Texas Bandmasters Association
Bandmasters Review • June 2014
14
on. In this way, you are always working towards the
familiar, instead of starting strong and proceeding into
unfamiliar territory. You want to know what is coming
up, and you want to feel secure as you approach what
is ahead.
Another favorite method is going slowly. I always say,
“the less time I have to work on something, the slower
I practice it.” It works. Slow practice is wonderful for
muscle memory in the fingers. Feel every note. Allow
yourself to feel physically relaxed so that you practice
playing without the tension that often results from the
stress of practicing and playing too fast. Do not play
the next note until all the fingers are ready. There are
several ways you can practice slowly. One of the best
ways is to play your passage at whatever tempo you
know you can play it perfectly. It does not matter how
slow it is. Play it perfectly at a tempo that feels easy,
and then find that tempo on the metronome. Once you
know this tempo, you have your starting point. From
here, you can either progress naturally—increasing
the tempo as you get faster through repetition—or set
daily or weekly tempo goals and repeat at incremental
tempos as much as you need to get to the next faster
tempo. Alternately, I like to set the metronome to the
goal tempo, but give that beat to a subdivision. If the
goal tempo is quarter note = 126, maybe 126 becomes
the eighth note, or even the sixteenth note. In this way,
I am always working with the goal tempo, but still
practicing slowly. Once you have mastered this tempo at
a tiny subdivision, you can make it a larger subdivision.
Eventually, you will be playing at the goal tempo.
Rhythm play is another of my all-time favorite
technique work methods. For example, if you have a
four beat run of sixteenth notes, you may play them
all as dotted eighth-sixteenth patterns. The next time
around, play sixteenth-dotted eighth patterns. Then
two eights, two sixteenths. Then two sixteenths,
two eighths. Next, play one eighth, two sixteenths,
one eighth. Finally, one sixteenth, two eighths, one
sixteenth. In this way, you have played all the notes
sequentially fast at one point or another. Finally, put
them all back together in straight sixteenths. The
rhythmic variations work the muscle memory in both
the fingers and the brain and provide repetition. For
triplets, I like to practice in sixteenth-eighth-sixteenth
patterns as well as one eighth-two sixteenths, and two
sixteenths-one eighth. Always do this practice with a
metronome. While using this method, you can also use
the practicing-from-the-end method.
Once you have become proficient at your technical
etude, work not just on playing the entire etude
straight through from beginning to end, but also in
large sections. Generally, you will not play the entire
etude at contest—you must be able to start and stop
in any spot, so it is good to incorporate this into your
practicing.
Lyrical Etudes
The lyrical etudes are often quite beautiful. Of
course, we want a lovely, pure, in-tune tone with an
appropriate vibrato and fitting dynamics, but careful
attention must also be paid to the rhythm. Rhythmic
inaccuracy shows a lack of attention to detail and
leaves the listener wondering about the strength of the
player. Counting is key. Feel (and mark in your music)
where ties end and subdivide everything. If a long
note is going into a subdivided beat, be sure you are
already subdividing in the rhythm of the next beat on
the previous longer, held out note.
In the ideal world, we would have perfect tone,
perfect dynamics, and perfect intonation. If it is
a question of dynamics or tone, I would sacrifice
dynamics for tone. In other words, make sure you
have a beautiful tone rather than fading and losing
your tone completely, or crescendoing too much and
becoming outrageously sharp.
Pract ice Tips for Learning Texas Al l -State Etudes