Those things everyone always says...

Tonight I was practicing a passage in the Saint-Saens Sonata that I was having trouble with; I thought I had worked it out a few weeks ago, but somehow the sloppiness had crept back in. I was frustrated with how I was practicing it– a few boring rhythms, inching the metronome up by a number of clicks that always either seemed so slow as to be agonizing or too fast to be doing much good– had had been thinking recently (prompted by overdosing on The Bulletproof Musician and Study Hacks blogs) about how to improve my use of my time in my practice. After reading a few trumpet player’s obituaries and remembrances of great CSO trumpeter Bud Herseth, I had been reading over recently a page called “Bud Herseth Lesson Notes”, and noticed that he emphasized playing only on the mouthpiece quite a bit. I began to wonder what the woodwind equivalent would be. I know that I can’t play the Saent-Saens sonata only on my reed, but– doh– I can play it only on my mouth! Singing your part is something that everyone, including me, knows you should do, but I rarely hear people singing their music in the practice rooms at school– sometimes brass players, but never woodwinds, and I had certainly never done it. Sure enough, when I tried to sing the line, it came out a jumbled mess. So I practiced singing it slowly, while watching the music and playing the notes with my fingers. I discovered I could even sing wrong notes when watching the music– many of the middle Gs often came out as an A! Once I had corrected this, and gotten my singing up to a reasonable tempo (not quite the final tempo, which is a little past the limits of my vocal technique…) I found I was able to put the run together on bassoon with much more ease. I wonder how much easier the movement would be if I had learned to sing the whole thing before ever putting it on the bassoon… I guess the moral of the story is, those things that everyone knows you should do? I should do them.