The Clarinet BBoard

Re: All State In Under 1 Month!

Author: SecondTry  Date:   2025-03-06 01:06 I don't know what grades 3-4 in your State equate to, but I'm not sure it makes a difference in my response because I suspect that regardless of the difficulty level others have rated the music, you may still come across your share of challenging phrases/passages. For these difficult sections I suggest that you do not, at least in practice, take these sections at a tempo (BTW: do work with a metronome) faster than you can play them accurately. To play them incorrectly at performance tempo, while practicing, not only won't find you mastering them, but I submit, will make it harder for you to achieve this goal as you will mentally be reinforcing the "muscle memory" of playing them wrong forcing success into a now two step process: breaking the old bad habit and adopting a new correct one. Slowly build up the metronome. Julian Bliss suggests not doing so until you can play the passage correctly 3 times consecutively at the prevailing metronome speed. Additionally, I think Eric Black has some great things to say about the use of "Practice Rhythms" in this Youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCzavH_ZI0A which in short involves making slight adjustments to the rhythms that appear on the page in difficult sections. To quote Eric, "this forces your brain to think about the passage in different and often times more difficult ways. This keeps you better engaged, and helps to highlight technical issues where your fingers aren't lining up, or moving quite right."

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