Author: ohsuzan
Date: 2007-07-18 14:11
(In answer to cj -- before Craig's intervening post)
Yeah, but . . .
There is also the issue of consistency -- being able to do the thing I desire to do directly, with confidence, on demand, appropriately to the music at hand. There's where I am at sea much of the time. And that is where what Craig gave me has made a difference. He has helped me identify just what it is I need to do to get to the place I want to be, say, 8 out of ten times.
From time to time, I know I do well, tonally. My teacher tells me so. I hear that it is so. But my ability to choose to play the way I desire to play seems almost like entering the lottery. Sometimes my numbers come up. Sometimes they don't. That's what I want to fix. I would really like to be able to go to the best of what I can do without having to feel and fumble around the scale and instrument for 10 minutes (or an hour) first. And I would like to be able to do this whether it is morning or night, whether I am focused or distracted, calm or nervous, whether I have a great reed or an average reed, whether I am sight reading (as I was doing when playing with Craig) or playing something for the one-hundredth time.
It's the old whine that teachers hear all the time: "But it sounded so much better at home!"
And do you know what? It probably DID sound much better at home, because at home, there were no distractions, no pressure, and you had all the time in the world to go by trial and error, listening to yourself and doing take after take after take until you got it right. But there is a world of difference between playing that way versus knowing how to get it right the first time.
It's like hunt-and-peck typing. Eventually, you may get a page written, but the error rate and the time consumed doing it make it completely impractical for you to find work as a typist.
So, Craig was able to tell me what I needed to do to reliably create that "better" sound. He could hear what I was trying to do, and helped me understand what I needed to do (or not do) to make it so. It's definitely my own sound -- I'm just learning to consistently produce it.
Susan
Post Edited (2007-07-18 14:18)
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