 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: WhitePlainsDave
Date: 2017-06-12 19:30
It sounds too good to be true; and it is.
If you take one message away from here it's that spending near daily, uninterrupted distraction free time in front of etude books, solos, and sight reading, with strict adherence to form and meter, avoiding taking music faster than you can accurately play it, is the recipe for success. We are creatures of habit: (repetitive) practice makes perfect. Forsaking accuracy for faster tempo only reinforces mistakes that will become harder to correct. Even more: if you can only play it fast, not slow, you haven't mastered it. And sure, add great teachers and instruments to the mix while you're at it.
And if this practice needs to occur in more than one daily session—because stamina, or commitments to other things (not the least being reeds) deem it necessary—so be it. Multiple shorter, but daily sessions is one of things Julian Bliss has advocated; (that, and maybe to start said practice at the “ripe old age of” …. 5.) Then again, “short” for Bliss may be 2.5 hour stretches.
But with this caveat understood, I'm a firm believer in downtime, (even if I don't practice what I preach because....(cymbal crash) I do practice)) and wonder if others have anecdotes or wisdom to share in this regard.
First—and I'm the biggest offender, put the instrument down if your tired—especially if you keep on making the same mistakes and are getting frustrated. All your doing is reinforcing bad habits. Still more, avoid practicing when in a foul mood. It can screw with your concentration.
(To those that say, "if I only played when I wasn't pooped, I'd never play"—I hear you. Life has a funny way of getting in the way of clarinet practice, rather than make time for an instrument often described as a “jealous mister/mistress.”)
But with all of this said, I've taken vacations with family that have included vacations from clarinet. This may have been born of the necessity of having no time on trips, much less ample secluded space to not disturb neighboring hotel guests. (Still more, I've taken the instrument on more wilderness/free open time trips and loved it.) But it's had its serendipitous benefits to play when I return.
Time away sometimes helps me re-attact some phrase or passage that's been beyond my reach. Maybe the time away has helped my brain forget the wrong way I was approaching it. Still more, variety is the spice of life. Doing other things, having other passions makes life more enjoyable (he says as some orchestra auditioning prospect of 50 auditioners, who needs this job to make rent, is telling me what I can do with my “free to be you and me” approach to play.)
How did stepping away for a bit make you a better player, if at all?
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Author: Roys_toys
Date: 2017-06-12 21:13
Not strictly answering the point, but an associated thought...
I do practice Bb clarinet a lot and I do notice that I improve. But I also double on Bass C, Soprano sax. I don't practice these too much ( don't have the time to) but I don't seem to suffer from this. May not improve but don't go backwards. Mostly I just pick them up when the time comes and play away. May do a few scales couple of times a week.
Do you classical guys spend anything like as much of your practice time on your A as you do on Bb ? ( eg do all your scales , arpeggios etc twice ?)
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2017-06-12 22:59
You can't tell if a practice will be good or bad until you actually are practicing. How you feel beforehand has little bearing and may be completely wrong. I noticed this in other pursuits as well, such as weight lifting.
If a practice is going hard and control just isn't there, I'll generally push patiently on for a couple hours, sometimes switching what I'm working on. (When I was much younger I'd sometimes fly into a screaming rage; thankfully people can change.)
For me, occasional breaks don't seem to hurt playing or progress for long. In some cases a little vacation seems to refresh things and recharge the batteries - but not always. Rachmaninoff, about piano practice, said if he missed a day of practice, he'd notice; if he missed two days, his colleagues would notice; if he missed three days, the audience would notice. That's a bit tidier than I'd claim.
I alternate practice days between my Bb and A clarinets. The spacing difference in the holes & keys seems to become a problem if I ignore either instrument for long. They respond differently in other ways too, so I like to keep ready.
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Author: Dan Shusta
Date: 2017-06-13 10:55
On missing days of practicing...
The quote: "Miss one day of practice, I notice; miss two, the critics notice; miss three, the audience notices” is a famous, popular quote with anyone who practices, from pianists to ballet dancers to golfers. The first to notice the drop in performance is the performer, then trained persons (such as professional critics or a teacher or friends), and then the general public.
The Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was credited with the saying in 1894. The Russian composer and pianist Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894) was credited with the saying in 1905. The German composer and pianist Hans von Bülow (1830-1894) was credited with the saying in 1910. The Polish composer and pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860-1941) was credited with the saying in 1911. Paderewski receives almost universal credit today, but the early citations of others (especially in a music publication such as The Etude) probably indicate that he did not coin the saying.
From a few other very famous performers:
From Jascha Heifetz, widely regarded as one of the greatest performing artists of all time: "If I don't practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it.
From the famous pianist André Previn, a very similar quote: ""If I miss a day of practice, I know it. If I miss two days, my manager knows it. If I miss three days, my audience knows it."
Itzhak Perman, the great violinist, said:" If I miss one day, I know it. If I miss two days, the critics know it. If I miss practice three days, everybody knows it".
So this quote with its slight variations appears to have been profoundly verified by many prominent musicians including Benny Goodman.
I believe it is fruitless to argue with the greats in the music field.
As to speed, Tony Pay, in a thread from 2006 said: "I tell my students to practice slowly and carefully, of course. ("Remember that somewhere in the world Eddie Daniels is practicing even slower!")
Points to ponder?
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2017-06-13 15:29
>> As to speed, Tony Pay, in a thread from 2006 said: "I tell my students to practice slowly and carefully, of course. ("Remember that somewhere in the world Eddie Daniels is practicing even slower!") >>
But that wasn't the point of my post; see here for the context.
Tony
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Author: WhitePlainsDave
Date: 2017-06-13 16:56
Mr Pay: I read your link and appreciate your context of believing slow playing to be just one of a number of valid methods of improving play--taking justified issue with those finding it the sole methodology.
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What gets under my skin are those that say always practice slowly.
Hogwash.
Almost never practice faster than you can accurately take something (yes, one most first exceed their playing speed limitations to what they are), but always practice slowly.....? (To practice faster than you can take something, i.e. too fast, is to reinforce errors that will be harder down the road to correct.
We practice to get better; to prepare for performance: even if a performance attended solely by the player. Performance is at, by definition, tempo, even if, albeit, that tempo is a window of differently acceptable speeds. We practice to be able to accurately play at the faster than initial practice tempo we began at.
Sometimes we practice faster than tempo, provided again accuracy doesn't suffer. It builds the confidence that if we can play accurately faster than tempo, we can perform at performance speed. Accuracy to my mind includes not simply hitting all the right notes, but doing so in tempo.
Always practice at different speeds..i.e. speeds slower than you can take it? I'm fine, even an advocate of that too: as said above, you haven't mastered it until you can play not only at tempo, but slower. Of course taking something at a ridiculously slow pace is likely just a waste of critical practice time.
Post Edited (2017-06-13 16:59)
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2017-06-13 17:10
Dan, thanks for the info on the 1-day, 2-day, 3-day quote. I didn't know its provenance was so broad. For me the results vary a lot more; I might play like crap after 14 straight days of diligent practice, or skip a day and then do anything I want (until what I want enlarges.) I miss about 1 day in every 10, either from necessity or, ah, instinct.
As Tony indicates in his contextual link, slow speed work is a useful practice tool, but it's not at all the only one for overcoming technical difficulties. Another poster here, a well known teacher, put it, "there's a lot of ways to practice."
The idea that you must start practicing a passage very slowly until you can play it perfectly n times in a row, and then bump the metronome a single click and repeat, week by week, until tadaa after a very few years you can nail it blindingly fast is, in my nobody opinion, an oversimplification of how the brain and neuromuscular system works in most people. The method can succeed, I guess, since so many people claim to follow it.
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Author: ClarinetRobt
Date: 2017-06-13 19:27
I've recently heard if one constantly practices slowly, then they may hit a road block...preventing them achieving a quicker tempo. Almost as if one becomes stuck and trying to play quicker gives diminishing returns (muscle memory at slower tempos holds back the performer). It's a theory, not sure if it has any credence.
Some have advocated practicing at performance tempo. Start with the first two notes, then add a third, fourth, so forth. As you perfectly execute the start of a passage numerous times in tempo, one then adds the next note of the phrase. Keep going until you have the entire passage under your fingers.
I tried this last month. I had to learn some tedious runs on a piece that defied any recognizable scale in a day. Time was my enemy and couldn't use traditional practice techniques to get where I needed to be quickly and efficiently. In this particular example, it worked perfectly for me. I'd say I achieved muscle memory quickly and was able to execute cleanly.
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Author: kdk
Date: 2017-06-13 21:08
FWIW, to respond to your original question, I've never taken my clarinets on vacation with me. The worst harm these stretches away from playing have done is to leave me a little stiff and uncomfortable for the first half-hour or so of my first return to playing. My endurance may be a little less after a week in Arizona visiting our daughter and seeing the sights, but it doesn't take more than a day or two to get back up to speed.
Karl
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Author: toffeeman3
Date: 2017-06-13 21:42
I agree,
If you have put in the hard yards already then you will start to hit the law of diminishing returns.
As an experienced player you can come back up to speed very quickly if you give it a rest and will feel more enthusiastic having missed your instrument.
This applies to every aspect of life and sport. When i played competitive sport every day I was very consistent but that came at the price of never hitting the highest points which usually came after a rest
Good point
John
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Author: WhitePlainsDave
Date: 2017-06-13 21:43
"in my nobody opinion, an oversimplification of how the brain and neuromuscular system works in most people."
It's funny how, not taking this out of context, one might interpret that two ways.
Phillip, I'm surmising, maybe incorrectly, is using oversimplification to refer to the idea that in "dumbing it down too much," nuances of the complete learning model may not be accounted for.
...and that's fine....
and yet there's a way to spin the above quote differently:
We are creatures of habit: bad and good. If a good task is too hard, breaking it into pieces and/or slowing it down is much of our arsenal.
Mr. Schwebel's recent mastery in chunks hasn't worked well for me but I should probably give it another try, as the slow down approach is a long road as you mention, full of twists and turns that find you taking 2 steps forward and 1 back as a result of sometimes absent or bad practice: ironically enough bringing us full circle to the original ideas of stepping away from practice for a while in the interest of improving, or at least, as Karl anecdotes: failing to regress beyond quick recovery.
Of course taking a break beyond say a week, doesn't have economies of scale anymore than 1 light beer 1/3 less calories, 2 light beers, 2/3 less calories does.
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Author: Richie
Date: 2017-06-14 00:00
I think I can agree with most points here. I try to avoid taking a day off if at all possible. Even if I don't have time to practice, I just play for 10-20 minutes, because I suppose something is better than nothing. Sometimes as enticing and fun vacations are--part of me is worried I will sound pretty bad when I get back. However every time I leave the clarinet for a while, I come back, it's not as bad as I envisioned. Playing for around half the days I was gone I'm back "up to speed." Sometimes even better.
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2017-06-14 01:34
When I see quotes from so-called authorities about what players 'should' do, I always want to know, in what circumstances did these authorities say the things they are quoted as saying?
Because sometimes the quotes may have applied to a particular player in a masterclass, and aren't therefore generalisable. To another player, they might well have said something different.
Another example: earlier in this thread, I was quoted, out of context, as having said "I tell my students to practise slowly and carefully, of course."
BUT, in context, I was telling people that that ISN'T the only way.
So, quoting me as having told people 'to practise slowly and carefully' is therefore a gross misrepresentation, of the very sort that I suspect may have generated at least part of the 'great wisdom' that other teachers have had attributed to them.
For myself – and I try to inculcate the questioning attitude in my students – I try to ask, What's going wrong here? How could I look at the situation in a different way? Which bit is the crucial bit I need to practice? How can I integrate that bit into its context when I've sorted it out? What practice strategies might I apply? What DIFFERENT practice strategies, applied in sequence, might make a difference?
...and so on.
The fundamental idea is to approach your playing in a creative way. It gives you back control of your practising time.
What do you lose, by taking this on board?
Nothing. And it might stop you from cluttering up this BBoard with your damned opinions as to what is 'right' and 'wrong'.
Tony
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Author: Dan Shusta
Date: 2017-06-14 02:09
Tony, I apologize for using your out of context quote which you characterize as "grossly misrepresenting" what you tell your students. That certainly was not my intention or desire. And, I appreciate you letting me know that I had done so. Thank you.
My desire in posting and reading the responses from other is edification and this wonderful BB rarely disappoints me.
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Author: WhitePlainsDave
Date: 2017-06-14 03:05
"When I see quotes from so-called authorities about what players 'should' do, I always want to know, in what circumstances did these authorities say the things they are quoted as saying?"
here here!
Were these people talking to prospective orchestral candidates/players in the insanely competitive world of making a clarinet living mostly from performance, or were they talking to others who can afford (and choose) to improve on the instrument less aggressively?
Either group of course being fine.
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Author: Fuzzy
Date: 2017-06-14 03:38
I'm still trying to figure out how any of this is going to help me bet. 
(For levity)
Fuzzy
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2017-06-14 04:11
Thank you, Dan. I really do appreciate that you had no ill intent.
Tony
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2017-06-14 18:00
"I'm still trying to figure out how any of this is going to help me bet."
Don't practice, then sell your playing short.
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Author: ClarinetRobt
Date: 2017-06-14 18:53
![[toast]](http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/smileys/smiley15.gif)
You guys do have the best discussion on the internet machine!
I noticed with my personal (inconsistent) practice regiment, when I need to get up to speed quickly and cleanly, I always resort to "practice rhythms". So after taking a break from clarinet, I resort to these to get back to snuff.
Dotted Eighth, Sixteenth
Sixteenth, Dotted Eighth
Eighth, 2-Sixteenths
2-Sixteenths, Eighth
Triplets
Running through these rhythms (especially in complicated, convoluted straight sixteenth passages), for me, cures a lot of technical ailments efficiently. I change the articulations as I see fit when practicing.
To date, just about every HS kid struggling with a Rose Etude lick, has always been amazed how these practice rhythms fixed in minutes what hours of "slow" practice never achieved.
I assumed this was common knowledge. I don't know where I got the teaching technique, but I know I'm not clever enough to come up with on my own.
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Author: seabreeze
Date: 2017-06-14 22:29
Practice of scales and even arpeggios in these rhythms certainly dates back many decades if not centuries. David Hite on page 96 of his Foundation Studies from Baermann Book 3, Op. 63--Daily Studies, gives examples, and similar advice can be found in Marcel Moyse's flute books.
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Author: toffeeman3
Date: 2017-06-17 17:44
My learning is that that everyone is different and no two people are the same, what works for one does not work for another.
Extremes do not help at all so the solutrion usually lies in the middle.
My opinion is only an opinion and so is everyone elses so it is worth respecting that.
If you are having fun carry on if not consider a different approach unless youo rely on it for a living
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