Blog

I Love Used Sheet Music

I prefer used sheet music over new sheet music. I always have. Sure, the pages on new music are nice and shiny and pretty, but there are good reasons why I love used music.

Why I Love Used Sheet Music

  1. It’s cheaper. Insanely cheaper. Half price, at the most, cheaper. Sometimes I can even get it for less than a dollar a book. Sometimes free.
  2. Secret Notes in the Margins These are notes meant to help the person who originally played the music. Who says they can’t help me, too? Rhythms, phrasing, fingerings, tone – there are notes on all those things to help me.
  3. The Pages Turn Easier. Let’s face it, older pages turn faster and easier. Then you don’t have the dreaded page turn.
  4. Different Editors/Editions Sometimes it’s nice to get a different take on how something should be interpreted, especially when it’s closer to when the compser was alive.
  5. High Quality Pages The pages are sewn into the book, rather than glued in. The paper is thicker. You get it, they don’t make ’em like they used to.
  6. Binding Sometimes one of the old books has been spiral or comb bound at an office store. This makes life easier!
  7. Forgotten Music One time I found a beautiful etude that I’ve never heard of before. I like to play it just because it’s pretty. Sometimes you find music that has been forgotten over the years just because you dive into a book of used music.
  8. Old Method Books Our ways of teaching may have changed over the years, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some good things in the old method books. If there’s someone struggling with a concept, you can bring in some music from those old method books to teach the concept in a different way.

Conclusion

When I was learning flute and piano, I was a scholarship student. I was on my own for getting any music besides my lesson books. I found music at Goodwill and St. Vincent De Paul’s for 25 cents per book.

I thought, “Why should I pay $15 for a book like this when I can get it for 25 cents?” That’s how I started buying and using used piano and flute books, and I saw how they served me well. After I got my first job at age 14, I started buying new books, too, but still, to this day, I peruse the book section in second hand stores for sheet music.

If you don’t have a second hand store available, go ahead and check out imslp.org. It’s a treasure trove!

Super Fun Practice Session

The purpose of a fun practice session is to keep up your morale towards your instrument. It takes longer than the regular practice session, but it has a different overall purpose. It brings the joy back to practicing when everything feels a little dull. Jennifer Cluff mentions this kind of practice briefly in this article.

Two Stacks of Music

You should start with two stacks of music – the music that you’re working on and music that you already know and enjoy. The enjoy part is the most important.

Put the stack of music that you already know and enjoy in order of easy to hard. I like to have the first one to be something from a Disney book, like this or this. That way I can do something fun and enjoyable, yet still be able to concentrate on form or tone.

Fun Practice Session Order

Here’s an example of the order in which you would practice on a day you need a fun practice session.

  1. Easy Fun Music (used instead of tone studies for winds)
  2. Scale warm-ups
  3. Easy Fun Music
  4. Technical Studies
  5. Old Repertoire
  6. Etudes
  7. Old Repertoire
  8. Repertoire
  9. Old Repertoire

Old Repertoire

Let’s talk about that old repertoire for a minute. It can be your standard definition of repertoire – music that isn’t an etude or a technical study and you’ve already learned.

Here’s the thing – there’s no reason why it can’t be an old etude that you loved. Why not? It’s your practice session, your rules. I recently pulled out an old Level 3 lesson book to play Irish Washerwoman because I wanted to.

Prevention

Preventing the need for this kind of practice session is easy – make sure that you play something fun at the end of each practice session.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t do the fun practice session just because you want to. Have an unexpected couple of hours? Do this because it’s fun!

Conclusion

Sometimes things get a little too intense in practice, and everything starts feeling dry and boring. We all need a pick-me-up every once in awhile, and this kind of practice session helps remind you how much you love music.

Harmonics

Harmonics are something that you learn about in physics class. They’re also practical in the music world. The more, better in tune, and stronger harmonics your tone has, the better it sounds.

What are Harmonics?

Harmonics are the overtones that your ear percieves, but can’t hear.

If you cut a string in half, it’s an octave higher. If you cut it in half again, it sounds a Perfect 5th higher. Here’s a list of the harmonic progressions below.

  1. Octave
  2. Perfect 5th
  3. Perfect 4th
  4. Major 3rd
  5. Minor 3rd
  6. Major 2nd
  7. Minor 2nd

The math and science behind this is here.

How Do Harmonics Affect Me as a Musician?

The stronger, better in-tune, and more various the harmonics, the better the sound.

Pianists

Pianists may have checked out by now, thinking harmonics don’t affect us. They do.

You know how sometimes you have to hold down a note long past it has finished making a sound? The composer is using resonance by having you play other notes from the harmonic series, which activates that string.

You can use the harmonic series to double-check and make sure that a piano is in tune. Hold down the keys for each note in the harmonic series. Play the bottom note. If you can hear the higher sounds, the piano is decently in tune. This only works on an acoustic piano.

These two things happen because of the laws of physics involving resonance. I talk a lot about resonance here.

Flutists

We use harmonics as part of our tone studies. The way we do that is by changing the air direction, pointing it higher with our lips. This causes a higher tone to come out – a harmonic. We can practice tuning the harmonics because when they’re in tune our sound is better, we can practice strengthening them, and we can practice adding them.

Here are some nice, easy, free studies to practice them. These ones are really good for helping you to tune your harmonics.

The first page of this book has harmonic studies that are a little bit harder. They’re more about aiming your air and helping you get a good sound and a large amount of harmonics on each note. The more harmonics you have on each note, the better your sound overall.

Bonus: Being able to play high harmonics also helps you hit the high notes with better sound and intonation.

Sometimes it’s fun to make up a harmonic exercise, too.

Extended Techniques

Every once in awhile, a piece will ask you to play a harmonic. It looks like a diamond over the top of two notes, like this.

Picture of a harmonic on the staff
This is the notation for a harmonic.

This technique is done for effect. The sound from a harmonic has less overtones and undertones, so the sound is a little bit different. I usually see it in pieces from the Romantic era.

Conclusion

You can use harmonics as a parlor trick, but they have a real usefulness about them. They’re especially useful in a winds, but they’re good to know about with every instrument.

The Dreaded Page Turn!

The page turn can be a scary thing in music. It can be simple, but it can get really complicated fast. Here are some suggestions.

I was going to talk about the page turn in a simple Facebook post, but when I turned the corner on the second paragraph, I realized that I needed to talk about it more in-depth.

Who would have thought how complicated turning pages can be. However, when music is involved, almost everything is more complicated. So, I’ll go through some ideas to make page turning easier.

The Basics of Page Turns

Okay, someone is saying, “It’s not that complicated.” I’m saying that it can be complicated, but here are the two most basic ways to turn a page while playing music:

  1. Stop playing with one hand and turn the page.
  2. Get a page turner.

Now I’m going to tell you how you’re taking your life in your hands with each one of those tactics.

1: Only Play with One Hand

You can dog-ear the pages and hope and pray that they turn easily. I get nervous when I play, so this doesn’t work well for me. I grab more than one page, or go to grab the page and the whole book falls on the floor. Not fun.

Another issue is that sometimes you have two-handed notes at the page turn (flute) or part of the piece where it would sound funny if you stopped playing with one hand on the piano. There are solutions for this – memorize before or after the page turn where there is a good spot to turn the page (both my instruments), or on flute play the two-handed notes with a harmonic that’s on one hand so you can use your other hand. I talk about harmonics a little bit here, but that’s a subject that I’ll touch on more in-depth soon.

2: Get a Page Turner

There are great page turners out there. Some page turners need to be trained in with more than one practice session. Some page turners are hopeless and can’t turn at the correct time or in the correct manner, no matter how hard they try. Depending on the day, I can be each one of these, and so can your page turner.

Other Page Turn Options

1. High Tech

The best way to turn pages is the high tech way – have some kind of a tablet and a blue tooth pedal that turns pages. As with all technology, it’s great as long as it works.

I was playing at a gig and one of my fellow musicians had that set-up. It was flawless, but she said she always has a paper copy along because paper doesn’t crash.

2. Cardboard and Bull Clips

This one’s good for if your music is past copyright so you can make copies, or is the download and print kind of music. I hope this picture is blurry enough that I didn’t break copyright!

Page Turn Alternative
Cardboard and bull clips. Note: I still had to have a page turner with two pieces of cardboard because there were so many pages.

3. Paperclips

Page Turn Tool
Look at all those paperclips. They help you grip the page.

I have a hard time getting a hold of a single page at a time, but if there’s a paperclip, it works as a handle for me to grab. Bonus: they weigh things down.

4. Bending the Binding

Binding Helps with Page Turning
I used an evenly distributed weight to hold the book open, adjusting it once a day until it laid right.

This one works well for if you’re allowed to use music in a competition or accompanying. Usually there are strict rules about not copying for page turns, even if the music is out of copyright. It allows you to keep the book open without using weights to hold the pages open.

5. Binding

A Binding Idea
This book fell out of its binding, so I 3-hole punched it. After I did that, it was so much easier to handle!
A Binding Idea
They can do this really inexpensively at an office store.

I like to re-bind things when I have a book that I use heavily, such as a Christmas book or a scale book.

These are both different ways to bind things – stick something in a binder that fell out of its binding, or take it to an office store, have the binding shaved off, and either spiral or comb-bound.

When books lay flat, it’s easier to turn pages. You also don’t have as many problems when you don’t have to worry about your book falling closed or falling to the floor because it snapped closed. As you can see, I use paperclips as handles along with changing the binding.

Conclusion

It’s okay to have a page turn malfunction. Everyone has them, and they’re understandable.

If you can prevent them, do it. It’s unprofessional. I hope these preventions help you as much as they’ve helped me. Do you have any ideas that aren’t on here?

Smart People Ask Questions

You know that one kid in class who is always asking questions. That kid is ignored by the teacher because the teacher doesn’t want to answer them. Everyone in the class knows that one kid is the smartest student in the room even though he’s not necessarily answering anything.

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask Questions

That student who is asking all the questions learns more every time he gets an answer. That builds on itself. It’s a great habit, one that anyone can do, not just smart people. If you do so, I want you to know that it doesn’t make you sound stupid – it makes you sound smart.

In conversations, I’ve noticed that asking questions helps me become a better conversationalist. It also makes the other person feel better about themselves that they know something that I don’t. I always try to build other people up as often as possible. The world does its best to tear everyone down. I would rather be a bright spot in other people’s lives.

It Doesn’t End in School

Every time I come into contact with any type of professional, I figure out a question to ask them. Here is a list of who I ask and what I ask them:

  1. Piano Tuners – buying tips/how a piano works
  2. Instrument Techs – buying tips/instrument care
  3. Other Music Teachers – anything that’s been stumping me lately
  4. Doctors – prevention/care of self
  5. Professional Musicians – practice routine/performance anxiety fixes

There are many more people of whom I ask questions, but they’re far too many to list. I tried to keep the focus locked on the music section of my life in my list. As you can see, asking questions is a way of life for me.

Conclusion

I hope you start to develop this life skill. It makes a bunch of different parts of your life much easier, not just musically.

If you want to send in questions for me to answer, feel free! I’ll keep you anonymous if I feature your answer on the blog.

Learning a Large Amount of Music By the Deadline

We get over-scheduled so easily. It’s hard to judge our limits. Sometimes we need a plan to dig ourselves out and learn a large amount of music quickly.

I’ve gotten this question a few times in the past week or so, but not necessarily from students. The people have over-committed and need to learn a large amount of music in a specified time period. I looked at the time period and it’s definitely doable, but they can’t find a way through it.

It’s recital season, competition season, and musical season. What that means is that there’s a ton of stuff going on in the spring. Because of this, quite a few musicians get extra music to play for their activities, their friends’ activities, and maybe even get some extra gigs.

Whoohoo! Extra opportunities to play!

Sometimes this means that we accept too many opportunities to play and we have more to practice than we can handle. Here’s a plan to dig out of that hole.

Step 1: Make a plan

Here’s an old joke that doubles as an adage: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. The adage portion of that joke means that if you have too much to do, make a plan.

This doesn’t have to be a formal plan, it can be a process inside your head. Here’s an example.

  1. Practice twice a day (either morning and night or afternoon and evening).
  2. Play through all pieces during each practice session.
  3. Focus on one piece per session, putting extra focus on a different page or section per day.

It’s important to note – if you’re practicing twice a day, you don’t have to practice warm-ups and technique at both practice sessions. Once a day is fine for those exercises.

Step 2: Follow Your Plan

Figure out how to fit your practice times into your schedule. Keep a practice journal to keep yourself honest or stack your books in such a way that you know where you are in your process.

Not every day is going to be perfect, and that’s fine. Don’t beat yourself up for it. We’re human. Life happens. If you miss one of your scheduled practice sessions this week, it’s not the end of the world. Don’t miss more than a quarter of your practice sessions per week.

Step 3: Help Your Plan Along

There are several things you can do to help your plan along. Here are a few, I hope you can come up with more.

Take naps between practice sessions. It sounds counter-intuitive, but the naps help your body produce myelin which coats the new synapses you’re making by learning the new pieces of music. There’s more information on myelin here.

Work out every day. The article I just referenced in the last paragraph stated that working out also helps the body create myelin. It also increases blood flow to the brain, making it work more efficiently.

Use practice techniques. I go into this more in-depth here. Practice techniques different ways to work around your mind blocks. When I’m teaching them to kids, I tell them that they work like magic.

Watch your technique. You don’t want pain to sideline you while you’re doing all this extra work. Proper technique reduces tension which also reduces pain.

Take stretching breaks. I wrote in this article about how your brain only works optimally for 20 minutes at a time. Because of this, it’s a good idea to set the timer for 20 minutes and make sure you stretch in between your 20 minute sessions. This practice is actually prescribed to me by my doctor and I can really tell a difference when I forget to set a timer.

Conclusion

We get over-scheduled so easily. It’s hard to say no. It’s also hard to judge your limits. Sometimes we need a plan to dig ourselves out and learn that large amount of music that we promised we’d learn.

The end goal of this plan is to learn from our mistakes. This isn’t information to help you make your situation worse. It’s information to get you through a tough time so you can make better choices in the future.

Back Breathing: A Tutorial

This is the final article in the series about breath. The other two articles are here and here. This is a very advanced breathing technique. It creates the most amount of resonance possible in the body, therefore making your sound better. It also increases the amount of air available to you.

How Do You Back Breathe?

Fill up your lungs to about 80% full. When you breathe out, keep your rib cage expanded. This will create a reserve of air that you try not to use. Try to keep your stomach muscles as relaxed as possible.

You know you’re doing it right when you bend over and feel your lower back expanding and contracting with your breath.

While exhaling, if you need to use the reserve air because it’s a particularly long passage, feel free to use it. Try not to use the reserve for every breath.

What If I Can’t Get It?

I learned this technique through reading a book. It said, “If you don’t understand how to do it from my description, talk to a singer.” That’s a common phrase when you read flute literature.

When I talked to a singer, she said to imagine the bottom half of your rib cage as a barrel that you’re holding around your midsection. It’s as full as you can get it and you shouldn’t let the barrel collapse.

An Odd Way to Practice Back Breathing

This breathing technique is hard until you get the hang of it. I practiced it while I was driving, doing tone work, etc, but I was holding too much tension in my shoulders and my stomach.

Enter marathon training. I tried breathing in this way while I was running and it worked! I was able to keep everything relaxed (because a 10-mile training run is exhausting) and my pace increased by a minute per mile! This was because I was using so much more air.

I was able to incorporate this kind of breathing into my flute practice within a week after my breakthrough while running.

How Should I Use Back Breathing?

You need to master the first two breathing methods first. After that, this should be your primary way of breathing while playing the flute. You can incorporate J breathing into back breathing if you wish – meaning, do both at the same time.

This form of breathing gives your sound more resonance because you’re allowing enough space for the organs in your rib cage to have a deeper vibration than normal.

Another plus is it helps you play longer without taking a breath.

Conclusion

Please don’t attempt this form of breathing until you’re fluent in belly breathing and J breathing. I didn’t learn it until after college, myself, but I could conceivably see someone learning it towards the end of high school at the earliest.

This form of breathing is very advanced, so don’t be upset if you don’t get it right away. It took me a whole year to figure it out.

When you do figure out how to back breathe, your sound will be better and you’ll be able to play longer between breaths. What’s not to love about that?

The First Advanced Breathing Technique

In my last post, I talked about Belly Breathing, which is the first kind of breathing that you learn. This article is about the first kind of advanced breathing technique that you learn, sometimes called J breathing. You usually learn this technique in high school.

J breathing used to be considered a different school of thought than belly breathing. Now they are both used because they each have their own purpose.

What is J Breathing’s Purpose?

This advanced breathing technique is for when you don’t need to use much air and you want to increase your resonance (I’ll talk about resonance a little later). It also helps with accented, short notes.

How Do I Do J Breathing?

Remember how I talked about pulling your belly muscles in for the exhale during the last article? With J breathing, you only pull in the top half of your muscles, leaving your lower abs relaxed. You’re making an imaginary J with your abs. You breathe in as if you were belly breathing.

Sometimes your abs make a gentle movement. This would be for short phrases where you don’t need much air, so you make it sound as good as possible.

Sometimes your abs make a sharp, quick movement. This would be for things like sforzando, accents, or marcato. The quick movement of the abs is putting quick pressure on your lungs, making an explosion of air, which helps with your quick volume changes.

What is resonance?

I’m about to get really technical, here. If you don’t want to know the science behind resonance, just know that it increases the overtones and the undertones of the tone that is played, making it sound better.

We all learned (or will learn) about resonance in physics class. Every item vibrates at a different frequency, on an elemental level. When a tone is made near an item, it can cause the vibration of that item to deepen, making the same tone that was made.

This is why the proverbial opera singer can make a glass shatter with her voice. If you want to learn more about resonance, this would be a good place to start.

Why Does J Breathing Increase Resonance?

Your whole body resonates with the sounds you’re making on your instrument. The more relaxed your body is, the more it resonates. By leaving the bottom half of your abs loose, you’re increasing the amount of resonance your body can do.

What Other Purpose Does J Breathing Have?

Sometimes when we do short phrases, we automatically breathe in between the phrases, even when we don’t have to. If there are too many short phrases in a row, it starts to feel like we’re hyperventilating. We get dizzy, light-headed, and tired.

J-breathing automatically decreases the amount of breath that you pull in and use. You aren’t using your lower abs, so the visceral mass (intestines, etc) that is behind the lower abs aren’t being used to put pressure on the diaphragm. That causes the lungs to not empty as much as with belly breathing, therefore using less air.

Conclusion

We only learn J breathing after we master belly breathing. It’s designed to be learned after we have learned to maximize our lung capacity. That’s what makes it an advanced breathing technique.

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting sore abs just from reading this! This technique takes awhile to master, so don’t be upset if it takes a month or two to get it down.

Next week will be the final article in this series. There’s one more advanced breathing technique, and it’s the best (and hardest) one!

First Lesson on Breath

Belly breathing is the bread and butter of our breathing techniques. Here’s a different way of learning it than normal.

Flutes use more air than the tuba. By air, I mean volume of air, not back-pressure. Oboes take the cake on back-pressure.

Flutes waste 60% of our air in order to make a sound. Because we have to waste 60% of our air, we have to figure out different ways to breathe so that we can play longer than one note at a time.

Note: this is not the traditional way to teach belly breathing. I have found over the years that this one works better.

Breathe Out

Pull in your stomach muscles as much as you can while breathing out. Breathe out until you don’t think more air is possible to come out. Your abs should be burning.

Breathe In

Let go of your stomach muscles. Your belly will get big as your lungs fill with air.

The Second Breath

In the second breath out, your abs shouldn’t burn, but you should feel your stomach muscles pull in. Breathing in will be less of a shock.

What’s happening

When you pull in your stomach muscles to breathe out, you’re using your visceral mass (organs and intestines in your belly) to push on the bottom of your diaphragm, helping it to force the air out of your lungs.

When you expand your belly to bring the air in, you’re making the air go faster than normal, all the way down to the bottom of your lungs. It’s almost like a vacuum effect.

Check Yourself in the Mirror

Stand to the side in a mirror and put your hands on your belly. You should see your belly going in and out quite a bit. If you’re just learning how to do this, it’s a good idea to begin your practice with this exercise of watching yourself in the mirror.

Belly Breathing

The process described above is called belly breathing. It’s considered one of the more effective ways to breathe. You’ll use this for the rest of your life as a musician.

Singers

I have read in a lot of flute literature that if you don’t understand something about breathing, talk to a singer. They’re a great resource for learning about breath.

James Galway used to talk to singers about breath, vibrato, and tone. I love talking to musicians about the different ways they learn things. More on that here.

Don’t Do The Things on the List Below.

Here are some things you shouldn’t do with the belly breathing

  1. Don’t bring your shoulders up when you’re breathing in. It creates extra pressure on your throat, does nothing for your amount of breath, and makes your body think it should only use the top 10% of your lung rather than the whole lung.
  2. Don’t fill up higher than 80%. The most you should feel full of air is to the height of your armpits. If you fill your lungs further than that, you put extra pressure on your vocal chords and might have bad tone for the first few notes. After a few years, you can practice getting good tone after filling up to 100%, but it takes a lot of work.
  3. When breathing out, don’t allow your chest to go down before your belly goes in. You’ll get a lot more playing time if you do it in that order than in the reverse.

Conclusion

Belly breathing is the bread and butter of our breathing techniques. It becomes automatic after a year or two and will serve you well in other things besides just music. More on that here.

There are two more breathing techniques, which will each come up in their own article.

Winter Break – Did You Practice?

In the USA, schools and studios alike are just coming off of Winter Break. Some students took the opportunity to practice every day. Some didn’t touch their instruments. Let’s take a look at this phenomenon a little more closely

The Students who Practiced

These are students who practiced at least three times per week. There are several reasons students practice over winter break.

  1. Intrinsic Motivation – this is the goal. This means the students practice because they enjoy playing.
  2. Parents – the parents make their children practice. This is a really good reason, too. It will eventually turn into the intrinsic motivation. This was my motivation when I was growing up.
  3. Boredom – there’s nothing going on, so I might as well practice. This is a really good one, too. It’s the stage before Intrinsic Motivation. This was also one of my motivations when I was a student living in the country.
  4. Habit – this is why the pros practice. They always practice at this time, so it’s habit.

The Students who Practiced a Little

These are students who practiced five times or less in the past two weeks. Their reasons are the same as those above, but their motivation wasn’t as high.

Their practice might have a little more to do with their parents, but that’s just fine. It shows their parents are invested in their musical education.

The Students Who Didn’t Practice

This category accounts for about 25% of my studio. There are three reasons for no practice over Winter Break:

  1. The student was on vacation with no access to a musical instrument.
  2. The break was over scheduled – Christmas is a time of running around like a chicken with its head cut off.
  3. The student didn’t want to practice.

The first two reasons are out of the student’s control. The last reason is the heart of the matter and the most common.

It’s Okay to Take a Break from your Instrument

Everyone gets burned out sometimes. That’s when we need to walk away for a week or two. When you come back, you’ll remember how much you loved it and will be able to play with a zest you forgot you had.

Notice I said a week or two, not longer. As with any discipline, you need to schedule a time to get back into that discipline. Practicing is definitely a discipline.

Getting back into the discipline of practicing will be hard for the first few weeks. You might want to take a look at some of these tactics to help you get back into the swing of things.

Prevent Burn-Out

Make sure you schedule time to enjoy life. I don’t mean video games or television, I mean go outside of your house.

  1. Go for a run or a bike ride.
  2. Climb a tree.
  3. Go to the art museum.
  4. Garden.
  5. Get together with friends.
  6. See a concert.

I’m sure there are plenty of better lists out there, but this is a start. Another thing I do is go online and do a search for “free things to do in [your city here]. ”

Music Is Art

We can’t produce art if we are only practicing all day. We need to go out and enjoy life. Then we use a studio break to take a break, we do just that. Experiencing life gives you the maturity to play better – more emotion, more tone colors, more artistic expression.

Conclusion

If you practiced during Winter Break, I’m proud of you.

If you didn’t practice over winter break, I hope you were able to fill your bucket so you can come back to your instrument and create art.