Category: Teaching

The Ten Coins

8/28/2016

This game was first described to me by Tom Booth during my time at SMU. The goal is to gain consistency in passages that you have already learned slowly by buzzing, singing, etc. I usually use this game with excerpts, but it can be equally beneficial when applied to difficult solo passages or technique exercises.

The game is pretty simple:

Get a stack of 10 coins (or buttons, pencils, or whatever) and pick an excerpt or passage
Play the excerpt and record it
Listen back, and if you hear no mistakes, remove one coin from the pile and start a new pile. If you do hear mistakes, use your big bag of practice techniques to make it better, then record it again until it is correct.
f you make a mistake (on any of the takes), put all the coins back in the first pile and start over.
Repeat this process, and you are finished when all the coins are moved from the old pile to the new. This means you have played the passage correctly 10 times in a row!

Although the process seems simple, this is one way of practicing most people neglect (including myself). We often work on something, finally get it right, and then go on to practice the next difficult thing. It is good when you get it right, but then you need to reinforce the correct way of playing the passage. For example, if you messed up an excerpt 3 times before getting it correct, your ratio of correct to incorrect is 1 to 3. Even if you don't have time to get 10 correct repetitions in a row, you always want to have more correct reps than incorrect.

There are lots of articles about how many correct repetitions it takes to "erase" a mistake, some saying 8 times, some saying 20 or more. Either way you look at it, you want to minimize the incorrect repetitions and maximize the correct ones. This game is most useful once you have learned the passage well, otherwise you are bound to play the passage incorrectly multiple times in a row. Even though there is no way to recreate the stress of an audition, I find that I experience similar feelings if I am playing this game and have moved 9 of the 10 coins to the new pile. There is some extra pressure just knowing that if this last run is not clean, I have to start all over as square one.

Try starting with something you are very comfortable with and see how you do!

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Listen to Yourself!

8/16/2016

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We all know we need to listen to ourselves, right? We tell our students to listen to themselves more closely, and our teachers tell us to listen better. We can try all we want, but when playing a new piece that consumes most of our attention, it can be hard to hear everything that is going on in our playing. In auditions or performances, we tend to have a heightened sense of perception compared to our typical practice, which leads us to hear more of what is going on (for better or worse). This could be due to nerves or just the excitement of performing.

     There are a lot of articles out there that link nervousness and performance anxiety to the idea of practicing with less attention than performing. If we slack off in practice and all of a sudden pay close attention when performing, it makes sense that we will hear more things (including more mistakes), and that will make us nervous, scared, and even angry. To really hear what is going on in your playing, try recording yourself. A recorder can act like an unbiased listener that tells it like it is, and if you know the red light is on you will play differently, as if someone is actually listening. This is a good idea in general, always play as if your favorite musician is listening!

   An exercise I learned from Tom Booth at SMU is the "down the page method". The idea is to get a recorder, a legal pad (the extra long pad of paper), and an excerpt or a couple lines of an etude. You record a take, and immediately listen back. Write as many comments as you can using only one line on the sheet. Continue this process until you are all the way down the page. This can take a while, but the listening acts as built-in rest for your face so you don't get too fatigued.

Notice as you get towards the bottom of the page, your commentary will likely change from missed notes and rhythms to more subtle qualities such as tone quality, phrasing, centering, and pitch. Even if you miss notes towards the bottom of the page, the unconscious shift in your attention is the beginning of improving your ear so you eventually hear all these details while playing.

If you have ever taken an unsuccessful audition and asked for comments from the audition committee, you probably have received some that were a surprise to you; "I didn't realize I was doing that!". Many of these things can be easily fixed by first knowing how to play the excerpt (through lessons, listening, etc), and then making sure you are actually doing what you intend, or in other words playing it the way you believe it should be played. Weird things happen in auditions or public performances, and recording yourself doesn't necessarily guarantee a mistake-free performance, but it can at the very least bring your attention to the mistake in the practice room, rather than on stage where it is a surprise and can lead to even more mistakes.

Set up your recorder next time you practice and try to find at least three things (good or bad) that you only hear on the recording and didn't catch in performance. This will point you in the right direction of what you are not hearing and consequently need to focus more on when practicing. It could be anything from too much vibrato, unclear multiple tonguing, and unsteady rhythms to surprisingly good phrasing and clear articulation.

   Comment below with any other creative ways you like to use a recorder to supplement your practicing!

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Started From the Bottom Now We're Here!

7/12/2016

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How many times have you learned a piece of music very well from the beginning, and by the time you get to the end you are sounding less than stellar? Probably many times, and if not, think of your students (if you teach) or maybe you have been a judge at some level of all-region or all-state auditions. The truth is, it happens to all of us. Here we have another simple albeit unconventional way to learn a piece of music.

We start out excited to learn a piece, and work on say the first three lines for a while, working out whatever technical or musical issues we find. The next day we get maybe to the fourth line, a day later the fifth, and so on. If we continue down this path, it is a week or so by the time we actually start to learn the end of the piece, maybe even longer depending on the length of the work. It's no wonder those all-region auditions sounded so much better when the audition cut was at the beginning of the piece!

Try this, learn the piece backwards. This can be a solo, etude, excerpt, or whatever. Start with the last note or beat, and add a note or beat before that with each correct repetition. I use the same rules of the Two Note Drill to determine if I move on or not. Unless it is exactly how you want it to sound, do it again! High standards when practicing lead to high levels of performance. Learning backwards helps with many issues other than simply learning the end of the piece first:

Endurance - If you struggle with endurance and usually start at the beginning of the piece, you will always be tired by the time you get to the end. Learn from the back a little bit at a time, and you will practice good habits when playing the end of the piece, so even if you are fatigued in performance you can rely on your reps of practice to carry you through.
Breath Control - If you have a long excerpt that must be played in one breath, start from the end adding a note or a beat backwards at a time (with a metronome!). This will gradually train you to be more efficient with your air and you will always end the piece feeling comfortable, rather than running on fumes! (I use this on the 2nd mvt. of Pines of Rome for this reason)
Phrasing - You will learn phrases more deeply by looking at them in a different way. If a piece contains mostly 4 or 8 measure phrases, going backwards by beat or measure will have you starting in sometimes awkward places, because you will often be starting within a phrase. You will never perform the work this way (unless you take an audition and there are awkward starting places), but if you know you can nail the high point of a phrase cold, it will be a piece of cake when you actually get to play the entire phrase from the beginning.
Accuracy - Similar to what was stated above, if you can sound awesome playing an etude from any and every starting point, running the whole thing and focusing on the piece as a whole will become much easier.

There are other benefits as well, one being that this will let you practice the same piece longer before getting bored with it. I find this especially helpful for younger students, especially those who always want to learn something new, not that there is anything wrong with that. I tend to get tired of pieces easily as well, so I use this method a ton! Each time you add a beat going backwards, it creates a new exercise and a new starting point. Otherwise, the student will always sound good at the beginning of the phrase regardless of how they sound at the end, simply because they start at the exact same spot every single time! I personally find this a more creative, involved, and effective way to practice. So next time you run an etude top to bottom and then get down to work, start from the bottom, and see how much better you are when you make it to the top!

The Top!

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The Two Note Drill

7/11/2016

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This is the first of many posts on practice methods and ways to learn music. The goal is for this page to be a resource with different practice ideas, so you can skim through posts and find different techniques to help improve different aspects of playing. For this first post lets talk about a simple yet very effective practice method I call the Two Note Drill. It is pretty self explanatory, and can be used in a variety of different ways. The TND is great for any ability level whether you are a beginner or a seasoned veteran. I first used this drill when teaching beginners, but now use it myself with very positive results!

     The general idea is that when learning a piece or passage, you start at the beginning and play only the first two notes. If you are rock solid move on. By rock solid I mean it has to have the sound (I usually go for a sound imitating my favorite recording of the opening of Pictures at an Exhibition), articulation, rhythm, intonation, dynamic, and direction (go to the second note or come away from the first?) that you intend. All of these aspects must be thought out before you play, otherwise how will you know if you nailed it or not?! It is a lot to think about at first, but the devil is in the detail, and with little work most anyone can play two notes in a row darn near perfectly.

     If the two notes are not as clean as you want them, buzz, sing, and play them (a later post will cover many different ways to solidify intervals). When you move on, the second note you played is now your new starting note. To make matters simple lets take a C major scale. Play C to D. If it is good, play D to E, then E to F, and so on.

   As I mentioned before, this is a simple method, but can be applied to a beginner learning a C major scale, or an expert learning the Henze Sonatina! Keep in mind that this is just one way to aid in hearing and centering every interval in a piece, and the idea is best used in the practice room rather than performing. You rarely want to only think of two note groups when playing music, especially on faster, technical pieces, but when starting to learn those difficult pieces, the TND will build a sturdy foundation much more efficiently than simply (and mindlessly) running the hard licks over and over.

     If you are ever having trouble hitting the bullseye on all your notes but can't seem to figure out where you first get out of the "zone", start at the beginning of the piece or passage using the TND and wherever you run into problems is a good indicator of where you need to work! You will be surprised how much work you can get done on difficult repertoire with just 5 or 10 minutes of this exercise. To spice it up, also try these!

TND singing (checking with the piano AFTER you sing it)
TND Buzzing (with both slurred glissandos and articulation)
Three Note Drill, Four Note Drill, etc...

Thanks for reading, and comment below if you found this to be effective!

-Justin

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The Ten Coins﻿

Listen to Yourself!

Started From the Bottom Now We're Here!

The Two Note Drill

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The Ten Coins