A Student’s Guide to Learning a New Piece
Happy New Year readers! Peter Tambroni here, from MostlyBass.com.
As the new year rolls around I’m beginning to plan for my school’s annual solo festival. I’m always looking to improve the quality of my student’s playing as well as their learning and how they learn their solo. I make practice CDs for them with their solos at different speeds using Amadeus.
This year I’m also adding a worksheet for them. I designed it with middle school students in mind but feel free to try it with different ages. Check out the sample pictures below. It gives simple instructions for checking out the music and then playing it very slowly – a technique described by Edgar Meyer in the book The Mastery of Music by Barry Green.
Click here to download them as a single PDF file.
If you have ideas of suggestions please email me at tambroni AT hotmail DOT com.
Thanks and happy practicing & teaching.
Practicing an ornament
Hello readers, Peter Tambroni here from MostlyBass.com.
This week I had a student working on a solo that had a somewhat complex ornament at a cadence. We worked on breaking it down and separating the components of it. I decided to write it up in Sibelius with the steps to learning it. Here’s a JPG of it. I wanted to share as I think some students may find this useful.
Quick Tip for Practicing Musicianship
Hello readers, Peter Tambroni here again from MostlyBass.com.
When practicing fast / scalar passages, play them in groups of odd numbers. Although notation generally beams notes in even groups, the actual music is usually in an odd group.
For example, if you have 4 sixteenth notes, practice them with the next note – they lead to that note. There’s a group of 5. To help get the velocity on the sixteenths, practice the first 3. After you repeated that many times, play the last 2 with the destination note – another group of 3.
Another example can be found in the trio from Beethoven’s 5th – third movement. When practicing the measures that are all eighth notes, practice them with the following downbeat – that’s the landing point.
And in any running note passage, isolate groups of odd numbers to practice – even if they cross beams or barlines. This will even out your playing and give your lines direction.
Happy practicing and for more tips visit MostlyBass.com.
Help! I don’t have time to practice!
Hello fellow bassists and educators, Peter Tambroni here from MostlyBass.com. Jason posted a great article recently about finding time to practice and auditions being a young persons game (check it out here).
But what if you ARE a young person (or not so young) and you still don’t have time to practice? What now? Well, first – MAKE TIME! I find it hard to believe that a student can’t find FIVE MINUTES to practice. Ok ok… What if you really only have five minutes? This was the topic of discussion at a recent lesson with a student and his parents. I thought he could lighten his class load by not taking so many advanced classes, dropping an elective, or not playing a sport. As it turns out there was an ill family member and he really didn’t have time to practice.
So, how about some practical solutions for the 21st century.
1. Each day, FIX SOMETHING. It could be one note, one shift, one rhythm, but improve something.
2. Do more listening. Most students have an iPod or other music player. Use travel time, chores, or laundry time to really get to know the piece you’re working on.
3. Study the score. Again, there are little times throughout the day that playing the bass is not practical (ie lunch) but you could be studying a score or sheet music.
4. Do counting exercises, air bowing, or visualization. Really! It may look a little silly, but the alternative (sounding bad) is even worse. As long as your brain is involved you can get better.
5. Don’t give up! Schedules go through cycles. Just try to have a better practice schedule next week, next month, or next semester.
Thanks and happy practicing!
Nine dynamite practice room accessories
When it’s time to hit the woodshed and do some serious practicing, there are a handful of no-brainer items that everyone needs–instrument, music, and music stand. Adding a few extra tools into the mix can make for much more productive and enjoyable practice sessions, however.
This list starts off with some obvious tools, but the ones further down the list may spark some ideas for creative practicing:
1. Metronome -
This is critical–if possible, get one with a tempo tap function and subsivision playback like the Dr. Beat models that Boss makes. While it’s not necessary to spend 100% of your practice time with a metronome, I find that it’s on for at least 50% of my typical practice session.
2. Tuner -
A tuner that also emits drone pitches on all twelve tones is a must for me. As a string player, I find that practicing along with a drone set to the fifth scale degree of the key I’m working in really helps to solidify my pitch center.
3. Legal pad or notebook -
I’m a fan of writing down an outline of what I’m trying to accomplish in a given practice session. Putting a practice plan down on paper makes you more likely to stuck to your plan and get all the goals for the session accomplished, and having a practice journal that you can look back on really helps to show areas in your playing that you’ve been neglecting. If you ever wonder why a particular piece or passage didn’t go so well in a performance, a written practice record can come in very handy for troubleshooting the cause.
4. Audio recording device -
I have recorded my practice sessions for years–it’s the most effective way I’ve found to diagnose problems and get an accurate assessment of where my playing needs work. It can be somewhat demoralizing to record yourself too much, but if you can get over the stark reality of hearing yourself on tape, you’ll find that you can really act as your own teacher and solve most problems on your own.
5. Video recording device -
Video recording is audio recording on steroids in terms of garnering valuable feedback. The visual feedback that video provides can reveal the causes of technical problems that audio cannot. It’s a much bigger pain to set up a camera than to just press record on an audio device, but it’s definitely worth it!
6. Finale or Sibelius -
Though using Finale or Sibelius as a practice tool is not quite common practice yet, I’m a big fan of it. I use these programs as practice aids, entering repertoire into the computer and playing along with it. Playing along with your part and trying to sync your rhythm and pitch with the computer is incredibly valuable, but don’t just stop there! Download a MIDI version of a piece you’re working on from classicalmusicarchive.org or another such site. You can then, at any tempo you choose, play along with the entire orchestra or a particular section. Feel like working with just the strings? How about basses and bassoons? No problem–this is a great way to fully experience the orchestration and how your part fits into the overall context.
7. iPod -
Mass storage music devices are a godsend to musicians. Being able to carry your entire music library in an easily searchable and accessible form is a huge thing. Creative use of playlists takes things to the next level. Make a playlist with different versions of the same piece for research purposes, put all your most inspiring recordings on a playlist and listen to it before an audition for inspiration, or–best of all–make a playlist of the music you’re doing on your next recital or audition. That way you can listen to it, practice along with it, or even put it on random shuffle and play things in whatever order they happen to come up. It’s great for audition preparation–getting used to playing excerpts in every concievable order is very helpful in building audition chops of steel.
8. Audio editing software -
Use a program like Audacity or GarageBand to make excerpts out of complete recordings for the above exercise. Programs like Amadeus or The Amazing Slow Downer can adjust recordings of a piece to match the exact speed you want to play them. Create multiple versions that increase in speed for practicing purposes. This is a tool that you’ll find to be surprisingly useful.
9. Laptop -
This is the ultimate modern practice accessory, combining all of the aforementioned tools (and then some!) into one package. While I wouldn’t expect a younger student to be running around with a MacBook Pro for practicing, the serious-minded older (college age) student should consider incorporating a laptop into his or her practice arsenal. With a laptop, integrating listening, audio and video recording, Finale play-along,
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