Technique is not an option..If you can’t play the notes.. you can’t play the music! M13

Description

Practice is very different than playing music… We practice to develop technique on our instruments, to develop sound or tone color and just to get to know our instruments.

I is never necessary to practice fast on correctly…. If you miss note it will take several hundred times of playing the passage right to get the mistake out of your fingers and mind…

What do we think about when practicing a passage or scale?
1.         The most important thing about playing any instruments is to listen to everything that comes out of the instrument… Know what you sound like!

2. Play slow and thing about movement of sound. (Making one note go to the next without any hesitation) when playing wind instruments when it is time to change from one note to another the fingers move as fast as possible… there is the same distance and movement time between two whole notes as between 2 thirty seconds. Developing an even tone color comes from practicing and n even volume so you can truly her the tone colors….
3. Match tone color of each note to the next. We want the volume, sound and response of each note to be the same.
4. Play at a medium volume.. do not practice using different volumes… This will come when practicing music… not in developing the instrument technique.
5. Become obsessed with developing the correct technique…
   *I lived with my good friend Dan Higgins in Denton Texas many years ago when he was going to North Texas…. One day he was learning to go from B to the middle finger C… well, after about 6 hours of hearing B-C, B-C, B-C over and over again… I went to his side of the house and told him I needed a break from B-C… He laughed… took a short break and started up again…. but by the end of the day he could really go from B to C… flawlessly…

* When we came to California we lived together until he got married and the same thing happened when he learned to go form B to the Bis B-Flat…. All day B-Bis, B-Bis never fast just correctly and very even eight notes…. Obsession is necessary to develop complete control of an instrument…

*I had a lot of young layers come into my shop and talk about wanting to be Studio musicians… and they could not play an even scale….