practicing

[bloke]

I think what other older players have said that I read (back when I was not an older player) is sort of proving to be true.

There are some really difficult passages and a few of them are really low orchestral excerpts. In the past, I used my youth to muscle through them, but maybe I have a little bit more wisdom a few decades later and since I haven't lost that much ability to play (even though I'm a good bit older) I've become a bit more observant and figured out just how to do my air and my mouth and so on to make certain pitches pop out more cleanly when things are rapid and borderline frantic. I'm also getting smarter about intonation workarounds in the really low range, I believe.

I know this sounds like just a bunch of bragging, but I've really never had to dedicate much thought to stuff that I play on the F tuba because I have such a ridiculously good instrument, and playing the tuba in that range is easier anyway.

[Mary Ann]

Then person now sitting on my right in the brass band plays a Firebird, and he powers his way through the low register. I doubt there are many who get a better sound, at least to my ears. But he is a tuba-sized guy, and has the physique to do that. I wonder where he will be in 44 years when he is my age, but happy for him that he can do what he does.

@bloke you referred to paying attention to the shape of your mouth, and I think I have seen you recently denigrate people who find they have to do that. Fascinating.

[bloke]

Then person now sitting on my right in the brass band plays a Firebird, and he powers his way through the low register. I doubt there are many who get a better sound, at least to my ears. But he is a tuba-sized guy, and has the physique to do that. I wonder where he will be in 44 years when he is my age, but happy for him that he can do what he does.

@bloke you referred to paying attention to the shape of your mouth, and I think I have seen you recently denigrate people who find they have to do that. Fascinating.

I pay attention to the shape of my mouth when the sound isn't right, drill long enough to make it second nature, and then stop thinking about the shape of my mouth (much as with the Charlie Parker quote I posted). If there's some "back-sliding", rinse-repeat. Thinking about "playing music" while making music (rather than completely thinking about the "music") results in the music suffering.

I'm physically changing some things about the way I'm playing a few standard excerpts. I'm drilling them (hundreds of times) until those things that I have to concentrate on (ie. the changes) are second nature. I go back-and-forth between concentrating on those changes and not concentrating on them...and I'm doing this UNTIL I don't have to think about the physical things at all and WITHOUT thinking about anything but the sound - at which point they sound right every single time (and even if my stomach/head/sinuses/joints/whatever don't feel very good...as "the days of everything feeling great most of the time" are past).

Also, at this point I really don't need to go see someone to suggest things to try when I want to change or improve things. I simply try things - with the most obvious ones I think of being the first thing I try.
To my ears, many tuba players who are coming along pretty well benefit much more from music lessons than from tuba lessons.

bloke "technically speaking (getting back to the how-to, vs. the how-to-sound), the golf swing analogy...ie. broken up into fourteen awkward segments, and missing the ball"

[MikeS]

When you are young, you are a good player on your own. When you are middle-aged aged you are a good ensemble player. When you become "old", you can practice a lot, becoming both a good individual player AND a good ensemble player, better than you ever were. Or you can give in and retire.

I think most folks decide to retire because it is the correct time and is far easier. I have to work until I die, so I have decided to sort of go back to school and polish this turd until it shines, baby…

Pablo Casals gave an interview when he was in his nineties. During the session Casals mentioned that he practiced at least four hours a day. The interviewer said, “Maestro, you have been at the top of your craft for over seventy years. Why do you still practice that much?”

Casals smiled and replied, “I’m beginning to see some improvement.”

If you have a few spare minutes, here is another example of someone who never had the intention of retiring. This is Ida Haendel, one of the greatest violinists of the 20th century, at age eighty,* talking and playing for some very lucky folk.



*She might have been 85 here. Depending on her mood and circumstances her birthday varied from 1923 to 1928.

[Mary Ann]

You know, as a violinist, what impressed me the most? She played running octaves (both notes at once) that were so in tune it was difficult to diferentiate the higher note. Given that each requires a different distance between the first and 4th fingers, and no two are alike unless they are exactly a fifth apart and played on the adjacent set of strings -- that is something most listeneners won't even realize is going on.

[bloke]

Why do you think I slid the nylon string guitar under the bed and started digging into the tuba?

Tuba paid more, and it was about ten times as easy.

[bloke]

People don't really appreciate posts suggesting what they do or don't do with their playing, particularly if it's not posted by one of the known-to-all-tuba-players players posting stuff such as that...

... so here goes anyway:

When I rarely encounter other players, a lot of times (happily, not all the time) it's fairly mousy (simply not loud enough), and it's not as if control of their super-soft playing has been mastered, either.

As bass guitars emerged and replaced upright pizzicato basses in big band music, jazz combo music, country, folk, and rockabilly music (as the rock era emerged), patrons' ears and musicians' and music directors' ears (particularly with the emergence of high Fidelity recordings in the 1950s into the 1960s) became accustomed to being offered and hearing more bass sound.

With the tuba, it requires a lot of practice, control, and energy to produce a broad bass sound that is focused, pleasant, and (well...) on pitch. It also requires continually pushing the envelope to a new "envelopes", and putting up with one's own coarse loader sounds until they are developed - at new higher volume levels - into pleasant sounds.

Nearly sixty years ago, we had giveaway cardboard band folders with a picture of Fred Fennell inside (sporting a flat top haircut) suggesting ways to become a better ensemble player, and one of them was to get out of the practice room and develop a marketable large glorious sound (though I'm not quoting him, because I don't have one of those old folders in front of me).

Again, music directors really like hearing a solid bass.
If there's not enough of it, they're probably not going to stop and say something, but if there is plenty of it, not too much, and it's very nice, they are going to smile. When music is marked with two p's or even three, that's not necessarily requesting the absolute smallest sound that can be produced on an instrument. Other than rests obviously, everything written on a page is intended to be heard. The volume guidelines are to suggest to us where we fit in the context and aren't directly related to figurative "knobs" controlling our output. When I'm playing absolutely as soft as I can, it's either a special effect or it's when I'm fading to nothing (which is something else that a whole bunch of players probably need to work on being able to do - as it's actually a very commonly appropriate musical effect).

Something which automatically makes a sound seem louder and more present is to simply play courageously at the very front of the pulse, rather than "in" the pulse. Anytime we hear the timpani or the snare drum or the principal trumpet or our metronome immediately before we hear our sound, we aren't there.

Okay. I'm sure I've offended enough people for this morning. I will go to work and won't come back and offend more people until after lunch.