Monday, August 31, 2009

Practicing

Do I still practice? Yes! Practicing is a way of life for a musician. You can either look at it as one of those boring "chores" that you have to do, or you can approach it as a way of bettering your playing skills.

Playing percussion, I have to keep my chops up on set, snare, timpani, mallets, and congas. I also play piano which is an instrument with which I "relax".

So what do I practice? For starters let me say there is quantitative practicing where you work on things such as scales, rudiments, excerpts, patterns, and in the process attain accuracy and authority at various tempi. This builds your hands/feet, strength, and stamina. It also builds headroom into your performance playing. Headroom is the difference between a car that is built to go 140 miles an hour and is only being driven 65 miles an hour, and a car that can only go 65 miles per hour at its top speed. Both cars can go 65 but one is cruising while the other is overloaded, rattling, and about to fall apart in the process. If you always feel like the second car being overloaded when you perform, then you need to practice in this manner with a metronome to measure improvement.

Qualitative practicing deals with approaching the material on your music stand to better understand what the composer/arranger had in mind for the music. The nuance of the music. The dynamics of the piece. The tempo where the music starts to make sense and sound right. As an experiment...right now... sing Jingle bells very softly and very... very slowly. You will notice that while you may be getting the correct notes, you are probably not singing the song in the joyous, exuberant, and fun way James Pierpont intended. That's a huge difference. Get away from the notes and into the music.

More on practicing in another post.
cn
Posted by at 10:29 PM
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2 comments:

  1. I was asked this week by my orchestra conductor if I wanted to play a musical. He thought it would be a good experience for me. The drama people are doing Music Man.When you talk about practicing, do you read through the book from cover to cover at different speeds?
    I like youre blog!
    Tyler

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  2. Hey Tyler. Congrats on being asked. If you have never played a musical before you will have a good time and a fun challenge. Music Man is a very good musical to get your feet wet.

    Most musicals have 2 percussionists (1 on set,1 on mallets). Music Man has one. You will be playing:BASS DRUM, BELLS, CYMBAL, GLOCKENSPIEL, HIGH HAT, SNARE DRUM, TEMPLE BLOCKS, TOM TOM, TRIANGLE, TYMPANI, VIBRAPHONE, WHISTLE, WOOD BLOCK, and XYLOPHONE.

    My routine for a musical is to "read" through the book as you would a novel, and take notes as to what instruments get played together or within a few beats of each other. This gives you a picture of where everything should be placed for your performances.

    Once you get all that taken care of, start looking for the tough stuff such as two instruments at the same time, long or fast runs on xylo, funny note changes on timps etc. On a legal pad note the page and the measures where these occur. Don't sweat the easy stuff and pay attention to the complicated passages and the "choreography" of getting from one instrument to another, or in some cases which mallet to pick up and when. You might wind up with 15 trouble areas. THESE are what you practice until you can master them.

    I hope that helps.
    cn

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