Tag Archives: Music

Breakthrough?

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It’s been an interesting two weeks since I last posted. For the most part I’ve been frustrated since playing day to day it’s hard to notice any progress. However, band started for the new year again after a month long Christmas break and that was an eye opening experience.

Tuesday night marked my one year anniversary playing with the 1st community band I joined.  One year ago I was very apprehensive about joining a band. I didn’t really think I was ready but fortunately my horn teacher gave me a bit of a push. I remember feeling very out of place and very nervous. I was introduced to the 1st hornist and he and I were the only hornists there at the start of the rehearsal. Thank heavens the 2nd and 3rd horns showed up. I really didn’t want to have the 1st horn hear me play.

This was the first time I played with a group since college in 1972. The band director handed me the music for 4th horn and off we went into the wild blue yonder. Cut time at quite a tempo. I didn’t have a prayer of playing any notes, let alone know where we were in the music. Fortunately we played some slower stuff and I fared better at that. I liked playing with the band enough that I kept going and over time I got better.

Fast forward to last Tuesday. The music was easy! Yes, easy. The band director handed out all new music and I had absolutely no problem sight reading through it. This was a huge boost to my lagging morale about my horn playing. I’m genuinely better. Wow.

Moving on to my lesson last Thursday. I’ve been struggling through Kopprasch #3 and Singer #4 for what seems like forever. Always with the same problem areas. I can’t play from the third space C up to the F and back down to the C cleanly – I kind of bump up into the notes – no matter how much I practice it. I have the same problem with these notes in other pieces. Of course these are not the only notes I have trouble with but at the moment these are the ones that are driving me crazy.

At my lesson my horn teacher asked me to try to open up my embouchure a bit because my sound was more closed than it’s been in the past. Lots of times she says to play out more. That’s one of my bigger problems. But at this lesson playing out more wasn’t really helping my sound open up. We checked my right hand position and that was okay. Once I opened up my embouchure my teacher said that my sound got a lot better. But the bigger change was that I didn’t miss my trouble notes. I had also been playing those same notes flat for the past couple of weeks. That improved as well. At the end of that lesson I felt recharged.

I’ve been trying to keep my embouchure more open over the past couple of days. I have found that some things have changed for the worse. I’ve lost my high Bb and C which had been easy for me. The more troubling change is that my middle register has gotten fuzzy. It’s hard to describe but the notes don’t have a pure tone. I don’t miss nearly as many notes as I had been but I’m sacrificing the quality of the note.

Yesterday I tried to go back to my usual embouchure but think about opening it up rather than actually doing it. This brought back my high range and cleaned up the middle register a bit. Some of the note chipping came back from C to F but not as bad as it was. What I can’t really tell is whether my sound closed up. That’s hard for me to hear especially in the room that I’ve been practicing in for the past three weeks. Wouldn’t it be funny if my whole recent sound problem is the acoustics in the room I’m using. Overall I think this change is a slight improvement that still needs to be tweaked.

Practice room acoustics –>

Downs and ups

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The past couple of weeks have been tumultuous to say the least. Finding time to practice was difficult but I did manage to put in around 40 minutes daily except for one day when I didn’t play at all. Just one day. Well you’d think I hadn’t picked up the horn in months by the way I played for several days after that one day of rest.

I think I’ve discovered a trend. If I back off my usual two hours of practice per day, or heaven forbid, skip a day, I play poorly for several days after. Then I get a bit better than I was before my lapse in practicing. When I read my practice notes from way back I noticed that every time I missed a day or more of practice I suffered for it. What’s hard to understand is how some of my fellow band members manage to play quite well – decent tone, only a few missed notes, etc. – each week at rehearsal without picking up their horn during the week. They walk in, toot a few notes as a warmup if they aren’t late, and get through an entire rehearsal. And this is band so we play non-stop for the whole rehearsal.

I was talking to my horn teacher last week about this and we thought this might be a ‘the more you play, the more you need to play’ problem. In other words, the muscles in my chops are used to playing a couple of hours a day every day and consequently, need to be used a couple hours a day. This is different than the typical weight training schedule of working one group of muscles one day and resting them the next day. For most things rest is usually helpful. This doesn’t seem to be true for me when it comes to playing the horn. Do any of you experience anything like this? Will I get to a point where I can take a day off and not pay for it with several days of poor horn playing?

My schedule eases off after an orchestra concert tonight so I should be able to practice everyday and stick to a plan. When I have band rehearsals I don’t practice for more than 40 minutes, if that, in order to save my chops for the rehearsal. I don’t have rehearsals again until the first week in January.  It will be interesting to see if several weeks of very consistent practicing will make a noticeable improvement.

Quiet time –>

Adding piano

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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.

Rewards –>

Mouthpieces again

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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.

Adding piano –>

I’m playing better

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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.

Mouthpieces again –>

Frustration

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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.

Slippery slope –>

Horn decision

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Well, I finally have my new horn. All of you who have been reading my blog from the beginning know that the new Hoyer that I purchased at the end of December 2008 played sharp. After months of aggravation I received a new tuning slide from Hoyer in August. The tuning slide solved the problem in that the pros that I took it to gave it a clean bill of health. I was still struggling playing the horn in tune and I had to decide what I wanted to do. I have to say that during these months of frustration with the Hoyer I really stopped liking the horn. Because of the intonation issue I played other horns at IHS and at the Barry Tuckwell Institute and got a feeling for what else was out there and there were definitely horns that I liked better.

I had several options:

1. Keep the Hoyer and deal with fixing my intonation problems and my general feelings about the horn.
2. Sell the Hoyer and go back to my Yamaha for a while.
3. Sell the Hoyer and my Yamaha and get a better horn.

Although keeping my Hoyer and learning to play it in tune probably would make me a better hornist I just was not enjoying playing it and that is the most important thing to me. 95% of the time I play by myself and it was just too frustrating dealing with it so about a month ago I left it with Scott Bacon, the dealer I bought it from, for him to sell it for me. I’m sure it’s a great horn for someone, just not me.

While I was going thru all this with the Hoyer I got my Yamaha 668 back into tip top shape. I spent some time playing both the Hoyer and the Yamaha and decided that I did make the right decision to buy the Hoyer. Although the intonation on the Yamaha is good, there were other things about it that made it harder than the Hoyer for me to play. So I brought the Yamaha up to Scott’s to sell before I left the Hoyer there.

When I dropped off the Yamaha Scott loaned me a gold brass Dieter Otto 180K horn to try for a few weeks. There was no question that I enjoyed playing this horn more than the Hoyer. For one thing, my intonation was pretty good. My articulation was better, notes were clean, I had fewer clams and I could play high Bb and C relatively easily. I could hardly ever get those notes on the Hoyer. Getting this Otto sounds like a no brainer but several pros cautioned me against buying it because it was gold brass, probably wouldn’t have as good a resale value as a yellow brass horn, the Otto brand wasn’t well known in the US and because the sound got harsher when the horn was really played loud.

I went back up to Scott’s three weeks later and tried a yellow brass Otto 180k and a yellow brass Otto 166. I wasn’t comfortable playing the 166 but the yellow brass Otto was very similar to the gold brass Otto. The biggest difference between the two was that the sound of the yellow brass Otto was a bit brighter. It may even have played slightly easier but not by much. I left the Hoyer at Scott’s and took both the gold and yellow brass Ottos home to try. I played both horns and liked the yellow brass Otto slightly better. During this time I thought it would be a good idea to go up to Ken Pope’s shop and try some of his horns. I didn’t ever end up going there because my mother ended up in the hospital and I just couldn’t squeeze in a trip to Boston.

I had the Ottos on loan when Scott got in a Lewis and Durk horn that I wanted to try so I headed up to Scotts again ( 3 hours one way) last Thursday and spent at least two hours trying the L & D horn and comparing it to the Ottos. I couldn’t come to a decision so I stayed in Fishkill, NY overnight and went back to Scotts in the morning and played the three of them again for another three hours. I finally decided that I really liked the Lewis and Durk horn. The intonation was flawless as was pretty much everything else. The tone was bright but had a lot of color. However it has more resistance than the Ottos and I was having some trouble centering notes. I liked the horn a lot and decided that I could deal with the learning curve so I wrote Scott a check and took my new horn home.

Saturday morning I took the horn out to practice and it was a disaster. In my music room, formerly our living room, I couldn’t get a nice tone quality from the horn even though it sounded great when I played it at Scott’s studio. My music room has great acoustics so this was very surprising and very frustrating. I clammed more notes than I got and generally had a miserable time. The same was true Saturday afternoon and Sunday. I didn’t sleep very well over the weekend. I was trying to convince myself that my chops were just dead and that it wasn’t the horn but I didn’t have another horn at home to test it against.

Monday morning I went up to Scott’s yet again and spent another three hours playing the three horns. Of course I played the L & D horn just fine up there. I also had Scott play the horns so I could hear the differences when someone who plays well played them. I was having a really hard time deciding which horn to pick when Scott asked me if I had to make an instant decision that was non-reversable what would I pick and I said an Otto immediately. Having had them as loaners for many weeks I knew how they were and there wasn’t any uncertainty about how I played on them.

The next step was to pick one of the two Ottos. I was leaning toward the yellow brass Otto when Scott put a gold brass hand hammered bell on the gold brass horn. Wow. The horn had a gorgeous rich sound even when played very loud which was one of it’s issues. One of the other issues was the resale value of the horn. I decided that I am buying a horn for my enjoyment and if I should ever decide to sell it whatever its value is will be okay with me. Now the choice between the yellow brass horn and the gold brass horn was easy so I am now the owner of a new gold brass Otto. At band last night the first hornist told me how good I sounded and that my intonation was excellent. Hallelujah.

Frustration –>

Travel with horn

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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.

Horn update –>

Unbelievable

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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?

Travel with horn –>

Bits and Pieces Part 2

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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.

Updates –>