 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Maruja
Date: 2016-12-30 16:04
I am finding the opening bars of this sonata very challenging at speed. The notes sound clean if I can go at my own speed but as soon as I try to pick up speed, they don't sound or they are fuzzy. I think the problem might be that I feel I don't have time to place my fingers correctly over the holes.
If anyone has any suggestions, I would be very grateful (in advance!)
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Author: concertmaster3
Date: 2016-12-30 16:58
The first thing that comes to mind is your finger height and hand placement. I tell my students to place their hands in a position that is similar to their hands at rest. Place your hands (one at a time) at your side, let your fingers relax in their natural position and then bend your elbow to bring the hand to the clarinet. For your left hand, also allow your index finger to touch the A key around the knuckle closes to your fingertip.
There's a few techniques you could use to practice each group to help build up speed also. I'll give you some of my favorites.
1. Play each group 4x's as slow, 2x's as slow and then with the correct note values. i.e.-play the 16th notes as quarter notes, then 8th notes and then 16th notes. Do this with little to no time in between and start slower than your comfortable tempo. You want to make sure you're playing slow enough that you can't get it wrong. This gives you the time to really give your fingers a chance to understand the muscle movements involved and to give your self time to think about how much your fingers are moving and how much they actually NEED to move (which was my issue when I started learning this).
2. Note grouping. Think about tackling each group of 5 notes not as 5 notes, but as maybe 2+3 or 3+2 notes, or whatever grouping helps you. Seeing them as a group of 3 or 2 notes usually helps with not feeling so frantic and it gives you a chance to "land" or "plant" your fingers at multiple places, rather than just the end. I usually will elongate the first note of the group to give myself the actual moment to land and gather my thoughts about the next group. Then you eventually stop elongating and essentially mentally accenting the groups.
Try those two and see what others come up with! Good luck on a wonderful piece of music!
Ron Ford
Woodwind Specialist
Performer/Teacher/Arranger
http://www.RonFordMusic.com
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Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2016-12-30 17:57
What is "my own speed?" If it's substantially slower than performance tempo, there may be a change in the way you *can* place and move your fingers. I would always suggest starting from the fastest tempo at which you can still play the passages cleanly. That may be what you're doing, but at this point we don't know.
Obviously, you can't play these passages easily if your fingers are flying out far away from the holes they need to come back to cover. The farther your fingers move away, the longer it takes to get them back. You may be moving your fingers too far or not.
The biggest reason I find for students' problems with fast figures like the ones you're asking about is that as they approach performance tempo they start to tense their hands and, as a result, rush so that the notes are no longer rhythmically accurate. Once the rhythm is gone, there is little chance to coordinated the fingers. So your focus might better be placed on controlling the rhythm - even, controlled 16th notes in those beats and very accurate placement of the notes that are on the beats. Coupled with my first suggestion, you might start to do this at a fairly fast but manageable tempo. If quarter = 136 is too quick, maybe you can control 120.
Changing the rhythms in a deliberate way - holding the first 16th note of each group longer than the others, changing the 16ths to dotted 16ths and 32nds - may give you a better sense of control and combat the tendency to rush.
You can use a retrograde technique on each group - start with the last two 16ths of a group and play only the 3 notes ending on the 8th. Do this in tempo - quarter = 136. When the 3 notes are clean, add the one before them, still in tempo and correct rhythm with respect to the beat. Once that's clean, add the first note to form the whole group.
I find that it never hurts to analyze the figures a little - it can give me a context of patterns I've played before. For example, the first group is like a G arpeggio starting on a chromatic lower auxiliary - but instead of B you play A# (Bb), which itself is a lower auxiliary of the B on beat 2. The second group is basically a G# chord to C# (V-I) again starting on a lower auxiliary. This can become a little convoluted and may not help, but I suggest it as something that I find helpful *sometimes.*
Much depends on what is actually going wrong when you try to speed the figures up.
Karl
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Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2016-12-30 21:34
Roxann wrote:
> http://www.bulletproofmusician.com/struggling-to-get-a-tricky-passage-up-to-
> tempo-try-this-clever-practice-technique/
> This comes from Nathan Cole, the First Associate Concertmaster
> in the LA Philharmonic
>
I haven't tried the other links yet, but this one doesn't work unless you remove the space that got into the URL as it appears in this post between the hyphen and tempo when you copy it to a search window (it doesn't show up in the paste above). I imagine there was a line feed there in your original that became a space when the lines got reformatted. When I cut-and-paste from the version above it turns out to be even more distorted (it contains the > and space from the quotation form).
This is one good reason for enclosing URLs in [URL]...[/URL] tags when you post them. With the tags it shows up as http://www.bulletproofmusician.com/struggling-to-get-a-tricky-passage-up-to-tempo-try-this-clever-practice-technique/ and works correctly.
Karl
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Author: Roxann
Date: 2016-12-31 04:47
Thanks, Karl...I didn't know that! Were you able to eventually link to all three websites?
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2016-12-31 04:50
I learned the grouping exercise from Keith Stein in 1958 and have used it ever since to work out difficult passages. The Nathan Cole video is the best explanation and demonstration I've seen. I have it bookmarked and play it back once in a while, and in my opinion everyone should.
Ken Shaw
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Author: Roxann
Date: 2016-12-31 04:51
Karl...I edited my post and added the [/] bracketing, but it didn't underline the website nobody can just click on it to automatically go to the website. Any idea what I might be doing wrong?
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Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2016-12-31 07:33
Yes. The syntax is [URL] (with the brackets and the tag URL or url), then the actual web address, then (again, the brackets enclosing the slash and URL or url). It's an HTML tag pair - it's also described under the Help/Rules link above the subject line of each post. There are other formatting tags there, too.
I just got back from a rehearsal and haven't tried the other links yet. I imagine by now someone else has.
Karl
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