LITTLE STEPS ADD UP TO GIANT STEPS

Calli, one of my nine-year-old clarinet students had a challenge: she wanted to win an audition into the advanced band at her school and go with them to their Disneyland concert.

But she'd only been playing for just over four months, and the audition piece was way over her skill level.  She'd even auditioned once before and was stopped mid-performance.

But she was determined. I broke the song down for her into little phrases, some only a few notes long, and we worked on finger placement and tonguing exercises too.

Friends, before I tell you how this story ends, what I've described for you is an important learning/teaching tool.

Isolate, then integrate.  Meaning, separate out the difficult passages, break them down to just two notes if you have to, practice slowly, build up speed and confidence, then string them back together.

Back to Calli:

This time when she went in to audition, the teacher stopped her, then asked the class to applaud.

She did it -- Calli's going to Disneyland with the band.

Next? Learning that success brings greater responsibility in the form of harder pieces to learn and delivery in performance.

But I think she can do it.

And Calli? She KNOWS she can do it.

practicing, scales, saxophone, music lessons, clarinet, woodwinds, music instruction, teaching strategies 

METRONOME OPTIONS FOR HATERS

Yeah, I know -- so many of my students truly hate practicing to a metronome. One student even said it reminded him of his mother!

I understand. Sort of.

I was watching a tutorial on YouTube in which the legendary Michael Brecker  said even he got depressed when he used his metronome because it busted him for rushing.

But if it wasn't one of the most important tools available to sax players at every level of the game, I wouldn't harp on you all to use a metronome at home, nor would I bring mine to lessons.

Trying to learn to play music without a metronome is like trying to get somewhere without a map: you end up all over the place.

And if and when you do gig with a band, you'll stick out like a sore thumb because you will likely have timing issues from not having gotten down with your metronome.

But -- there are alternatives you may find that are even better than the steady blip-blip-bleep coming out of the little black box.

Rhythm tracks, for example. You can buy them online and download for use. YouTube only has about a million of them under various headings, such as this funk groove drum beat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiz-pj5FMSE

Whatever you decide on, use your metronome or a backing drum track every day without fail for a portion of your practice session.

You can thank me later.

rhythm studies,  saxophone advice, music lessons, metronome, rhythm tracks, saxophone, woodwinds, rhythm, beats

PRACTICING WHAT I PREACH

I agree -- sometimes, practicing is all about doing those things that I don't really want to do.

And, doing them in a way that gets results rather than just doing what I call mindless practice -- you know what I mean: checking messages while practicing, texting, scanning YouTube, watching TV, and on and on.

Lately, a friend posted some vids of me jamming at a blues club on YouTube, and the sound of my horn about made me cringe.

I was out of tune.

Granted, I couldn't hear this during the performance because of the amps and drums and the lack of a stage monitor, but so be it.

There I was, out of tune.  In public.

So, I went back to practicing long tones with a tuner, and then I thought about some of the other tools I'd been avoiding, like the metronome.

Yep. Resumed working with that, too.

And then I thought about yet another one of the 'T's" I'd been neglecting, and that was transcribing.

I've always found transcribing to be cumbersome and difficult...even though when I do it, my playing improves.

So, I went to work on transcribing an Illinois Jacquet solo. Transcribing is simply one of the best tools we have at our disposal. Nothing forces us to listen more carefully, nor to learn the note-by-note of how a master instrumentalist approaches ideas, than by transcribing a solo to our horns.

No, don't write it down. Listen to the the point that you can sing every note, then, begin to play and memorize on your horn.

Yes. It can take a lot of time and effort, but by the end, you will have learned more than you bargained for.

Remember the three T's when you practice next time: Time, Tune, and Transcribe.  You'll be glad you did.

saxophone, lessons, transcribe, metronome, intonation, tuner, rhythm, jazz rhythm, blues rhythm, woodwind solo

NO, WE'RE NOT JUST MACHINES

The other day at lessons one of my valued students had some questions about working out an arrangement for a song.

But her questions had less to do with the music and more to do with band member relations.

She wanted to know if she should get the other horn players to articulate a line the way she heard it.

My answer was for her to bring it up next time at band practice. What I thought about that line and how it should be performed was irrelevant at that point.

Friends, part of learning music is learning how to communicate such ideas about arranging or phrasing or whatever amongst yourselves in a manner that is  constructive, respectful, and that gets the point across.

I recall a day on the band stand with adult musicians...and one of them was having trouble finding a groove at the place where the  song shifted to cut time. A musician offered an opinion. I'm sure he thought he was only being helpful, but he said it in a way such that the other guy took offense and unplugged his own rig and went home.

If there's a moral to today's post it is this: communication in band class takes place on many more levels than with your respective instruments, and that's part of what you are there to learn -- or, as my friend and guitarist Tom Tice would put it, how to play nice with one another.

WE LEARN TO PLAY MUSIC BY LISTENING TO MUSIC, NOT BY MEMORIZING SCALES

We listen to someone play, and then, we try as best we can to mimic what we just heard on our own horn. We repeat that process over and over until we get it right. Along the way, we learn such valuable tools as phrasing, note choice, dynamics, and so on.

That's been the proven best way to learn how to play an instrument. But instead of doing that, we more often than not get caught up in theory and rote memorization and tests and so on -- especially when we are just starting out.

And this is especially the time that we need to listen and imitate -- when we are in the beginning of the learning process.

Why?

This is much the same way we learned to speak, right? We heard the people around us talking and making sounds and over time and trial and error, we learned to repeat the language. We made mistakes. But our parents encouraged us and we got better. Later, we learned the alphabet, and how to write words.

Now, imagine not being able to talk, but having to learn the alphabet anyway. It would be a meaningless experience, right? Language facility first, then the building blocks and tools.

We do music pretty much in reverse of this. Music education quite often involves learning the equivalent of the alphabet long before we can play music.

And in the end, so many of our students simply never 'get' music. They have no idea how to play, how to develop a sound, because they never listen and imitate. That's not part of a traditional music education.

As s student of the art, you've simply got to listen to music, and you've got to study the history of it. I play R&B style sax, and I know that I likewise replay the roots of that music when I perform, as learned by transcribing the solos of top R&B founding sax players like Jr. Walker and King Curtis and Rusty Bryant.

R&B is a language with a history, and incorporating those elements of the language, meaning all of those particular sounds and articulations and phrasing and riffs passed down through the ages into the dialogue, makes for a successful solo.

We're not re-inventing the wheel here.

Playing music is all about knowing  the history of the music, and how to use it as a soloist. And understanding the context of that history is where a student of music can focus her/his efforts.

The good news is that just about every single note in the archives of R&B is on record and as such made accessible by YouTube.

So go listen, and learn by repeating what you hear. Put on a track by your favorite artist, listen over and over until you have the piece in your memory and can sing the notes, and then pick up your horn and see what comes out.        

SING YOUR WAY TO BETTER SAXOPHONE PLAYING

That's right. Sing.

Out loud.

In the shower, on your morning walks, in the car, wherever.

Why? Because the act of singing does a couple of things that improve our saxophone technique. First, humming a melody over and over implants it in your memory in such a way that recall becomes easier and easier.

Second, singing a melody that you are trying to learn on your saxophone shapes your throat in order to form the notes (and your breath) in order to make them come out of your throat and into the world.

And those two things are Basic Saxophone 101: the shape of your throat through the horn's range of notes, and, how you move breath through the saxophone.

Experiment a little, and sing a tune that has everything from low notes to high notes. Notice as you are singing the different shapes your throat makes for high notes as opposed to low notes, and you begin to get the idea.

This is exactly what we do (or want to be doing) when we play the saxophone: making a 'theeeeeeeee' throat shape in the upper registers, and making a 'the' throat shape in the lower registers.

And singing a melody helps you learn those things without too much effort and it imprints the melody in your memory at the same time.

In the words of one of my wise old saxophone teachers:  "Don't play it unless you can sing it."

It works for me, singing, and it's worked for my students who have added singing to their daily repertoire.

Teaching Generation Z to Play Music

The image accompanying today's post is a cover for a Samsung smart phone. It shows the evolution of man from knuckle-dragger to the pinnacle of evolution: in this case, a sax player.

Sweet! And, on a cell phone cover.

And why not? Most of my students fall into Gen Z, the pre-teen and teen years, and they spend a lot of their time connected to the Internet on their smart phones.

A recent study posted by NPR in fact claims that Gen Z kids spend more time on the Internet than they do sleeping. Gen Z kids are the most inter-connected generation we have ever known. They can (and do) multitask on several screens, and they crave social contact as well.

They move about the planet in groups; hence the rise in popularity of pop music festivals.

Most of the Gen Z-ers in my lessons came to  music as an elective, not as an outgrowth from their home life. Few of them had the kind of childhood I did -- where my parents played records almost non-stop, especially at dinner.  Listening to music was a group thing in my house, and I am grateful. That's where my own deep and abiding love of music comes from.

And wanting to make those sounds is what inspired me to want to take music farther than the fifth grade band class where it all started for me.

Now, as a music educator, I am keenly aware of how environment nurtures creativity. Likewise, I know that everything I ask my Gen Z students to do -- namely, spend much time alone in a room, running music exercises over and over and over again -- runs completely counter to their generational needs.

How do I compete with a generation that has so much of the Internet at their fingertips on demand that they are able to become curators of their own lives?

I don't know. Learning to play an instrument in our current model is all about woodshedding. It takes time and patience alone to learn, say, all of the blues scales.

The one thing the Internet can't do is learn them for you. You can find dozens of tutorials posted by master sax players on YouTube, but by the end of a day, you have to knuckle down and learn them by playing them over and over.

I'll leave you with this question: how do I keep lessons interesting and relevant and still get my teen students to cover the bases and actually practice during their spare time?

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