Tag: arpeggios

Arm Flapping

Arm flapping is a common mistake among both piano and flute students. Let’s talk about why we flap our arms and ways to fix it.

The Ideal Way to Hold Your Arms

Whenever you play a musical instrument, it should feel like your arms are wet spaghetti noodles that hang between your wrists and your shoulders. Obviously you’re going to move your arms occasionally – we’re human and need to move around or the joints will get stiff. The movements need to be graceful and, ballerina-like, leading with the elbow or wrist.

Arm Flapping on the Flute

Some flutists have a tendency to flap our arms in order to send out our emotions. When our elbows are raised, it changes the shape of our chest cavity enough to create a different tone color which makes it very easy to pull out the emotion of the piece.

The big problem: if you’re flapping your arms or even just holding one or both elbows up for an extended period of time, you’re compressing your wrist and putting extra strain on your shoulders and upper back. Compression + strain = pain.

The other problem: it makes you look ridiculous. I don’t care as much about this problem because I’m not an aesthetic person, but I thought I’d put it out there.

The solution: if you want to emote in a certain section, raise one elbow for 1-2 measures. You’ll create the tone color that you want and then you’ll be able to hold onto it with your embouchure once you lower your arm. Write a reminder in the music to raise your arm here and lower it there. Otherwise, use the ideal way to hold your arms as described above.

Arm Flapping on the Piano

Most pianists flap our arms because we’re flipping our thumb under our hands for more than an interval of a 2nd in order to crawl our fingers across the piano. We don’t realize we’re doing it, we’re just concentrating on getting our thumbs a 3rd or a 4th up the keyboard. Our bodies do funny things when we’re concentrating.

The problem: it puts extra strain on your shoulder and it slows you down just a tad for that one interval.

The solution: Take your thumb and move the tip all the way across your palm. That’s how far you have to move your thumb in order to leap a 4th.

Don’t concentrate on it too much when you’re practicing your piece. Your body needs to do funny things in order to to concentrate. Concentrate on doing this when you’re doing your one-handed arpeggios during warm-ups.

Since arpeggios are fun and easy, it will give you more time to concentrate on your new habit. After you’ve mastered this, your new skill will naturally matriculate into the other aspects of your playing. I talk more about why we do scales, cadences, chords and arpeggios at the beginning of the warm-ups here.

What to Expect

It takes about a month to change a habit. Some people take a week to stop the arm flapping habit, some take a month or two. It depends upon the situation and how long you’ve been doing it. Good luck!

Solving Scary Music with Theory

Ever turn the page in your lesson book and go, “AACK!”? This happens to my students once in awhile. They look at it and their eyes don’t know what to do with it.

Sometimes I direct them to the backwards practice technique, and other times I help them analyze the piece.

What does it mean to analyze a piece?

It can mean a couple of things. Back in college theory class, it meant to figure out the chord structure of the piece. There are more things you can do:

  1. Find the form of the piece (ABA or sonata form, for example) to see how the melody repeats.
  2. Find all the common finger patterns – scales, chords, arpeggios, grupettos, roller coaster scales, finger wiggles, repeated notes.
  3. Find how the phrases might be the same, only slightly ornamented.

How do we analyze the piece together?

Usually, I start at the beginning. We look for the common finger patterns. I point out the patterns and have the student name them.

After the first phrase, I start looking at whether the melody repeats. At the beginning of a new phrase, I check to see if we’ve already done it. Then I point out to the student that it’s the same as before.

Results

After we talk through the piece, the students feel better. It’s not so scary. They say, “I play my scales and chords every day! This piece is so easy!”

Conclusion

Theory is the math of music, and it helps us make sense of it when it’s confusing. I know that theory lessons can be boring or frustrating, but they help make the music easier.

Improv – Baroque Style

It’s the time of year when you start getting more gigs. People like to have live Christmas music played at events and as ambiance. It’s not December yet, but starting in October, everyone wants to fill up their December calendar. They might just call you. It’s a great time to be a musician.

Simple Music

One nice thing about all these gigs is that the music is usually relatively simple. You don’t have to practice much to get them to performance level, which is nice, because there can be a large volume.

Sometimes, though, you want to play something a little harder than what’s available. That’s when it’s good to know how to add some sparkle to the pieces, the way the people of the Baroque period did it – with ornamentation.

Ornamentation

It’s rather ironic that we can decorate Christmas music with ornaments just like we would a Christmas tree. On a tree, ornaments make everything sparkle and look impressive. In music, you can use ornaments to change the feel of the music, making it sound more impressive and fancy. You can use the musical ornaments to emphasize notes (that usually go with words) or just to create a cool ending to a phrase.

The steps below show how to do this on paper. After about a year, you’ll be able to do parts of this without having to write it down.

Step 1

Look at the music and pay attention to the phrase endings – the cadences, to be musically correct. Compare the phrase endings with this list – grace notes, trills, grupettos (turns), mordents, arpeggios, and glissandos.

Step 2

Add ornaments to the phrase endings in the following order:

  1. Grupettos
  2. Mordents
  3. Grace Notes
  4. Trills
  5. Glissandos (For melodies, leaps of a 5th or more, better on a wind instrument, sometimes sounds cheesy on a piano.)
  6. Arpeggios (For block chords, arpeggiate them, piano only.)

I have this order for a reason. I start with the hardest thing to add and move to the easiest thing to add. I only add one ornament per phrase ending and I don’t add an ornament to every single phrase ending. Just the ones that jump out at me.

Step 3

There’s a very important note in each phrase. One of my old teachers called it the sunshine note. It’s the emotional apex of the phrase. If it’s a longer note, add a mordent or a grace note to it.

If there’s a word that you really want to highlight, add a grace note or mordent to that note, too.

Jean-Pierre Rampal once said that a grace note is like a flower pot on a window sill. What notes or words need a flower pot?

Step 4

Play through your new ideas. Did you overdo it? If there are some phrases where there’s more than one ornament, pay extra attention. Does it sound good? You may have to pick and choose what you want to subtract and you may want to add something here or there.

Becoming Fluent

After you’ve done this for a year or two, you won’t have to plan your ornaments ahead of time. You’ll just intuitively know where to add them. Your brain will go through this 4-step process, but it will happen in an instant without you realizing it.

In your head, you’ll go through the list in Step 2 backwards. Easiest first. You’ll find yourself just adding the glissandos or arpeggiating chords without thinking about it. A month or two later, you’ll add a trill, grace note, or mordent without thinking about it. Grupettos might take an extra year or two to be able to add without planning ahead of time.

Practicing This Skill When It’s Not The Holidays

If you know you’ll be doing a lot of Christmas gigs, it’s a good idea to practice the steps above until you can do them intuitively, even in June. If you’re like me and don’t want to play Christmas music in the summer, find a hymnal (not an affiliate link) or a folk song book (affiliate link). Look in thrift stores for folk song books. I find them for a dollar at thrift stores all the time.

You can do this once or twice a week instead of tone work, as described in “Other Options” here.

Listen

Another good tool to learn how to do this is to listen to symphonic metal bands, such as Trans-Siberian Orchestra or Epica. The lead guitars do this kind of improv all the time. By listening to it, you’ll be able to simplify it in your head and do it more naturally.

Conclusion

If you do the steps listed above, listen to examples, and practice at it all year around, you’ll find yourself doing this process intuitively. You’ll have a bunch of fun doing it and it will help you stay in the moment during your easier gigs.