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Imitation is the backbone of creativity (Video)

ISJ

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Making time

Being a musician you often don’t have time for everything. You can’t practice everything all of the time. You’ll probably have to have a job that’s not exactly what you want to be doing. You’ll have less time to practice then. You won’t have time to work for hours on end to achieve your goals.

You’ll need to make time.

Making time for something can be incredibly difficult, especially when you have other priorities and other things that you need to take care of.

Making time doesn’t need to happen every day and it doesn’t need to be big chunks of time.

You can make a lot of time in small increments.

25 minutes a day.

Twice a week that’s 2600 minutes a year. That’s 43.33 hours.

That’s a lot of time.

ISJ

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Explain your conducting

If you’re conducting students, and I would argue even if you aren’t conducting students, explaining your conducting can be super useful.

With students this can be especially useful. They aren’t as skilled in following a conductor as professional musicians. Professional orchestral musicians have been following different conductors for quite a while and will have a lot of experience in following different motions and gestures. They’ll likely be able to figure out what you mean just from looking at the gestures that you give them.

Less experienced musicians might not, especially if they’re in high school or younger.

So explain it to them.

Just take a few minutes in your rehearsal to tell them what you’ll be doing with your hands and what each different gesture means.

If you’re giving one specific player or group of players a gesture, let them know. Tell the whole orchestra that it’s just for that group of players or singular player so they know not to follow it.

It can also be useful to tell the orchestra to follow you at certain sections. Less experienced players won’t be able to figure out what parts of the music will require more direction than others. So tell them.

Just taking a few moments in rehearsal to explain exactly what you’re doing and exactly why you’re doing it can save a lot of confusion and time later on in the rehearsal.

It also helps the students better follow a conductor. Remember that you’re their teacher. Even if you’re conducting them for a concert remember that you are there to teach them how to play in an orchestra. And part of learning to play in an orchestra is learning to follow a conductor.

If they haven’t had to follow a conductor for a long period of time they likely don’t understand what all of the gestures are and what they all mean. So explain to them what all of that means. Remember that they haven’t studied conducting at all likely. They’ll recognize some things because they’ve seen them before, but if there’s a gesture that they haven’t seen before it can be useful to explain it to them.

I know a choir teacher who has the students practice doing the gestures with him. It’s a great break from singing for the students and gives them another look into what it’s like to direct the choir. He’s also told me that the students really enjoy doing them because it gives them a chance to be a little less serious than when they are singing.

If you’re directing a choir or orchestra give this a shot and see if it helps your players follow you a little bit better.

ISJ

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Mouth the words

My students just had a big Christmas performance and they were singing a bunch of different Christmas songs.

I wasn’t singing with them, but I wanted to make sure that they knew where they were. So I mouthed the words.

This might be something that sounds like common sense, but I think it’s worth pointing out because it can be so incredibly helpful for student singers. It’s especially useful for students who aren’t very experienced with singing in performances. Some older choral students may not need the extra help, but younger and less experienced students definitely need it.

Mouth the words as if you’re singing. If you can mouth them slightly before the beat then that can help the students even more because you’ll be able to give them a hint of what to sing right before they need to sing it. This can help them make sure that they sing the correct words on the beat, rather than slightly after the beat.

ISJ

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Conducting more than a beat pattern

One of the first things you learn when you learn to conduct is how to conduct a beat pattern. That’s a good start, but there’s so much more to conducting than the beat pattern.

You can conduct dynamics with the size of the beat pattern that you’re conducting. You can also use your left hand to add in dynamic changes like crescendos and decresendos. Lifting your hand up and down can be a useful way to do this.

You can add in articulations by changing how you conduct your beat pattern. If you conduct smoothly, like you’re spreading nutella or peanut butter, you’ll be conducting legato. If you conduct like you’re chopping up carrots or celery you’ll be conducting staccato. Sharper and more punchy beats will be staccato and smoother beats will be legato.

You can use your other hand for phrasing if you want to.

Cues can be given a number of different ways. I like to use my left hand to give cues by either pointing at the person or motioning towards them with an open palm.

Cut offs can be given with both hands or just the left hand. Different types of cut offs can be given with the left hand than both hands. I often will give a cut off with my left hand if it’s only for a specific group of people. If I give a cut off with both hands it’s for everybody.

Accents can be given with either hand. Depending on the type of accent it might be easier to give with one hand than the other. An off beat accent can be given with the left hand easily, or it can be given with the right hand by bouncing on the beat quickly almost as if you’re trying to take away the beat from the orchestra.

You can also give other cues with your left hand. Any other type of hand gestures or symbols that you’d like to give to the ensemble can easily be given with the left hand. I’ve heard of conductors teaching the students different words in American Sign Language (ASL) and using those for different things during the performance. I’ve never done that myself, but I could see how that would easily communicate certain ideas with the players.

There’s lots of ways to communicate different musical ideas with your hands. Especially if you use both hands.

There are probably a lot of things I missed here, but these are some basics to get yourself started.

ISJ

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Remember chord progressions

I love practicing ear training. I love being able to hear songs and understand them by ear. I definitely don’t practice ear training as much as I probably should, but I think it’s one of the most useful skills that a musician can learn.

For an intro for people that may be unfamiliar, ear training is the ability to recognize different aspects of music (rhythms, harmonies, melodic intervals, instruments) just from listening. So that’s a lot of different things to be able to recognize.

Today’s post is only about chord progressions.

When you learn a new chord progression or harmony, remember the sound of it. Play it in different keys and pay attention to the sound of the chord progression. Listen for what different intervals you hear and how each note changes from chord to chord. Listen to the voice leading that’s often used. If you use solfege or scale degrees, listen to which different scale degrees you hear in each chord.

If you can do that for every new chord progression that you learn you’ll be able to recognize chords in a lot of different songs. They might be in different keys, but if you know the sound of the chord progression as a whole it can help you recognize it regardless of the key.

Another thing to pay attention to is how the chords change. Listen to pairs of chords. How does I to V sound? How about V to vi? And so on. Continue paying attention to different chord changes.

Compare them to other chord progressions that you know and try to hear them as being distinct. Listen to the chord quality and what type of chord it is.

Doing this can help you improve your ear training without adding much more work to your practice sessions. If you play a chordal instrument like guitar or piano then you learn to play chord progressions all the time. And those chord progressions will often come back in other songs. Or parts of those chord progressions will come back in other songs.

Being able to recognize what type of chord progression you have before you start learning the song can be a great confidence boost and can give you a head start in learning the song.

This can be something that you add while you’re learning a song. You can use the songs that you’ve already learned to help yourself learn ear training.

I’ve personally had this help me with ear training classes while I was at Berklee College of Music. Some of the chord progressions we had on the ear training dictation exams I recognized from songs that I’d learned on guitar. It made it a lot easier to do well in ear training classes.

ISJ

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Following the beat

There are some types of music where you can follow the beat. Other types of music you need to be with the beat. You need to be locked to the beat.

In classical music you can often follow the beat. You can follow the conductor and play slightly after them. A lot of orchestras do that normally. German orchestras especially do this. There’s a certain amount of time that they always play after the conductor’s beat. And the whole orchestra is together because they all know exactly how long to wait. There are a number of videos of Leonard Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic like this.

Orchestras from the U.S. are a little different. U.S. orchestras often play directly on top of the beat.

Jazz and pop and rock music isn’t like this either.

In those styles of music you want to be phase locked. This means that you are playing at the exact same time as everyone else in the band. When they play the first beat, you also play the first beat. You are both synced and playing on the exact same beats.

The way to practice this is to play with a constant beat and practice playing as with that beat as you can.

This can be done with a metronome or with a recording. Either one works, as long as you have a constant beat. A metronome is often useful because it’ll be ruthless in telling you how on the beat you are. That immediate click will let you know whether you’re ahead of the beat or behind the beat. You’re exposed while playing with a metronome.

With a recording it can sometimes be a little harder to tell at first. There are often multiple other instruments playing different rhythms so you’re covered up a little bit more than with just a metronome. There are other elements that might be masking how on the beat you are.

Another way to practice your rhythm is to practice purposefully playing before or after the beat. You want to feel like you’re pulling or pushing the beat by the exact same amount. Playing right before the beat the same way every time is much more difficult than it sounds because in order to play the exact same amount before the beat you need to know exactly where that beat is going to fall. The same goes for playing slightly after the beat. Playing slightly after the beat, in the exact same way, every single time, you need to be able to anticipate when that beat will come so that you’re prepared to play right after it.

One final way to practice this is to practice subdividing the beat. Practicing different 8th note, 8th note triplet, and 16th note rhythms can help you improve your rhythms because you’re learning to change the beat up. You can also practice playing constant rhythms and accenting different parts of the beat. Play constant 16th notes and practice accenting the first 16th note first. Then practice accenting the second 16th note; the “e” of every beat. Then practice accenting the third 16th note; accenting the “&” of every beat. Then finally practice accenting the fourth 16th note; the “a” of every beat.

That would look something like this.

Using these techniques can greatly improve your rhythm. It’s something that students often don’t realize they need to practice until they hear themselves in a performance and don’t understand why they don’t sound as good as they thought they did. Playing in time is quite difficult to do, and unless you’ve practiced it it’s often something that you don’t hear while you’re playing.

Luckily for us there are plenty of different ways to practice playing in time that will improve our rhythm quickly.

ISJ

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Always hear what you sing

The title here is self explanatory, but I’ll explain exactly what I mean, how and why it’s useful, and how to practice this.

So let’s start from the top.

What do I mean?

Always hear the note that you’re about to sing right before you sing it. Hear it in your head in as much detail as possible. You can also visualize yourself singing it and imagine how that will feel, but the main thing is to hear the tone that you’re trying to sing.

Try to hear it in the correct register (head voice vs. chest voice) and in the correct dynamic. Try to hear it as clearly and as in tune as possible.

This can be difficult at first so I’ll give you some practice tips at the end of this post.

How and why is this useful?

This is useful because it prepares you to sing the note. It also makes sure that you know which note you’re about to sing before you sing it. It focuses your attention on one note. If you just try to sing a song without hearing it you might do just fine, but you’ll do much better if you can imagine each note before you hear it.

This skill is called “audiation” and it’s something that I’ve posted a lot about. For singers it’s a necessary skill to learn because it’s something that’ll help you sing more in tune and likely more relaxed. And doing all of those things will likely give you more confidence so that you’ll be a much better singer all around if you can learn how to do this.

When I teach my students how to do this they immediately sound better. It’s kind of amazing how much better this makes them sound.

That brings us to the next section.

How do we practice this?

The way I teach this to my students is by playing them something on an instrument, most often guitar, or from a recording. I play it for them at least four times. Then I have them give me a thumbs up when they can hear that piece of music in their head. I take maybe three notes. I don’t take much of the song. I give them something like three notes. Sometimes I have them find what part of the song that piece of music is from.

After having my students do this a few times I’ll have them sing it all together. They always sound a lot better.

Another way to practice this is by pitch matching. Pitch matching just means that you play yourself a note, hear it in your head, and then sing it. That can be super useful if you’re having problems with pitch at a specific part of the song. Practice pitch matching each pitch individually, then practice it in chunks of notes.

Eventually the goal is to do this with every single song that you sing. The goal is to hear each note right before you sing it without having to think about it. That’ll help you sing with much better intonation. Having music in front of you can help a lot because it can be a quick reminder of where the music goes, but hearing it in your head is the main thing that’s going to help.

ISJ

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Practice without an instrument

How do you practice without an instrument? That sounds kind of silly because you’re not really practicing. But it can be really useful to practice without an instrument.

You do this by visualizing.

It can be a great way to practice while you’re not able to practice your instrument.

It’s not a replacement for practicing with an instrument, but it’s something that I used to do while at Berklee quite often. It can also help with hearing a piece of music in your head; audiating.

If you can visualize yourself playing some in as much detail as possible you’ll be able to control your fingers and play it better when you do have an instrument.

It can also help with sight reading an remembering notes and fingerings because you’re imagining where those notes and fingerings are on the instrument.

Let’s start with the first thing.

What does “in detail” mean?

That means imagine it being as similar to you having an instrument in your hand as possible. Imagine everything. Try to feel what it’d feel like to press down the keys or the strings or the frets. Imagine how your hand is going to be positioned and how your feet are going to be positioned.

Sometimes when I would do this I would hold my hands up as if I actually did have an instrument. It might look or feel silly, but it can be super helpful when you don’t have an instrument in front of you.

Imagine how everything on the instrument looks. What color is everything? How big is everything? What temperature is everything?

After you’ve got everything in detail you want to imagine everything about how you play. Imagine what the keys feel like. Imagine what the strings or frets feel like. Imagine what the embouchure feels like if you’re playing a wind instrument. Imagine how the position changes feel when you play different parts of the music. Imagine how everything sounds when you play it.

Imagine everything.

It should “feel” as real as you can make it.

And honestly this should be quite difficult. Imagining everything in this much detail will take a lot of effort. It’ll be really difficult to do this, and it likely won’t be something that you’ll want to do for extended periods of time.

Now how can this help?

It helps in a few ways. It helps by getting your brain ready to move those tiny muscles in your hands and lips to create the correct sounds and fingerings while you’re playing. It prepares you to make all of those tiny movements.

One main way that this helps is because you’ll practice everything perfectly. If you’re really doing this correctly you’ll be imagining everything perfectly. You want to visualize yourself playing everything absolutely perfectly. That’s an incredibly effective way to practice, especially with an instrument. Every note, every articulation, every small little hand movement should be perfect.

Another thing this can help with is audiation; hearing music in your head.

When you’re reading a piece of music it can often be useful to imagine yourself playing that piece of music to be able to hear it in your head. It gives you something else to hold onto in order to hear the music.

I often do this with guitar, or with piano music. If I’m trying to hear something in my head I’ll visualize myself playing it on the piano and imagine sight reading it on piano. That gives me an idea of where my hands would be placed on the piano. This helps me imagine what notes the piano would be making while I’m doing this.

Give this a try if you’ve got some extra time at a bus stop or before a meeting or something. It can be a great way to improve your skills without needing to have an instrument in front of you. You’ll be surprised at how much this will help you improve your instrumental skills.

ISJ

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Shifting positions on violin

Currently I’ve been learning violin and I’m going through the same books that my orchestra students go through; Essential Elements.

I’m in the third book and that’s where they start to teach 3rd position. There are a lot of position shifting activities to learn where the correct hand placement is for switching positions. A lot of them involve using the same finger to play a note in first position and in third position. If you’re practicing on the D string that’d be playing E with the first finger and shifting up to third position and playing G with the first finger.

This practices the correct position and where to hold your hand on the violin to get to third position.

You want to practice that small shift in hand position because that’s what will help you stay in tune.

You need to know that hand position as opposed to first position.

When you learn first position you don’t need to learn it in relation to anything else.

Once you start learning other positions you need to learn them to be different from each other. You want to learn to “feel” them and know where the correct position is without having to play or without having to look at your hand.

This is why skilled musicians can play so easily with their eyes closed. Once you’re skilled enough on your instrument, it feels the same as playing with eyes open.

It always amazes my students if I play with my eyes closed, but it doesn’t feel any different once you’re used to it.

And it doesn’t even take much practice.

I’ve never practiced without my eyes closed, but I’ve practiced enough that I can “feel” where everything is.

Knowing which piano keys are under your hands, or knowing where third position is, or knowing what frets are under your fingers isn’t an easy thing to learn, but it’s not magical. All those different keys, frets, and positions are different postures and different placements of your hand. They don’t feel the same. At first they might feel too similar to be able to distinguish them. After some practice they’ll begin to feel more and more different and you’ll be able to tell them apart.

One of my students had a great idea during a lesson. He struggled with “feeling” where different strings were on the guitar, in his right hand; his picking hand. So he practiced playing two different strings without looking at them. That way he doesn’t have to always look at his picking hand, and he can focus on his fretting hand.

I’ve never practiced that way myself, but it was a really good idea. He was practicing exactly the thing that was difficult for him.

That’s an efficient way to practice.

On violin, just practice switching between the two positions. Practice that in a bunch of different ways, but that’s what you want to practice to learn to switch to third position.

Just practice shifting positions.

ISJ

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