User:Taki-noboru-desu

2021 UPDATE: Hi guys, turns out being a military musician takes a LOT of time. I miss being an active part of the Hibike community when I was in college but these days there just isn't enough time. If you read Angels in the Architecture (my H!E fic on AO3) rest assured that it will continue, but otherwise I'm super sorry for not being as active as in the past! -Yours, Jess my tumblr: http://taki-sensei.tumblr.com

hi! i am a professional band geek who uses her spare time to edit this wiki this way too much, mostly just because of taki noboru and masahiro hashimoto, whom are the two cutest band directors in the world. some pages that I wrote on this wiki and am too attached to:
 * noboru taki and wife of noboru taki
 * full list of characters, concert band terminology
 * masahiro hashimoto, satomi niiyama, and rikako
 * sunrise festival
 * clarinet, eb clarinet
 * masakazu shindou
 * crescent moon dance, March "Wind of Provence", and hibike! euphonium (fictional book)
 * rikka high school and kitauji high school
 * kitauji concert band schism
 * i also wrote like half the asuka tanaka page.

jess's practice tips- by taki-sensei.tumblr.com (formerly taki-noboru-desu)
So this page used to list my nerdy-ass concert band creds, but I moved that to my tumblr bio in case you were looking for that. I'm now using this space to list clarinet practice tips! Enjoy :)

1. importance of mental practice
In the summer before auditions I practice about 2-4 hours a day, but... during the school year I don’t physically practice longer than 20 minutes a day. (because I take 20 credits and participate in too much crap). I don't practice much solo repertoire. My job is just to play well enough in Wind Symphony so that my presence contributes positively to the band, so I just focus on band music and fundamentals.

However, I spend hours every day mentally practicing. It sounds silly but it works! Though it can be difficult to do if you don’t have perfect pitch. Why do this? Because forcing yourself to imagine your ideal sound and your ideal interpretation of a piece creates a clear standard that you are trying to reach. It sets a goal for your physical practice time and helps you streamline your efforts. Too often people just fumble around in practice rooms until the “thing” they’re playing sounds “alright”. Personally I feel that’s unfocused and sloppy. Practicing with intent and direction is a better use of your time and energy!
 * 1) Sit somewhere (on the bus, on the couch, eating alone, bored in class, etc)
 * 2) let yourself mentally hear the parts you were practicing in real life, and get them stuck in your head. If you need to have sheet music with you while you do that, that’s fine.
 * 3) take what you hear in your head and slow it down. Experience it in slow motion. Imagine yourself playing all the notes you hear, and imagine your fingers feeling the keys as you press them down with the correct fingerings.
 * 4) Experience the sound of each note-- vividly hear the color, tone, and tuning of the note. Imagine your embouchure forming the perfect shape around your mouthpiece to produce that sound.

If you get good enough at mental practice, you won’t need to slow things down in your head anymore. I’ve been doing it since 7th grade, so at this point I can use mental practice to work on technical stuff. When you get good at this, you can open your music, visualize yourself playing a hard part, then actually play it with about 90% accuracy on the first try. This helps a LOT for sightreading.

2. Annotating/studying your music
Sometimes, before you start all the woodshedding and detailed practicing and mental practicing, you need to get a clear idea of what your ideal interpretation should be like. Your first instinct will be to go with intuition and do “whatever your musical feelings tell you,” but that isn’t always the best way.

I like to religiously mark my music—more as a way of studying it rather than setting reminders. Here are the things I ask myself while marking music: Questions like these will help you make better decisions about where you should breathe, where to place accents, how loud you should play, and how you should direct the flow of your energy throughout the piece.
 * 1) Does this passage “sing” or does it “dance”? Chances are it will be one of the two. Dance-like music should be played with a light bounce, and song-like music should be played with connected notes and gently tapered endings. I didn't use to consider this until my college band director drilled it into my head, but it's pretty useful.
 * 2) What parts of the entire piece are similar, and what parts are different? Sometimes motifs/ideas are repeated throughout a piece. Those parts should be played in exactly the same style, but if there’s something different about a particular iteration, that difference needs to be emphasized and advertised.
 * 3) What parts are meant to create contrast? Where are the mood changes in the piece? Are they sudden mood changes, or is there a transition part that takes the listener from one mood to another? Express these mood changes in your music so that it sounds deliberate.
 * 4) What era is the music from? Who is the composer? What are idioms typical to that era/composer? Make sure your music reflects an understanding of this. (ie. please don’t play classical era music with heavy rubato because you think it sounds more “musical.”)
 * 5) If it’s an orchestral/band excerpt (aka. for an audition or concert): What instruments are playing with you, and in which parts? And how will you adjust to them? What is your role in the music? Are you melody or harmony? Are you the motor device? And does that mean you should play louder or softer?

Now, after doing this, go back to using mental practice so that your revised ideal interpretation is solidified in your head. During physical practice with your instrument, you should strive to sound like what you hear in your head.

3. “Quick” practice tricks
These are probably what you came for in the first place: quick, easy practice tips you can add to your practice routine! Anyway, here they are, listed in order of whatever comes to my mind:
 * 1) Five-note patterns- see this link from my tumblr. These will solve almost all technicality issues with fast passages. These are really useful- there's a reason why they're at the top of this list!!!
 * 2) Practice without your octave key. It’s kind of hard at first, but it will force you to use your mouth instead of your octave key to jump to the higher octave. It will sound flatter and out of tune, but the focus here is to work on your tone quality and understanding of harmonics.
 * 3) * I like to remind myself that tone quality is 85% in the mouth and 15% in the instrument (you get this mentality growing up playing a cheaper clarinet than everyone around you, haha). It’s possible to achieve pretty good tone on a shitty instrument if you put serious thought into your embouchure. Not using the octave key helps with this.
 * 4) Got issues with a rhythmically difficult passage? If it has ties, and those are what’s tripping you up… practice without the ties first, then add them back in. Works every time.
 * 5) Grace notes, trills, or other ornamentation tripping you up? Practice without those first, then add them back in!
 * 6) Up 4, down 2- This one is really important! When practicing with a metronome:
 * 7) * Always start at the tempo that you can most comfortably play the passage without making a single mistake.
 * 8) * Repeat that passage 3-10 times in a row with 0 mistakes (depending on how serious you are about practice).
 * 9) * Then move the metronome up 4 clicks. Do it again, 3-10 times.
 * 10) * Then back down 2 clicks. Again, 3-10 times.
 * 11) * All the way, up 4 down 2, until it is at full tempo.
 * 12) * If you flub something during one of your 3-10 repetitions, start over until you do it 3-10 times in a row without a mistake.
 * 13) Not tonguing as fast as you’d like? Whisper tongued sixteenth notes to yourself as you walk to class, or just whenever you’re walking. Do it every day. Your tonguing gets better the more you do it, and it will carry over to your instrument.
 * 14) For clearer and lighter articulation, say “dee dee dee” instead of “da da da” or “ta ta ta”. I don’t know if this works for other woodwinds but it definitely does work for clarinets.
 * 15) Accents: Accents do NOT mean “play this one note really loud.” They are best handled as “bell tones,” kind of like fortepianos but not as aggressively obvious.
 * 16) * Accents are often supposed to be impacts. The best way to create the feeling of an impact is to hit the note hard and back off in volume, as if you’ve just struck a bell that is now ringing.
 * 17) Intonation: Is the high G on your clarinet too flat? Or your middle E is too sharp? Sometimes clarinets come with wonky notes, but you can’t blame your instrument on an audition. You gotta learn to work with it, and there are ways to handle it besides lipping up or lipping down.
 * 18) * For notes that are consistently flat, you can “vent” the note: Try adding the right hand banana key, or the right hand "Eb/G#" key, or both.
 * 19) * For notes that are consistently sharp, try putting down your right ring finger. or add the right middle finger too, if necessary.
 * 20) LEARN ALTERNATE FINGERINGS! If there’s anything that feels awkward at all to you, the first thing you should do is LOOK UP ALTERNATE FINGERINGS! in fact you should be reading about alternate fingerings in your free time! Always be reading about alternate fingerings!
 * 21) * Sometimes you can replace standard fingerings with alternate ones if they work better for you: for example, I never use the standard fingering for my altissimo G now, I always use “F#+ right hand side Eb key,” because it’s both more in tune and better for playing technical stuff smoothly. But that just works on my instrument. You need to develop a set of alternate fingerings that works for your instrument and know them like the back of your hand!
 * 22) If you're practicing for an audition, keep a log. Keep a tally chart of how many times you played an excerpt correctly without mistakes, how many times you totally messed up, and how many times it was just alright. By the date of the audition, you will have a good idea of how likely you are to do well.
 * 23) * This helps you develop consistency as a musician. Some musicians are extremely talented, but only for a moment in a private practice room. The people who win are not necessarily as talented, but can perform consistently, and can do so under pressure, on demand.
 * 24) Stop and start your notes with intent. Don't be mindless about how you begin a note and, even more importantly, how you end it. Should you end the note forcefully? Stop it with your tongue? Let it ring? Slowly fade out into nothing? These are all conscious decisions you should be making.
 * 25) Practice intonation with a tuning drone. Play with a drone pitch behind you (google will turn up lots of results) that you can practice tuning to. Woodwinds aren't like pianos (which have equal temperament) in that we have the extra challenge of learning to tune intervals. Tuning drones will help you tune commonly flubbed intervals like thirds, fourths, and fifths.
 * 26) When practicing long tones, practice crescendoing to the peak of your sound, then fading out into nothing as gracefully as you can. Do this for all of your notes while you do long tones. This will help you develop great tone at all of your dynamic levels.
 * 27) Do the same thing as above, but with a tuner. Now you can develop great tone AND great pitch at all dynamic levels. A lot of clarinet players have trouble with this- the tendency is to run sharp when you're quiet, and fall flat when you're loud. Doing long tones daily with a tuner while exploring the extremes of your dynamic range will help you overcome this.
 * 28) Record yourself! Record audio and/or video of yourself regularly during practice sessions. This is REALLY useful, and helps you to accurate self-evaluate your playing. Sometimes we don't sound how we think we do!
 * 29) * I like to keep several days of audio recordings on my phone, and go back and listen to my progress before deleting them.
 * 30) * When listening to a recording of yourself, make lots of mental notes on how your playing matches or doesn't match your ideal sound and ideal interpretation.
 * 31) I have more random tips and stuff but these are what I can remember off the top of my head right now. I'll keep adding to this list as they come to me :)

4. Practice room mindset
You know how sometimes you get super in-the-zone practicing a really tough part forever, and at the end of 2 hours of solid work, you FINALLY get it down? Except then you try it the next day and it totally sucks. Well, there’s a way to avoid that.

Firstly, don’t ever spend longer than 5-10 minutes on one thing. Also, don’t goof off while practicing. “Goofing off” means playing anything that is intended to jerk off your own ego and remind yourself how great and mighty you sound. Set aside designated time for doing that. Don’t waste valuable time reaffirming to yourself that you’re the good clarinetist you already are, when you could be using that time to become an even better clarinetist.
 * If you’re working on Daphnis et Chloe, do those technical things for 10 minutes, then switch to long tones or something else for 6 minutes. Then come back to Daphnis et Chloe.
 * By switching up your focus like this, you’ll retain progress more easily. It’s not good to drown in “tunnel vision” practicing something for so long.

Which brings us to the last point: Don’t ever compare yourself to others. Yes, it’s good to learn from others and borrow things like tips, or tone quality ideas, but don’t hold any one clarinetist as a measuring stick against yourself. As Hiromitsu-sensei from Sensei Kunshu would say, “Practicing clarinet is a fight against oneself.”

This is not just about protecting your self-esteem; it’s also about keeping your thirst for progress alive. If “surpassing others” is your goal for practicing clarinet, then what happens after you do surpass everyone? My jazz band director (he's in an US military band) told me that he has colleagues who are in their 50s, and stagnating because they know that they’re “already as good as everyone around them” and don’t feel the desire to get any better. I’m no professional musician, but professional or not, that is not the kind of musician I would ever want to be. I hope you wouldn’t want to be that way either.

Always keep the fight between you and yourself!

- Love, Taki-sensei (Jess)

More practice resources compiled here by other Tumblr users!