligent you are at slowly building up technique, you may encounter a wall that only, maybe practice AND time/patience may overcome.
* Recognize that even with time and practice, you may never be able to do this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb3ktqyDuKU
* Recognize one of the greatest clarinet paradoxes. To play difficult things accurately you must be focused, but yet at the same time relaxed--and yet difficult stuff makes us nervous. Resist metronome speed increase unless you can (I originally wrote "cane"---must be Freudian) not only simply play accurately, but with no more tension than under slower speeds.
* Conquer and divide. Break the stuff up into pieces. Vary where you break a difficult passage up. Keep it "fresh."
* Get your eyes in front of every bit of new music you can and play it. I think the sightreadingfactory.com website an excellent one for this.
* Resist getting frustrated. Forgive yourself.
Post Edited (2016-04-14 20:02)
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Author: nisharae18
Date: 2016-04-14 20:18
Oh this post makes me so happy... I am not the only one struggling with this stuff.... Pounding scales, and going from snail slow and working up to speed is working wonders... Still every once in a while though, I find in fast passages I am fingering correctly but like Karl said above my note transitions can be slightly messy, or worse yet notes like middle B, C, C# will not speak quickly enough to be heard in a sixteenth note run... Any advice for this technical problem.. I So appreciate this topic.. Makes me feel less like a failure lol.. :P
Thanks in advance,
Nisha
PS also to the Caprice Posted above... Amazing I wasn't sure whether to be breathtakingly amazed, or to cry due to sheer disbelief that such a thing exists... But then part of me wanted a copy to start working on that maybe in 10 years, I can play it at half tempo :P This one goes right up there with my life goals of playing with Rossini's Intro, Theme and Variations :P
Post Edited (2016-04-14 20:23)
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Author: brycon
Date: 2016-04-14 20:33
I find slow practice to be a huge time suck (though not quite as bad as long tones). I've used it to acheive some long term technical goals, but in my day-to-day practice I don't often use it as a practice technique.
Here's a copy of something I posted on a similar thread a while back:
or: brycon (---.184.175.2.T00625-01.above.net - (Abovenet Communications) New York, NY United States)
Date: 2015-02-06 21:58
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.
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2016-04-14 22:27
Slow practice has undeniable value, but as Dave Blumberg said here once, there are a lot of ways to practice. If you hit a wall, try different things.
Johng's advice of stopping on the last easy note in a passage is a good tactic, but so is stopping on the first hard note. Perhaps the most frequent problem in fast passages is one or more fingers moving early; stopping on the first hard note catches that.
Here's another pattern that seems to help me. Break a short problematic passage into two halves. Pick a speed you can't play very well. Play the first half at half the picked speed, twice. Then play the second half at half the picked speed, twice. Then play both halves together at the picked speed. There's something about the speed doubling that works, at least for me.
The great pianist Sviatoslav Richter encountered his first teacher at a relatively late age, 22. The teacher was Heinrich Neuhaus, a legendary teacher who included many of the most famous Russian pianists as pupils. Early on, Neuhaus assigned Richter the Liszt B-minor sonata, a masterpiece and technical tour-de-force. Richter prepared it by the next lesson, if I recall, one week later. Neuhaus, indicating a passage well known as a technical benchmark, asked Richter how he had learned it. Richter replied that he simply played it over until it was right. Note, in his biography Richter said he practiced new pieces at full tempo. As brycon said, "faith in your own abilities"! Well, Richter was far out at the high tip of more than one curve, so mmv.
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Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2016-04-14 22:34
It seems obvious, but I'll include it just for the record. One important reason for going through a tricky passage at least once slowly is to make sure you know what's actually there. I have to correct so many students in fast music because they're playing SOMEthing fairly cleanly, but it isn't what's written. They've looked at it, sort of guessed about what pattern it is, gotten most of the notes right, but made up some part of the middle that then had to be unlearned. Going through the passage slowly would have let them learn it accurately in the first place.
Karl
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Author: WhitePlainsDave
Date: 2016-04-15 00:28
I'm glad the idea of slow practice came up.
I don't advocate for it, nor do I have a problem with it.
If slow is the speed at which you need to take something to get it right, (or its what the music calls for) then slow it is--but not in and of itself because slow = good.
I do believe in being able to play the passage well at all speeds--so in that regard being able to do it slow is a good thing, but may not be necessary to get a passage right.
Slow stinks, it's a time sink, and time is our most precious asset as players. Save "slow" for the stuff you can't handle at tempo. But know as sure as its a drag, it is at times critical to getting things right.
Some advocate to always play slow. That's silly and self defeating I think. The goal of practice is to get something right to perform, even if the only audience is you, and the goal is advancement as a player. Slow is a means to that end, not the end in and of itself.
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Author: KenJarczyk
Date: 2016-04-15 00:37
Lot of interesting ideas here. Here is what helped me "get over" that wall.
3 practice books, all by the famed master of Clarinet pedagogy Kalmen Opperman. Get his "Velocity Studies" volumes 1, 2 & 3. You will hate me for a short while, then I'll become your hero.
Ken Jarczyk
Woodwinds Specialist
Eb, C, Bb, A & Bass Clarinets
Soprano, Alto, Tenor & Baritone Saxophones
Flute, Alto Flute, Piccolo
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2016-04-15 03:11
The "anti slow movement" here should realize that we are only talking semantics.
"Fast," would be beyond where you play the passage cleanly. I don't think anyone would recommend playing a passage incorrectly over and over and over (that is the ultimate time waster). If one did that, it would only reinforce WRONG.
But no one is saying to play everything at a snail's pace, only what is a technical problem, or what you are trying to memorize indelibly.
..................Paul Aviles
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Author: lagatitalila
Date: 2016-04-15 10:00
Hello young clarinetist! First off, fear has the ability to paralyze progress, so view your need to improve your technical agility as a growing opportunity instead of some looming obstacle here to destroy your dreams. Perception is everything.
Second, the physical action of closing your hands is natural, while lifting fingers takes a bit more concentration. The action of opening your hands as wide as possible will help exercise the muscles needed for fast finger-lifting action. After opening your hand, do not close it, allow it to relax into its natural curled state. It's good to become aware of what is happening with your body physically when you play.
There is much interesting and useful information here already, but it bears repeating that scales and scale patterns should be in your daily practice routine, as they are the building blocks of music. And, you should learn difficult passages at least ten clicks faster than a tempo so that a tempo sits comfortably in your fingers.
Something that helps me woodshed that I haven't seen mentioned is the use of stop-tonguing. Stop-tonguing is when you play a note as short as possible, with the only thing stopping the sound is your tongue on the reed. Your wind should be behind your tongue, waiting for you to play the next note like you're a balloon that's been pinched shut. To do this for woodshedding, you'll slow the tempo down to where the passage is possible, but not so slow your attention span is affected. You play each note of the passage as short as possible and lift your fingers immediately after to the next note in the sequence without letting it speak. This helps me identify what specifically my fingers are doing between the notes that is making a passage sloppy, or as a "plyometric" exercise to get my fingers to move faster. It's also a cheap way of getting some articulation practice. Two birds and all that.
Good luck and remember to have fun!
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Author: brycon
Date: 2016-04-15 21:10
Quote:
The "anti slow movement" here should realize that we are only talking semantics.
"Fast," would be beyond where you play the passage cleanly.
Paul, I don't think anyone got that nuanced definition of slow and fast from this sentence:
Quote:
"SLOW" means that you set the tempo so that what you are practicing is stupid easy.
I do practice some things slowly. But as a catchall pedagogical cudgel, used in every instance of technical difficulty, slow practice is a huge waste of time. Your practice technique, for example, is a perfect case of the underpants gnome problem:
Step 1: practice slowly
Step 2: ?????
Step 3: easily play passage at tempo
By leaving out the crucial step of pinpointing the technical deficiency and coming up with some specific exercises to solve it, you're wasting time with somewhat mindless repetitions of a passage.
By contrast, here's an example of a recent practice session I had:
Step 1: I noticed a technical passage wasn't clean.
Step 2: To make sure it was a consistent problem, I recorded myself playing the passage at tempo (with the metronome) a few times.
Step 3: I slowed the recording down by 50% and noticed that I was beginning the passage slightly behind the beat. Then I was rushing to catch back up, causing the overall sloppiness in my playing.
Step 4: I practiced starting the first note exactly on the beat a few times--trying to be very precise with the note start (recording myself to double-check).
Step 5: Then I repeated step 2 and 3 and found that the passage was good to go.
Step 6: I enjoyed a beer with all that free time I had because I didn't do tons of slow repetitions.
This whole process took maybe 5 minutes. And since it wasn't completely boring, I was mentally engaged during that section of my practicing. Just because something is painful and boring doesn't mean it's good for you. Sometimes it just sucks.
Post Edited (2016-04-15 21:11)
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2016-04-16 06:33
So when I play a passage perfectly 100 times in a row (for example), and you play it incorrectly at least three times, where is the advantage?
.............Paul Aviles
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2016-04-16 13:53
>> So when I play a passage perfectly 100 times in a row (for example), and you play it incorrectly at least three times, where is the advantage?>>
This is such a straw man.
How do you learn to shoot clay pigeons? Not SLOWLY, that's for sure.
The important realisation is that doing something 'incorrectly' (as you would put it) whilst being aware of the mismatch between the result and what was desired, is a SUCCESS on the level of calibration.
It's how kids learn to speak, and how you must deal with things like longjumps, and it's an aspect of practice that it's foolish to throw away.
Don't you understand that?
By the way, Paul, how do you pronounce your name: is it Ah-VEE-Lez or something else?
Tony
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2016-04-16 15:18
ah-vee-LESS
I was told that in Spain, if it ended in a "Z," then it would be "ah-VEE-lez."
I appreciate that assessment from you. Perhaps I take the mode for learning a solo piece too far. Having been more careful in my youth would have been more productive. But even with that I find older, poorer habits can be corrected but it takes very diligent, pedantic work. I just hope the younger players out there don't get the idea that blasting through something ten times will make number eleven magically better.
................Paul ah-vee-LESS
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2016-04-16 16:54
Another thought. Playing all the notes gets you only halfway there. If anything, it's more important to play in accurate rhythm. Ed Palanker has said that the biggest reason players lose auditions is unsteady rhythm.
Being able to play exactly with a metronome lays the foundation for expressive playing. You must have something rock-solid to take off from and come back to.
Ken Shaw
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Author: sfalexi
Date: 2016-04-17 09:00
Ken Shaw wrote:
> Another thought. Playing all the notes gets you only halfway
> there. If anything, it's more important to play in accurate
> rhythm.
......
> Being able to play exactly with a metronome lays the foundation
> for expressive playing. You must have something rock-solid to
> take off from and come back to.
>
> Ken Shaw
Gotta say, the accurate rhythm and playing WITH the metronome is probably the #1 thing I don't see in many bands. I see people that can rip a passage off extremely quickly. All the right notes. And those hard licks? They get all those notes one right after another. But the problem is that many folks almost "overlearn" it. They practice it so much, they look forward to ripping through it, and when it comes time for that difficult passage, I see a lot of people play it TOO fast. The get to the downbeat too soon, or they start slow, and rush to catch up.
I'd have to say that having technical proficiency is great, but applying it in tempo is tough.
FWIW, another great exercise to check your sense of tempo....set the metronome to beat once a measure on the downbeat. See if you can make it there. Or when you are playing a piece with quarter notes or half notes (or anything that doesn't require lots of finger flying), set the metronome to beat one every four measures. Ha! That's humbling!
Alexi
US Army Japan Band
Post Edited (2016-04-17 09:02)
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2016-04-17 09:52
I remembered that we had something like this slow/fast discussion before, and had a look:
http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/read.html?f=1&i=398239&t=398079
Oh, and of course Sulliman's 'missing beats' metronome shows that he is interested in precisely what Alexi talks about above, namely, the maintaining of a sense of tempo. I downloaded his collection of metronome samples at the time, but I now see you can get phone apps, eg Time Guru, that do the job more elegantly.
Tony
Post Edited (2016-04-17 14:15)
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The Clarinet Pages
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