Tag Archives: Practicing Music

10 Recurring Principles Of Effective Practice (And Performance)

Leave a reply
person playing stringed instrument

Photo by Quentin Ecrepont on Pexels.com

This past year I’ve had the privilege and honor to serve as practice coach and Alexander Technique teacher to some especially outstanding musicians, from elite orchestral members, to studio session pros, to outstanding jazz artists.

I’m always so thankful for what I learn from my clients, and use what I learn not only to help other musicians, but to also better help myself as a musician.

As I reflect upon the year, both as teacher and as student, I become aware of certain recurring principles that seem be most essential in the process of improving as a musician. These are the concepts that arose most frequently for both my clients and for me (sort of  a “Top 10”, as it were), and are topics I’ve written about in greater detail on this blog.

I’d like to share them with you in the form of some gentle advice.

Here they are:

1. Be clear about what you want.

How do you want to play? Strive for a detailed conception of the kind of musician you aspire to be. Understand that this conception will most likely change along the way, but being clear about what you want will help you work most specifically and effectively.

2. Be clear about how things work.

Understand at least the basic science behind how your instrument works (acoustics), and your human design (anatomy and physiology). You can avoid lots of misdirected effort by being clear on these things. Take responsibility to learn and understand the physical principles involved in playing, and pick and choose the pedagogy that best suits these principles.

3. Use yourself well.

This is the foundation of the Alexander Technique. How you “use yourself” includes your movement, posture (including how you hold your instrument) and your quality of attention (basically, how you “react” as you play your instrument). By using your entire self  in a balanced, more conscious way (i.e., in cooperation with your human design) you create the best conditions for successful musical results (not to mention you also avoid strain and injury).

4. Let your ear lead.

Aim for an expressive  rather than a mechanical  quality in your attention as you play. This is a matter of letting your aural imagination (your ear!) be the initiator of musical activity (e.g., your desire/conception for your best, most expressive sound; not your desire/conception for the “correct embouchure”). When your aural conception is clear, your brain is free to organize the movement to manifest your musical expression in a naturally efficient way.

5. Balance the internal and external.

More specifically, don’t become too internally focused  as you practice and/or play (micro-managing tongue, fingers, embouchure, etc.) Be available to notice what you’re doing with your entire self (an internal awareness), and integrate that with hearing and feeling your sound and expression outside  of yourself (in your instrument, in the room, in conjunction with the other musicians, etc.) Many coordination problems musicians develop (including focal dystonia) are partly a result of a too narrowly focused internal attention.

6. Understand (and strengthen) the relationship between your perception of time and your coordination.

All problems musicians have with coordination and technique are some form of problem with perceiving time. As you improve your time, you improve your coordination and technique.  The clearer and more precise your time perception becomes, the cleaner and faster your technique becomes. So rather than wishing for “fast fingers”, wish instead for clear, solid time. (Even things like pitch and attack are conditioned by your perception of time.)

7. Bring things within reach.

I too often see musicians reaching too far beyond what they are capable of doing in that particular practice session. Besides being a less than optimum learning experience, this also leads to frustration and self-doubt, as well as poor movement and postural habits (i.e., “misuse”). Aim at regressing (simplifying) a too-difficult exercise so that is only slightly  out of your reach. Then work gently and mindfully to bring it back within your reach. Repeat this process many times as you’re practicing something and you’ll be pleasently surprised at your progress. “Lots of little bites finish the entire meal with the greatest satisfaction”, my mother used to say to us kids.

8. Get good at stopping.

There is no point in rushing on to the next attempt to correct what you just did until you are clear about what needs to change, or more specifically, what you need to do differently to make that change. Get good at stopping and redirecting attention and effort. The better I get at practicing music, the better I get at stopping. It is never  a waste of time.

9. Find satisfaction.

Sure, you want to get better. You want to be able to do more than you can do right now. But it’s important that you reaffirm what you already can  do. You need to do this everyday  (no matter how “poorly” your practice session has gone). Always try to end your practice session with something that makes you feel satisfied with what you can already  do as a musician. This will keep you inspired, motivated, and in love (which leads me to the next principle!)

10. Play from a place of love.

I leave the most important principle for last. I still witness far too many musicians that are making music predominantly from a place of fear. This often creates problems for them, some of these problems quite serious. Playing music with a motivational energy of love not only is more satisfying, but it also helps your brain organize the movements necessary to play in the most optimum manner. Love brings with it curiosity, faithfulness and persistence, and with these come continued improvement.

So I hope you consider some of these principles, as I also wish you a wonderful, growth-filled, musically challenging and satisfying life!

An Important Component of Effective Practice That Is Too Often Overlooked

Leave a reply

Whenever I meet with a musician for the first time to give a practice coaching session, I ask lots of questions about musical goals, as well as the procedures to attain those goals.

In essence, these questions fall under the category of two broader questions:

“What would you like to have?”  and “What are you doing to achieve that?”

From here we have a good starting point to look at things objectively and constructively. Both of these questions require clear and detailed answers in order to optimize progress and minimize frustration.

Often, the “What would you like to have?”  part is fairly solid. (If it’s not, we need to start there.)

But too often, the “What are you doing to achieve that?”  part is lacking. This is where the frustration flourishes.

Many things fan the flames of this frustration, but one of the most overlooked is very simple: Too much of what is being practiced is devoid of pleasure.

Pleasure is a component of practice that is sorely overlooked.

A good number of musicians come to me for help who simply dread  most of what they do as they practice. This makes it nearly impossible to get any kind of expansive, inspired growth.

The sad part is that many of these musicians think, to a certain degree, that if it’s pleasurable, it’s not really practice.

That’s just not true. Most of the great, virtuosic musicians love (or loved) to practice. For them it is not simply a means to an end. To a certain degree, practice is an end unto itself. It’s a form of meditation.

I look forward each day to my practice sessions. They are nourishing, satisfying, centering, calming, enlivening, challenging, fun, illuminating, somatically pleasurable…all at once.

And I continue to improve as a musician as I practice.

There are two main reasons way practice should be mostly pleasurable:

First, the obvious: If something brings you pleasure, you’re more likely to spend time doing it. It becomes less a matter of discipline, and more a matter seeking gratification.

Second (and this is less obvious), you simply learn better when you enjoy what you’re studying and practicing.

This is one of the reasons why skilled teachers use play (games, role-play, etc.) to enhance the learning experience for learners of all ages. (I often use play to great effect in teaching the Alexander Technique to college and conservatory students.)

Pleasure and learning work together well, as pleasure is a powerful motivator. Pleasure lights up and integrates different parts of your brain. It enlivens your senses. It makes you receptive to experience, to possibilities. It makes you curious. It makes you fearless.

Do these sound like good qualities to have while playing music?

Without a doubt they are.

Don’t misunderstand. You still have to work. Focused, intentional, productive work that you need to hold yourself accountable for. You must reflect and assess, and reassess and redirect, being constantly vigilant.

But you’ll do so much better if you learn how to do so pleasurably.

One of the things I encourage the musicians I coach to take responsibility for is altering how  and what  they practice in order to make it pleasurable for them.

Their job is to turn problem solving and skill acquisition into a primarily  pleasurable activity.

It’s a matter of transforming the activity. This calls for creativity and inspiration.

So let’s say holding sustained tones to improve your sound (long tones) is drudgery to you, try playing beautiful songs at very slow tempos. Play as if you’re really “singing” these melodies (like you really mean it!), with your finest, most personal sound.

By doing so, you engage your expressive consciousness while at the same time developing the motor skills necessary to cultivate and implement a beautiful sound in order to carry out your expression.

Don’t like to run scales mindlessly? Okay, organize the scale you’re practicing into a lovely sounding four or five-note melodic pattern and play it up and down the range of your instrument. (You can get lots of these kinds of melodic scalar ideas by looking at the music of Bach, Brahms, or even Cannonball Adderly; just follow the music you love.)

In the simplest sense, aim at making what you practice musical  as opposed to mechanical.

The whole idea of a written “etude” is to turn a particular pedagogical aim into a musically satisfying expression and experience. It’s to teach a particular lesson by telling a good story, so to speak.

See if you can think in this “etude” way to bring your practice into the realm of pleasure.

For example, if there is a particular technical passage that give you difficulty, rather than just repeating the passage over and over as it is, see if you can play with it a bit. Make variations on it. Play games with the tempo as you work through it. Play it by ear in different keys. Use it in the context of improvisation (in fact, build and entire improvised solo based upon the technically challenging passage.)

If you work this way, you’ll help build a more expansive and flexible technique.

And it doesn’t have to be only because something gives you a direct musical pleasure to make it otherwise pleasurable. I have a student who loves holding long tones on the trombone because the resonance he feels in his face and chest give him pleasure. This Kinesthetic sensation is like a healthy narcotic for him. He loves to practice long tones!

Maybe it’s pleasurable because you love to be challenged. Maybe it’s pleasurable because it gives you a sense of ritual and routine. Maybe it’s pleasurable because it helps you imagine beyond what you can already do.

Or maybe it gives you pleasure because it reminds you of why you play music in the first place. All good.

There are so many resources these days to make practicing more enjoyable and efficient: backing tracks, smart phone apps, video tutorials, etudes…take advantage of these things!

And always remember to digress that which is out of your reach. If something is to difficult for you to play in the moment, transform it slightly to bring it back into reach, then raise the bar slightly once you’re successful doing so.

As a final thought, be good to yourself. “Use yourself well”, we’d say in the Alexander Technique. That is, aim to play with an easy, flexible balance and with a minimum of excess effort. And speak to yourself kindly. Be clear about what you want, and ask  yourself gently for it. Remember that music, even the most serious music, involves play. So play!

You And Your Instrument: Three Simple Steps That Make Playing Easier

Leave a reply

Whenever I give a first Alexander Technique lesson to a musician, one of the things I’m most curious about is examining the relationship between instrumentalist  and instrument.

It is often this interfacing  of person with tool that begins to perpetuate many of the difficulties musicians have that led them to seek my help in the first place: chronic pain, excessive tension, inefficient breathing, poor coordination/loss of skill, etc.

But before I observe any new student with their instrument, I first observe their habits of general coordination: What do they do as they stand, as they sit, as they begin to move? Is their breathing free or fixed? How do they use their eyes? Where/how do they tend to compress/hold themselves? And so on.

It is this general, overall coordination  that will have a direct impact on the specific skill and coordination they use to play their instrument.

Once we begin to bring their habits of movement and posture to light, they have a chance to become more conscious of the unconscious  ways in which they interfere with the best use of themselves as they play.

I couple this new awareness with a new strategy to change these habits for the better. One of the most effective tools I get them to work with is a simple, three-step process. I’d like to share it with you here:

Step One: Start with balance

It all begins here. Whether you sit or stand when you play, how you maintain your upright balance has a significant influence on your comfort, safety and skill.

If you’re sitting, you need to be on top of your sitting bones, with your head poised lightly above. Think of your neck as being free and your spine gently releasing upward, as the weight of your torso releases downward  to be supported by the chair.

It is this upward/downward opposition between the head and the pelvis that makes easy upright balance available to you. It is part of your human design.

Avoid trying to “sit up straight” (being stiff and rigid). Also avoid collapsing into the chair (make sure the chair you’re sitting in isn’t too soft, or you’ll be tempted to collapse.). Balance is the operative word here, not posture, postition or perfection.

If you’re standing, allow your weight to release evenly through your feet into the floor, as you let your head balance lightly above (just as in sitting). Again, think of your neck as being free, and let your back and shoulders release into width and elasticity.

Make sure you’re not locking your knees or distorting your pelvis by either pushing it forward, or tucking your tail. Think of your ribs as being very free to move, as you let yourself breathe easily.

Imagine yourself as mobile, dynamic and grounded, instead of stiff, fixed and planted.

Step Two: Bring the instrument to you (instead of bringing yourself to the instrument)

Once you’ve found an easy balance, bring the instrument to you  (this obviously doesn’t apply to piano, drum kit, or other stationary instruments). It is much easier and more efficient to bring the instrument to you than vice versa.

Though this sounds somewhat obvious, If you were to observe yourself in a mirror as you start to play, you might be surprised to see that you’re pulling yourself out of balance toward  the instrument instead of being the point of balance through which you integrate the instrument with yourself.

Understand that if your instrument is going away from your body, you must let your whole self  be free to move very slightly  in the opposite direction as a form of counterbalance.

Say for example, you play trumpet. As the instrument goes forward in front of you, your weight goes very slightly backward away from it. If you’re standing, this movement comes from your ankles; if you’re sitting, it comes from your hip joints (in this case because your base of support is at your sitting bones, not at your feet.)

You don’t have to try to actively move yourself backwards (in fact, doing so can actually take you out of balance). Your neuromuscular system does that on its own, as a sort of postural reflex. Just see that you’re not interfering with this reflex by stiffening your ankles (and/or hip joints).

And beyond this, you can notice how else you might be “over-preparing” yourself the instant before you actually start playing. For example, are you taking your head out of balance on your spine? Are you narrowing your shoulders as you reach  for your instrument? Let the instrument come to you.

Bottom line, avoid distorting and compressing yourself before you start playing. Let yourself stay in fluid, upright, expansive and easy balance.

Step Three: Renew the thought.

This is the step that tends to get most neglected in the process. Once you are clear about your balance, and about how you bring the instrument to you in order to stay in balance, you need to regularly redirect your thinking so that you’re not falling back into habit. It is very, very easy to fall back into habit, if you’re not vigilant about this.

As I mentioned in a recent article, you need to be clear about two things each moment you begin to play: your intention and your use. Remember to take your time. Stopping to constructively redirect thought/effort is NEVER a waste of time.

So allow yourself to notice your habits with your instrument. Notice your balance (including any kind of excess holding or tension) without your instrument, as well. Observe how you make contact with your instrument. Are you free, or fixed?

Aim for free. Be patient and persistent, and enjoy your newfound ease and continued improvement.

Two Things You Should Be Clear About Each Moment You Begin To Play

2 Replies

One of the things I emphasize when I’m coaching a musician is the importance of regularly redirecting  thought whenever practicing or performing. It is this “redirecting” process that is an essential element of constructive change.

It is quite easy to fall into an autopilot frame of mind when spending any length of time with your instrument, letting yourself run on unconscious habit. Yet whenever this happens, you’re missing out on opportunities for improvement.

Each time you start a phrase, or even just begin to play a single note, you will have the greatest chance for success if you affirm and clarify two things in your consciousness:

  1. Intention
  2. Direction

Both of these are things that you wish for,  things that you would like to have as you play.

Let’s start with intention. The way I define it, your intention is simply what you’d like to have happen musically.

Now, to be clear, intention has nothing to do directly  with the mechanical aspects of executing the music, and has everything to do with how you imagine  the music.

Your intention includes, but is not limited to:

  • What you feel, what you’d like to express, what you’d like to communicate. It’s about the meaning of the music.
  • How vividly you imagine your sound, including color, dynamics, articulation…even pitch.
  • How your imagined expression will manifest itself in time (rhythmic clarity).
  • The “bigger picture” of your imagined expression, the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.
  • How this whole will interface with the other musicians (where applicable).

The more detailed your wish is for the musical expression, the more likely your brain will speak to your muscles in an effective way to carry the wish out. As one of my students (an outstanding professional French Horn player) says:

“Let the ear lead everything else.”

You’ll notice that I didn’t mention things like “embouchure”, “breath support”, “hand position”, “fingering”, etc. These things are not part of your musical intention. They are simply things that serve  your intention. These are mechanical elements, not expressive ones.

Now, of course, it is fine to have some of these “mechanical” components in your thinking as you play. Just remember that they are not part of your musical  intention. Rather, they are part of your overall direction.

Your intention is nested into your direction, but your direction is primarily about how  you are going to carry out your intention. It’s about how you’re planning to coordinate your entire self to realize your imagined expression.

Your direction includes, but is not limited to:

  • What you are doing with your head, neck, shoulders and back (letting them work together in an integrated, free way).
  • How you are maintaining balance (and finding support and stability).
  • The mobility of your joints (including your hips, knees and ankles).
  • Your breathing (including the mobility and freedom of your ribs).
  • What your eyes are doing (and your facial expression, in general).
  • How you attend to the mechanical details as you express the music (fingering, support, embouchure, etc.)

Even the clearest of musical intentions won’t necessarily overcome a poorly directed, overly tense, and uncoordinated effort. To optimize your chance of success, you need to see to both. Intention and direction.

A key benefit of studying the Alexander Technique is in learning to improve how you use yourself in activity. It’s about learning to consciously and constructively direct your energy to most effectively serve your intentions.

The reason a good Alexander Technique teacher is so essential to this process, is that it is possible that you might be:

Unclear about the best, most efficient and effective way to use yourself. (Unfortunately, some of this could be a result of poorly prescribed pedagogy.)

Or,

Unconscious of the habits of use (movement, posture, reaction) that are interfering with your music making intentions.

(And of course, you might be challenged by a combination of both these issues.)

The aim of the Alexander Technique is to help you clearly understand how to use yourself in accordance with your design. By consciously subtracting habits of unnecessary tension, you learn to make music with greater ease, efficiency, clarity, consistency and satisfaction.

It’s about directing your efforts to help give you what you want.

As you become clearer and more detailed about your musical intentions, along with becoming more effective at directing your effort, you’ll find that you spend less conscious energy managing the specific mechanical details (what your tongue, fingers, etc. are doing) as you play.

You’ll learn to gradually trust that your brain knows quite well how to carry out your intentions, and does so best when you leave yourself alone enough for it to happen. This allows the music to flow from you more freely and expressively.

So next time you’re practicing, see if you can notice how clear you are with your intention and your direction. If you’re like a lot of reasonably skilled musicians, you might find that your intention is sometimes muddled by too many mechanical instructions (embouchure, air support, fingering, etc.), and that your direction does not include your entire self in a constructive way.

Notice how and where you create tension as you begin to play. Notice if/how you begin to take yourself out of balance. Notice where you begin to brace yourself. Notice where your attention goes. (Does it become narrow, inward and exclusive, or expansive, multi-directional and inclusive?) Then, consider how some of these things can impact the quality of your music making.

Notice how clear you are with the details of your intention. How vividly do you hear what you’re going to play before you play it? How clear are you about the meaning of the music? How clear are you about what you wish to communicate?

It takes time, curiosity, and persistent practice to effectively couple intention with direction in this way, but it is very much worth the effort.

Start each note, each phrase, each time you begin to play, with clear intention and constructive, inclusive direction, and you’re on your way to continued improvement and greater satisfaction.

A Highly Effective (And Really Fun!) Way To Improve Your Ears

4 Replies

 

Screen Shot 2015-08-25 at 4.38.58 PMThere are so many resources available now for improving your ear, both for general musicianship, and more specifically for improvisation. One simple little device that can be immensely helpful is a drone. (I’m of course talking about a device that makes a continuous humming sound, not the aircraft.)

In the past few months, I’ve been spending a little time each day of my practice session using a drone. Besides the improvements I’ve gained in my harmonic imagination, intonation, etc., I’ve simply been having a blast playing with it, and wanted to share some of my ideas and experiences with you.

There are three main skills in which practicing with a drone will help you improve and expand upon:

  1. Intonation
  2. Harmonic recognition/imagination
  3. Rhythmic imagination

Let’s look at these one at a time.

For intonation, playing long tones, melodies, overtones, etc., with a drone is far more effective than practicing with a visual tuner. Learning how to hear  and respond immediately to the necessary changes in voicing is fundamental to any wind instrumentalist. (Notice that I said “hear”!)

By practicing long tones with a drone you rely completely upon your aural senses and let your brain know what to do to voice the note most effectively. It’s almost fail proof. All you have to do is play with the drone and cancel out the unpleasant waves you hear. You don’t even need to know specifically what you did physically to make the changes. Just trust your ear and your brain.

A great and really fun way to improve the accuracy of your harmonic ear (as well as to expand it!) is to practice simple improvisation explorations with a drone. By perceiving the drone as a particular point of reference, you can systematically (or randomly, if you prefer) give yourself the experience of hearing how different pitches relate to it.

Here are a few examples of how you can practice this way:

  • Use the drone pitch as the root of an assigned key center. For example, if your drone is a concert “C”, practice improvising simple melodies with the various tonalities of “C”: major, melodic minor, harmonic minor, Lydian, harmonic major (pentatonic scales, including major, minor and harmonic major), etc. Play around with changing key colors in your improvisation (e.g., going from major to Lydian; melodic minor to harmonic major, etc.) Listen, and enjoy, as you connect intention with aural precision.
  • Perceive the drone pitch as various degrees of a particular scale. So think of a “C” drone as the root, 2nd, 3rd, etc., as you improvise in a particular “C” tonality. You’ll learn to hear and imagine scale degrees in relation to your melodic statements.
  • Explore the drone as various altered tensions. You can do this with a scale or chord in mind. For example, you can perceive your “C” drone as the raised 11th of the key of  F# major (as a B#, actually), or as the flatted 13th of an E7 chord. By playing around with these tensions this way, you’ll develop a more vivid harmonic imagination, turning “altered tensions” into an actual aural experience instead of a just a theoretical idea.
  • Drone over a standard song. Choose a tune that is both harmonically complex and enjoyable to improvise over, and set the drone as the tonic root note. Practicing this way will help you to really internalize the modulations found within the harmony of the song.
  • Have no specific key center in mind. Yes, just improvise/explore freely, noticing how certain combinations of notes work over the drone. Learn to get comfortable with (and recognize) various degrees of dissonance. Just let your mind run free and see what you discover. Or maybe make variations on a simple intervallic pattern.

Practicing with a drone can also really open up your rhythmic imagination. The constancy of the drone sound acts as a kind of support for you to push against, yet provides no specific rhythmic stimulus. At first, this can seem kind of challenging, as perhaps no kind of rhythmic movement comes immediately to mind.

But after even just a short amount of practice, you’ll find yourself imagining and playing multiple rhythmic pulses. As you spend even more time, you can explore various types of odd-metered groupings and time feels, modulating tempos and more. Practicing this way will make rhythmic variation much more available to you as you improvise.

And if you like, you can also practice with a drone and a time source (either a drum loop or metronome) at the same time. This is not only immensely helpful in opening up possibilities, but also, is very meditative, engaging and calming.

It’s not hard to get access to some good drones, these days. Here are a few resources:

I use two different smartphone/tablet apps. I have an iPad, and my favorite is RealTanpura, which simulates the four-stringed drone instrument used in Indian classical music. I like it because it has a beautiful sound, and I can change the pulsation of the drone, as well as choose various other modes (harmonic organizations), speed, pluck rate, etc.

The other app that I use from time to time is Scale-Master, which is a synthesized drone, but comes with various features that are useful, like being able to create specific intervallic drones, and a large range of frequencies.

Recently I’ve been using DroneTone, which has a sampled cello sound. Rich in overtones, it has been particularly helpful for dialing in my intonation/voicing on saxophone.

Whichever you choose, if you start daily practice with a drone, you’ll discover all kinds of new ways to think of and hear music. Your ear will improve, and you’ll have lots of satisfying, highly enjoyable playing experiences.

And if you know of, or use, an app that you think is particularly good, please let me know about it!