Author: brycon
Date: 2022-01-10 21:58
Quote:
I learned my scales without using a book. I worked on them out of a books for a while (Londeix, Albert, Baermann), but it got to be too slow. I stopped worrying about playing every possible pattern over the whole horn. At first it was very slow figuring them out without music, but that didn't last very long. I just started working with the range and patterns I could play (or enjoyed) and focused on that, then improved on it. It won't take long until you are extending your range and making things harder. It becomes a game, so you can fool with whatever pattern you like, and whatever range you like. When you find something you can't do, you work on it. You can also learn patterns that aren't in the scale books.
Thank you for posting this wonderful advice!
The scale books, etude books, etc. you use don't matter. The way you interact with the material, however, matters a great deal.
Students of all ages ask, "What's the best book to learn x, y, and z," and then play through whatever recommendations they receive and expect results. But the books don't teach you: you teach yourself. When you really practice a scale or some other fundamental, by contrast, listen (or perhaps record yourself and listen back) for precision, evenness, intonation, legato, etc. And if something isn't good, try to figure out exactly what's happening (the right-hand pinky, for example, is coming off the C key too quickly) and then create some exercises to remedy the problem. You can go through this process of listening, self-evaluation, and problem solving using any number of books or using your memory. But if you simply passively play through a book, which is what students often do with them, improvement will be negligible.
And I very much agree with Nadia Boulanger, who said that when things are learned by ear, figured out mentally, or memorized, they become a part of us in a way that written out things never can. When you mentally learn a scale and practice it away from a book, you listen in a way that's very different from the way you listen when you read a scale.
At any rate, as you've shown, it's the process rather than whatever book you choose to download that's important.
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The Clarinet BBoard
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