Adding piano
I practice in twenty minute intervals with, typically, a twenty minute rest in between each session. I do this twice a day playing for an hour each time. I’ve always felt that the twenty minute rests weren’t long enough to settle into doing something else so I put on the TV or do some crossword puzzles on my computer or do both.
I practice in my living room sitting about 5 feet away from my piano. Earlier this week I had one of those ‘well duh’ moments and realized that I can do something very worthwhile as I wait twenty minutes for my chops to recover. I can practice the piano. What a concept. It makes a lot of sense to do this. For one thing, I enjoy playing the piano even though I’m close to a beginner on it. I took lessons when I was a kid but stopped when I started the horn. At this point my horn playing capability is considerably better than my piano playing capability. But more importantly, by playing the piano I can improve my sight reading and get better at reading the base clef without using my chops. Although I haven’t tried it yet, I imagine I can work on transposition as well. It’s too bad I didn’t think of this a year ago.
Mouthpieces again
Four days ago I wrote about how I thought I had finally gotten through the mouthpiece fiasco. I was wrong. Monday morning’s practice was pretty bad and at my band rehearsal that evening I could barely play. I would have chalked this up to a random bad day except that Tuesday and Wednesday were just as bad if not worse. I’m playing the horn to have fun and enjoy making music. I haven’t had much fun during the past six weeks. Yesterday morning I was practicing and I was so frustrated that I felt like throwing the horn through the window.
I’ve been using my Laskey mouthpiece since the end of September. I went back to the Moosewood for a day or two here and there because I was struggling so much with the Laskey but I have been, for almost the whole time, sticking with it. I know that using the Moosewood at all during this time was not a good idea but it’s very hard to keep sticking with something that’s not working.
Yesterday afternoon I took the Moosewood out again and made a decision to stick with it no matter what. Sometimes you just have to go with your gut and mine has been telling me to use the Moosewood for weeks now. I’ve been sticking with the Laskey because it is ‘supposed’ to be a better mouthpiece for my Otto horn with it’s bowl shaped cup and I promised Scott Bacon that I wouldn’t change back to the Moosewood until I saw him at my next lesson. Well, I’ve broken my promise but ironically he called me today to ask about the mouthpiece problem and, after I went through telling him about all the trouble I’ve been having, he told me to switch back to the Moosewood. (I didn’t mention that I had already done that the day before.) What a relief. I feel like a huge load has been taken off my shoulders.
As I expected, I played very well – ‘very well’ meaning that I was happy with the way I was playing – yesterday afternoon and today. It’s so nice to just pick up the horn, especially since it’s a brand new horn, and just enjoy playing. I expect that I will experience a set back in a week or so but I am just going to have to get through it.
I’m playing better
I think I have finally turned the corner from my mouthpiece disaster and lower lip bite. Just under two weeks ago I settled on using the Laskey mouthpiece even though I didn’t really want to. I decided that I had to trust Scott Bacon who I bought my Otto horn from and who really wanted me to use the Laskey with this geyer wrap horn.
After about four days of pure misery, including numbness and pain on top of the awful playing and biting my lip three times on Friday and Saturday, last Sunday things started getting better. I had a band concert that afternoon and I played really well despite the lower lip bites and the changed mouthpiece. I couldn’t play at all Saturday but Sunday morning I warmed up and didn’t feel too bad. Then I did some flexibility exercises before the concert. We did a two hour program with a 20 minute intermission and I was okay, with some occasional pain, through the whole thing.
During this week I’ve had a few revelations as I struggled with the mouthpiece and the bites. One had nothing to do with the either of those. Our conductor brought in two extra college students for the concert bringing our horn section from five to seven. One doubled me on 4th and I asked her to sit to my left so she wouldn’t hear me and my inevitable mistakes and so I could hear her. I learned what playing the horn loud means. Now I understand why my teachers tell me I’m not playing loud when I think I am.
I also think that a large part of my mouthpiece struggle was due to endurance. A new mouthpiece uses, to some extent, different muscles. My first 20 minutes of warm ups were always fine. The awful playing started after about ten minutes into my second practice session and I really couldn’t play after about 45 minutes (this includes the first 20 minutes). That’s about where I was a year ago. Now I’m almost back to my usual two hours. On Thursday I made it through an hour and ten minutes of practice followed by an hour long lesson later that afternoon.
I noticed that once I start playing poorly my bottom teeth start digging into my lower lip. With the bite injury I have there it gets quite painful. When this happens I can barely get to middle C when I try to do a low C arpeggio. Usually I can get to 3rd space C easily and many times to the E above that. If I pay very close attention to how I set my horn on my face I can then play those arpeggios to 3rd space C and when I go back to what I was practicing my tone gets much better. So somewhere along the way as my endurance lags I must be subtly changing my embouchure in a bad way to cope with it.
I’ve had my share of lip injuries – tearing skin off with ice cubes, banging mouthpieces and water bottles into my lips, biting the inside of my lower lip – since I started playing again. Reading Julia Rose’s blog about her recent injury reminded me of them and how I deal with playing while hurt. Julia talks about first getting a more minor injury where she expected to play after a day or two followed by a significantly worse injury that demands a solid rest from horn playing. I always try to play through the pain, which I imagine is a bad idea, because I worry a lot about taking breaks from practicing. When I was sick back in June and didn’t play for close to a week it took a few days to recover from not playing. Plus I actually enjoy practicing and I don’t know what to do with myself when I have those extra hours. I’m retired and I play for fun and if I don’t play well the only person it effects is me. Concerns about injuries must be a lot worse for professionals.
I use Vitamin E and ChopSaver lip balm when I have an open wound on my lips. ChopSaver is the best lip balm I’ve ever used and my non brass playing family swears by it too. (I promise I don’t own stock in the company.) I’ve been putting ChopSaver directly on the wound in my lower lip and it is really helping. It should have gone away by now but I keep re-biting it. I did try Ambesol on it but it also got on my lips and I learned what feeling numb really feels like. I think I wasn’t as numb as I thought I was using the Laskey mouthpiece. I thought briefly about playing while the Ambesol was doing it’s thing but I’ve used up my being stupid quotient for the month.
Frustration
Frustration is nothing new for me as I learn to play again. I’ve had my share of bad days and bad weeks and I deal with them much better now than I used to handle them. These days I usually just shrug my shoulders and know that this too will pass. Early in my quest to learn this beast I would try different mouthpieces if I was having a bad day. I had four or five of them sitting on a table next to me and I would try one after another until I found one that helped just a tad. Then I’d use it for a couple of days until it didn’t help anymore and I’d go back and use the old one. Even when I was doing this I knew it was a bad idea and then when I had my first lesson with Scott Bacon early in 2009 he said no more changing mouthpieces. I’ve stuck with the same one, a Moosewood B12, until about three weeks ago.
One of the horns I was testing (and the one I bought last week) during my quest for a new horn was a Dieter Otto 180K. Andrew Joy plays on them professionally and I contacted him about the horn. He suggested that, for the Otto horns, I go to a mouthpiece with a cup shape rather than a cone shape that the Moosewood has. At my latest lesson with Scott Bacon he switched me to a Laskey 75G mouthpiece.
For the first week I played really, really well. My term for this is new mouthpiece euphoria. Then two weeks ago I went to an audition and although my warm-up right before the audition went fairly well, I played poorly at the audition. I was suspicious that my mouthpiece euphoria had ended but my playing improved again and didn’t really deteriorate until this past Thursday. Some of this is due to the new horn but I had this horn on loan for at least 6 weeks and generally played very well on it. I think that the stiffness in my chops, poor tone quality, and most likely my loss of endurance is due to the mouthpiece change. The other thing that I’m experiencing is some numbness in my upper lip and a touch of numbness in my lower lip after I warm up for about 20 minutes and right after I started using this mouthpiece I noticed that the feeling of my skin on my upper lip is smoother – almost like I lost a minute layer of skin – and I have two subtle ridges where the mouthpiece touches my lip. These ridges were more pronounced last week but the difference in the smoothness of the skin hasn’t changed.
So…..yesterday, being very frustrated, I tried my Moosewood mouthpiece again. I played a few phrases with it and then the same phrases with the Laskey and back and forth like that for about 15 minutes. The two things I detected were a subtle change in tone – the Moosewood sounded a tad brassier – and the Moosewood felt a little funny. It didn’t have that aah factor like when you put on your favorite comfy sweatshirt. For the rest of practice – I toughed it out for about 45 minutes – I used the Laskey.
I’m not sure what to do. Visually the rims on the two mouthpieces look very similar. The shanks are different. Is it possible that the change in shank style could cause this change in my chops? I suspect that the culprit is the rim. My Moosewood has a screw on rim and the Laskey doesn’t. I don’t think Moosewood has a cup shaped mouthpiece. Are there manufacturers that have cup shaped mouthpieces that I can screw on my Moosewood rim? Should I stick with the Laskey I have and hope that my chops get better? I’m tempted to use the Moosewood today and see how it goes though it may just add to my problems.
Travel with horn
Boy this has been a busy week. I picked up a consulting contract with a customer I worked with before I retired so I had to go to Atlanta for the initial meeting. Despite the fact that I traveled over 3 million miles during my 25 year marketing career I prefer driving to flying so I wanted to drive to Atlanta. My husband was also heading to the meeting since he is peripherally involved with the project so I convinced him to drive by adding a mini-vacation in Virginia Beach.
My challenge was fitting in practicing during the trip. It’s a 15 hour drive from Long Island to Atlanta so we headed out last Tuesday evening to avoid traffic. I practiced before we left so Tuesday was covered. Wednesday was the long haul of the drive but I still got about 45 minutes of practice in. I used my Best Brass mute for the first time. The Best Brass mute is similar to the Yamaha Silent Brass mute but it is smaller and self contained – no external amplification box. The horn sounded reasonable, much better than with just a plain practice mute. Using the mute was an interesting experience. I didn’t feel like I was giving my chops any kind of a workout. After 45 minutes I still felt fresh. I think it’s okay for practicing technical passages but not for endurance. I also had to hold the horn with my right forearm pressed against the mute to keep it from falling out of the horn.
On Thursday we got back to the hotel at a reasonable time and I asked the clerk at the front desk if there was somewhere I could play. She offered the hotel’s boardroom which was located behind the front desk but away from any rooms. I figured that anyone in the lobby was going to hear me play so I decided to just have some fun. I did do my usual warmup but I skipped scales and Kopprasch. (Great excuse.) I brought a lot of music with me so I just ran through it – Basler’s Canciones, Strauss’ Nocturno, Strauss 1, Lowell Shaw’s Just Desserts and some stuff from the Mason Jones solo book. Hopefully the inevitable clams weren’t that audible. The hotel clerk gave me a big thumbs up when I was done so I guess it wasn’t too bad.
Friday was another long haul driving day but this time I didn’t get any practicing in. By the time we got to the hotel, checked in and ate dinner – we were starving – it was late and I was exhausted. Saturday I took the horn out around 10 Am and played for a bit out on the balcony. It was oceanfront and I was hoping the noise from the ocean would drown out the horn. Well it didn’t. My husband was outside by the boardwalk and he could hear me. I decided that taking out the mute was probably a good idea. The other rooms around me didn’t really need an AM horn call.
The drive home on Sunday took forever. What should have been an eight hour drive turned into an eleven hour drive. Needless to say when I got home it was late and I was not in the mood to practice. So for a six day trip I missed two days. On the days I did practice I got somewhere between 45 minutes to an hour in. None of it was what I would call quality practice but at least I did play and kept my chops working.
With a day off on Sunday I was curious how Monday would go. I put in a solid hour of hard practice in the morning and played very well. Then I remembered that I had a two hour band rehearsal that evening. Surprisingly I didn’t have any endurance problems at the rehearsal until the very end. Yesterday I was extremely busy and only played at my other band’s rehearsal. I had lots of endurance problems and no upper register so I guess I paid for Monday on Tuesday. In the end I think I did pretty well keeping in shape. I did schedule my weekly lesson for Friday to give me some time to prepare for it.
Unbelievable
In one of the community bands I play in our 1st horn player takes a lot of questionable liberties. I’m not talking about how he deals with the section members, he’s a very nice guy, but he actually changes the music! (and if you are the section leader in my band and are reading my blog, I’m sorry but you might want to think about what I’m writing about.)
Our section members and other members of the band near him have complained about this behavior but I didn’t really believe them. I thought, no this can’t really be true. I usually play 4th horn but at our last rehearsal I played 2nd and I had the opportunity to hear this guy for myself. OMG, it’s true. For one thing, he adds trills to parts that don’t have them. He adds notes to melodic lines. What he did to the theme song in Evita was something to behold. Don’t Cry for me Argentina tra la la la la la la la la la. Sometimes he just doesn’t play if the part consists of off-beats. But what takes the cake – he adds melodic lines to parts with off-beats that aren’t in his part or any of the horn parts. Sometimes up to 16 measures or so.
Now it’s possible that he only does this at rehearsals but considering the complaints I’ve heard I’m 99% sure that he does this at concerts also. The seating arrangement in this band puts me directly in front of the trumpets so I’m lucky if I can hear myself play. And until this latest rehearsal I couldn’t see his music so when I did hear him play I had no way to know what was in his part. Band arrangements can be weird.
So, you might be asking, why is this guy playing first in the band? Good question. A few weeks ago our 2nd horn spoke to the conductor about this and last week the assistant 1st horn also spoke to him. Our conductor is aware of the behavior, phew. It would be a lot worse if he wasn’t. The problem is that the 1st horn has been in the band forever and he’s a founding member of the board. (Don’t we all just love the English language – we can turn inanimate objects into people.) Nothing like politics. Our conductor is a really nice guy and I think he is at a loss about what to do. All of the horns in the section are capable of playing 1st, even me, so it’s not that he doesn’t have someone to play 1st. Our assistant 1st horn is actually the best of the bunch of us.
I’m new to this band as of last January so it’s not my place to say something but I will urge our 3rd horn to speak up. I think that if we can present some solution to the conductor that lets the 1st horn save face that might work. Coming up with a solution is the kicker. Anyone have any ideas?
Bits and Pieces Part 2
Don’t introduce yourself to the conductor of the new band you just joined and mention that you might need the ladies room during rehearsal. He might just tell you about his prostrate.
If you have a guest conductor and the regular conductor plays clarinet directly to your right don’t play those low G’s in the 4th horn part a beat off for ten measures.
If you’ve developed the most worthwhile skill of totally ingoring your metronome when practicing, don’t exhibit this newly honed skill at your lesson.
Before you decide that there is something terribly wrong with your horn, make sure you have screwed your bell on all the way.
Don’t bring music to your lesson to demonstrate one problem you are having without realizing that you are now going to spend a whole lesson’s worth of time on two measures.
Don’t bring your expensive tuner to a lesson and forget where you put it when you get back home. (Three weeks and counting.)
Don’t pack your horn up, put it in the car, and drive away to a concert. Good thing about that dreaded feeling that you forgot something. Yup, it was the bell.
Don’t go bicycle riding and bang a full water bottle on your lip. This hurts almost as much as doing it with the mouthpiece.
Don’t swap mouthpiece shanks and forget where you put your rim.
Don’t yell as loudly as possible at your conductor at the start of a concert. I didn’t do this, the 1st horn did. You might want to skip the next rehearsal too.
If you are going to arrive at an outdoor concert on your Harley it might be a good idea to arrive on time. – 1st clarinet and 1st flute.
You might want to read Bits and Pieces also.
Goals
When I first picked up my horn again back in May 2008 I really didn’t have any expectations or goals. I was just going to see how it would go. As I played and then actually started to practice I slowly got better and good things fell into place. I didn’t set a goal to play in a community band by January 09. One day my teacher and I talked about playing in a band and I found a local group, emailed the band director and got in. Then I met the other hornists in this band who told me about another band and I got into that.
As I practiced more and played better I got more serious about playing and I started to think very abstractly about what goals I have related to playing the horn. Goals can be short term or long term and may or may not be achievable depending on how they are defined. Fundraising goals, for example, are typically set for a fiscal year which, to me, would be a long term goal. Establishing targets for each quarter would be short term goals. To reach a short term goal one can define a set of tasks which, if accomplished, completes the goal. On a daily or weekly basis one can identify expectations that hopefully lead to successfully completing the task. A task could be contacting all the people who made a donation the previous year with an expectation of getting 65% of them to donate again.
For horn playing, one of my short term goals is to learn transposition. The tasks would be to learn Eb and then E and so forth. As I practice everyday I may set an expectation of playing one short Kopprasch etude correctly in Eb at a given tempo, say quarter note = 60. Once I achieve that, the next expectation would be to play the same exercise at quarter note = 70. This may seem like micromanagement but as I mentioned in my blog about expectations I want to make daily practice sessions a positive experience so I want to set my daily expectations darn close to achievable. As I work on transposition over time my short term goal will ultimately become an expectation – e.g. play x number of excerpts in different transpositions correctly.
A long term goal of mine would be to play in a community orchestra. One of the many things I need to do to achieve that goal is to learn transposition. So that long term goal of playing in a community orchestra is made up of shorter goals, one of which is to learn transposition. Another thing I have to work on is rhythm. I think most goals should be quantifiable so a goal of “get better at rhythm” would not be a particularly useful goal. Picking out a rhythmically complicated excerpt to be sight read in a month might be a better goal.
I hadn’t really thought about writing my goals down but it makes sense to do that just as it makes sense to write down expectations. To that end, I designed a practice log that hopefully will make it easy to jot down notes (pun intended) as I practice. The value of a practice log is not only to identify what one should work on for the day but to see progress on a regular basis. The more specific and achievable the expectations are the more obvious it will be to see improvement.
Practice Log
This is the log I designed and just started using. I typed in the exercises that I do everyday and I left blank space for the current things I am working on that will change over time. I entered a few expectations and goals as an example. I think this log still needs some improvements – a place for a date; maybe using landscape format to get more room for comments or to add a column for tasks. It’ll need to be two pages to get everything in it but that’s probably the better way to do it. Once I feel comfortable with the design I’ll take it to Staples, print up a hundred or so pages and have it bound.
I’ve been keeping a practice journal for quite a while now but I rarely go back and read it. For one thing, my handwriting is awful so when I do look it over I can’t figure out half of what I wrote. At my weekly lesson we sometimes review what I have written for the week but I lose some valuable lesson time trying to decipher what’s in the journal. Even if I can figure out what the words are I don’t always remember what I meant. This log needs to be simple and concise so it’s easy to go back and review it. If anyone has ideas on how to make this log better I’m all ears (or maybe eyes.)
Expectations
I had one of those “It’s 2 AM in the morning, why on earth am I awake?” nights and I started thinking about expectations. (It’s amazing what pops into one’s head in the middle of the night.) I spent 24 years in corporate marketing before I retired and I spent many of those years dealing with performance reviews based on expectations.
The typical review was based on ‘below expectations’, ‘meets expectations’, and ‘exceeds expectations’. These, of course, were one’s boss’s expectations. How they were derived were more about how much your boss liked you or what the corporation set as a required bell curve for reviews than how well you did your job. This is because expectations are highly subjective and very difficult to define concretely. I remember one time where I felt I had a stellar year and got a ‘meets expectations’ review. I talked to my boss and he agreed that I had a stellar year but then said, “I expected that of you.”
There are ways to try to quantify expectations – e.g. ‘put together 4 marketing kits for the year’. Well, if you put together 5 did you exceed expectations? Only if your boss thinks so. Maybe he would expect 6 in order to get an ‘exceeds’ expectations review.
So how does this relate to playing the horn? I think how ‘good’ we are is based mostly on expectations. For a pro there is a standard of expectations that needs to be met to get that gig or to get an orchestra job or a teaching position. Who defines what that standard is? The person or group who is doing the hiring. They may expect a candidate to play musically as most important and not mind a missed note or three. (Hopefully.) Or they may base everything on technical capability. They may even reject a candidate because he/she is too good and they expect that the person will leave soon for a better position. Did the person who gets the job ‘exceed’ their expectations? Probably but you’ll never know.
For the amateur I think expectations are more personal. There can be the same audition judging expectations for the community orchestra but many times our expectations define a ‘good’ practice day from a ‘bad’ one or a good horn solo in the orchestra from a bad one. You may think you didn’t play your best but the audience, with entirely different expectations, thinks it was wonderful.
When working with a teacher, I think it’s probably a good idea to talk about expectations. Rather than thinking your teacher expects you to play something perfectly (which is impossible) they most likely expect you to just improve. If they assign ‘this, this, and that’ find out what their expectations are. Maybe for the next lesson they just want the dynamics correct and don’t care so much about getting all the notes right. If they assign the Ab major scale most likely they expect you to know it by memory at the next lesson. But find out.
I usually write down how I think I did as I practice but it occurs to me that it might be beneficial to first write down what I expect of myself for my practice session. Maybe it’s just playing four measures of a piece I’m working on without any clams or playing the first two lines of a Kopprasch exercise without missing any notes. Whatever it is it needs to be realistic or I’m just setting myself up for failure and guaranteeing a ‘bad’ day. If I can come up with a reasonable set of expectations and accomplish them – the more specific I make them the easier it will be to determine if I accomplished them – then I can walk away from a practice session feeling good. There will always be days when I don’t meet my expectations but at least I’ll have a solid reason for why it’s a bad day and a goal to do better the next day. Maybe I’m preaching to the choir but that’s what happens with ideas formulated at 2 AM.
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