The same but different - the wonders of alternative fingerings

Think back to when you first started playing the recorder. Do you remember the simplicity of the earliest fingerings you learnt? Each note had one possible fingering and it was challenge enough to wrap your fingers around those.

In reality, how many different fingerings do you think there are for each note on the recorder? A couple, perhaps? You might be shocked to learn that some notes have dozens of possible fingerings, each used for different purposes. Today we’re going to look at the reasons why you might wish to learn some of the recorder’s many non-standard fingerings. How many you choose to learn, and the reasons for doing, so will depend on the level you’re at, but it’s useful to at least have an awareness of the principles behind them.

A word on numbering

I’m going to share lots of fingerings with you today, so it’s worth saying a few words about how these are notated. I’ll mostly use illustrative charts, but from time to time I’ll also use numbers. A standard has evolved in recorder tutor books for the numbering of the fingerholes, which is shown below. The left thumb is 0, while the holes on the front of the recorder are numbered 1 to 7, top to bottom. This may be different from other instruments you play - for instance the piano, where the fingers have different numbering patterns.

The standard fingerings we use every day produce a consistent quality of tone throughout the recorder’s range, with good intonation. In most situations these fingerings work perfectly well, but there are still occasions when we might need to tweak them a little…

What is a standard fingering?

If you consult the fingering chart provided with any new recorder it might be easy to assume there’s just one standard set of fingerings and anything else is an alternative. There’s a degree of truth to this, but in reality even standard fingerings can require a degree of flexibility. Those shown in your fingering chart are just a starting point.

Certain notes may need a little tweaking to play in tune - for instance low C sharp on the treble recorder (G sharp on descant or tenor). Most fingering charts will show the following fingering:

This generally works well, but may not always be perfectly in tune. To correct this, the simplest solution is to cover a little more or less of hole 6. For instance, my sopranino recorder needs finger 6 to be covering both double holes to be in tune in most circumstances. I learnt this a long while ago and using this slightly modified fingering is now habitual.

It’s worth remembering too, that unless you’re playing with a piano (where the pitch of each note is fixed by your piano tuner) the exact placing of any note will vary slightly, depending on its position within each chord. For instance, a C sharp which exists as the major third of an A major chord will need to be slightly lower in pitch than the same note used as the fifth of an F sharp major chord.

When you begin playing larger recorders (bass downwards), a little flexibility is often required, even with the so called standard fingerings. For example, on many bass recorders (especially plastic ones) the standard fingering for low E flat will be too flat. The fingering below is often a better choice, using finger 5 instead of 4:

Similarly, many basses are reluctant to play top C sharp with the fingering we would habitually use for the equivalent note on the treble recorder. The following is a much more reliable alternative, although curiously it tends to be out of tune on smaller sizes of recorder:

Setting these minor anomalies aside, why would you wish to use a different fingering if the ones you’re already using are serving you perfectly well? There are a number of reasons, so let’s take a look at some of them…

Ease of playing

The most practical sort of alternative fingerings are the ones we use to make life easier for ourselves. The recorder’s basic design hasn’t changed significantly over the last three centuries. The keywork which gradually developed on other woodwind instruments (flute, oboe, clarinet etc) during this period was intended to help extend the range of notes available and to make the playing of chromatic passages simpler. Our instrument is capable to playing fully chromatic music without these additions, but this does lead to some complex fingerings. Take, for instance, this forked fingering (treble E flat or descant B flat:

It produces a clear tone, but to move from there to the notes immediately above and below requires us to move several fingers up and down simultaneously. With practice doing this neatly is entirely possible, but at high speed it can still be a challenge.

For such passages there are a number of fingerings we can use to make life easier, minimising the number of digits to be moved. These alternative fingerings tend to be the ones we learn first, simply because they make our life easier. The ones shown below are the most commonly used alternatives, with notes about the places where you might find them helpful:

There are many more you can use - too many to include a comprehensive list here. I’ll point you in the direction of some useful sources of information later…

Trills and ornaments

Baroque music has always been a significant part of the recorder’s repertoire, and with that comes the need for trills and other ornaments. Many trills are playable using standard fingerings, but for some combinations of notes we have to find alternatives to make them possible. I wrote a blog about trills, their reason for being and how to play them better a while ago. If trills scare you, this is a really good place to begin - you can find my blog here.

Creating dynamic shape

One of the expressive challenges we face as recorder players is the limited dynamic range our instrument has. There’s a limit to how much you can increase and decrease your breath pressure to play louder and softer before the notes becomes unacceptably sharp or flat.

One way around this problem is to combine a change of breath pressure with slightly sharp or flat alternative fingerings. Let me explain the principles involved…

To play quietly - here you use a fingering which would ordinarily be slightly sharp, and then drop your breath pressure slightly to bring the note in tune and play softly. This fingering, for instance, is a slightly modified treble E flat (or descant B flat). By adding a couple of extra fingers and dropping your breath pressure it creates a beautiful soft treble D or descant A.

The following table illustrates the quiet alternatives I use most frequently when I’m playing. Don’t forget to combine these with gentle blowing!

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To play loudly - here you need to find a slightly flat fingering (often by adding a finger or two to the standard fingering) and blow more firmly to keep the pitch true. For instance, for treble C (descant G) you could add an extra finger on your right hand to do this:

I won’t include a list of loud alternatives here as they are easier to figure out for yourself. Just try covering or shading one of the open holes to see how much of a flattening effect it has on the note and choose the one that suits your needs best.

While these principles are quite logical, you must also remember that dynamic adjustments are easier to achieve with some notes than others. For the lowest notes there simply aren’t many (if any) suitable alternatives, while for others there are dozens of possibilities! As well as learning these new fingerings you’ll also need to remember to adjust your breath pressure to modulate the pitch of the notes.

How easy you find all of this will depend on the level of your playing. If simply finding the ‘normal’ fingerings is still a challenge this may be a step too far for you yet. I wouldn’t expect to introduce such complexities to my pupils until they are reasonably advanced, so please don’t feel you’re a failure if the concept alone boggles your mind!

Special effects

Another niche use for non-standard fingerings on the recorder is to create unique tonal effects - something most commonly found in contemporary music. For instance, in Hans-Martin Linde’s Music for a Bird he gives very specific fingerings to create special effects, such as a particular tone colour or to play multiphonics (playing more than one pitch at once), as you can see in the extract below. Such techniques are used in many contemporary works, but unless this is a style of music that particularly interests you, you needn’t worry about such fingerings in other types of music.

Resources to learn non-standard fingerings

Perhaps the most comprehensive source of recorder fingerings of all types is a website I only learnt about last summer - www.recorder-fingerings.com. Here you’ll find hundreds of charts for any type of fingering you could possibly wish for - for ease of use, dynamics, trills, and even for specific makes of recorder. It’s worth bookmarking this page so you can refer to it when you need a specific fingering. If you care to take a deep dive the site, it contains a bewildering array of options, but they’re helpfully arranged by category, making it easy enough to find exactly what you need.

If you prefer books to online sources, I can recommend two containing comprehensive charts for different uses:

Eve O’Kelly - The Recorder Today (Cambridge University Press, 1990).

A fascinating book about all aspects of the recorder, with a slant towards contemporary music. Still available to purchase new, but there are also plenty of used copies available at AbeBooks

Anthony Rowland-Jones - Recorder Technique, Intermediate to Advanced (Peacock Press, 2013)

A handy book covering all aspects of technique, including a comprehensive chapter on alternative fingerings. Available direct from the publisher or to order from most good bookshops.

Getting to grips with non-standard fingerings

It can seem bewildering when you first begin using alternative fingerings – there are just so many of them to get to grips with! To help you with this process, here are some of my top tips to get you started.

Start gradually

Don’t try to assimilate lots of new fingerings at once – that’s a recipe for disappointment and confusion! Instead, be selective. Whether you’re trying to learn an alternative fingering to make a difficult passage easier, or a specific trill fingering, begin by selecting just one or two. For instance, if you want to become fluent with the alternative E on the treble recorder (B on descant or tenor), choose a simple piece and practise using that fingering every time an E crops up in the music.

If you’re beginning to add trills into Baroque music, don’t feel you need to include them all at once. Maybe pick one trill that occurs several times in your music and play only that one to start with. When you’re comfortable and are able to locate the right fingering reliably, then add in another one. Because recorder music tends to use a limited range of key signatures, you’ll notice some trills crop up much more often than others. Use this to your advantage and learn them gradually. There are no prizes for trying to wrestle them all into submission at once, especially if you fail!

Get to know your recorders

While plastic recorders are mass produced and identical, wooden ones tend to have at least an element of individual human work in their manufacture. Made from a living, breathing material such as wood, even supposedly identical models can vary, so you may find you have to use subtly different fingerings from instrument to instrument. Take some time to make friends with each of your recorders, listening to the tone and intonation of your fingerings.

Listen out for tone quality

Some alternative fingerings have a different tone colour to their standard  companions. For instance, cover your thumb hole and finger 1 (the fingering for E on treble, B on descant/tenor) and really listen to the quality of the sound - it produces a clear, solid tone. Now compare that with this alternative:

Do you hear the difference? The tone quality isn’t quite so clear, and on some recorders it may be a touch flatter in pitch.

Now consider the context in which you might use this alternative fingering. The obvious place is when you need to move swiftly (and perhaps repetitively) between E and the F (B and C on descant). If you’re doing this at speed, the difference in tone quality will be barely perceptible. But in slower music, where you may linger on the note for longer, its lesser tone quality may stick out like a sore thumb. In such situations it’s better to practise until you can use the standard fingering cleanly. If you’re adding an alternative fingering to make your life easier, be careful you’re not doing so at the expense of a consistent tone quality throughout the musical line.

Don’t neglect your intonation

When you start using sharp and flat fingerings to create dynamic contrasts you introduce another variable into the mix - an adjustment to your breath pressure. Over time you’ll learn to increase or decrease your breath appropriately, but it’s important to focus on tuning. You could practise this by playing with other people (or comparing your notes to the pitches on a piano if you have one). If neither of these is a realistic option, it’s worth investing in a tuning meter to help you. Standalone tuning meters can be bought quite inexpensively, sometimes combined with a metronome. But if you have a smartphone the simplest and cheapest solution is to download a tuning meter app. Using a tuner you can check the pitch of your piano and forte alternative fingerings and learn to modulate your breath pressure appropriately.

Elegantly dovetailed phrase endings

If you regularly play duets with a partner you’ll often find your phrases finish on the same note - particularly in Baroque music. If you’re both using the same fingering it can result in a final note which is suddenly much louder than those around it. To avoid this sudden bump a good solution is for one player to use a quiet alternative fingering, while the other sticks with the standard fingering. When I play with my friend Sophie in The Parnassian Ensemble we use this technique a lot to create smooth endings that don’t jolt the listener’s ear, and we both have favourite fingerings we know work well on our recorders. This is not a technique for elementary players, but if you’re looking to hone your phrase endings elegantly it’s worth experimenting with.

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Have I opened your eyes to some new musical possibilities? Or are you feeling bamboozled by an unexpected array of alternative fingerings? Learning even a few of these fingerings can be a helpful addition to your technique, be they for trills, dynamics or simply to help you get around a tricky passage. The most important thing is it to begin your explorations of alternative fingerings gradually. Don’t try to learn them all at once - you may find yourself feeling lost and confused. Instead, be selective, picking just one or two at first, only adding more as you gain fluency and confidence.

Whether you’re new to this, or a real alternative fingering geek I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments below. Do you have your own tips or perhaps favourite fingerings you wouldn’t want to be without? Please do leave a comment and let’s see if we can all learn at least one new fingering today!

The Practice Files - How to practise like a pro

What’s your approach to practising? Are you a last minute crammer? Or someone who works diligently every day? My hope today is to open your eyes to the way practice works. Not just a case of ‘do this, do that’, but what actually goes on inside your body. Learning about this has helped me understand the process of learning and practice and I hope it’ll also help you harness your body’s ability to learn.

How do we learn new skills?

Have you ever considered what goes on inside your body when you practise? I suspect most of us go about learning music without giving it a second thought, but a little knowledge can be a powerful tool to help us understand the best way to improve our playing.

Let’s begin with a few basics of physiology…

In order to move any part of our bodies, an electrical impulse needs to travel from our brain, along our nerves, telling the muscles and tendons to move. Every second of the day our brains send endless electrical messages out to all parts of our anatomy, almost all of them without any conscious decision making. Think about the simple act of eating, for instance. Messages have to be sent to our hands to manipulate the cutlery (quite aside from the process of deciding which piece of food you want to eat next), followed by another to lift the fork to our lips and then our jaws and throat need yet more messages with instructions to chew and swallow. When you break down that process it’s amazing how many complex actions we carry out every second without a second thought.

What you may not realise is that we have secret weapon helping us learn these repetitive skills, making them quicker and more instinctive. That weapon is a substance called myelin.

What is myelin?

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Myelin is a phospholipid membrane - a dense type of fat which wraps about our nerve fibres to insulate them. As you can see from this image, it builds up in sausage-like shapes around the nerves. This insulation prevents electrical impulses leaking from the nerves, resulting in stronger, more efficient neural pathways. Myelin acts just like the plastic insulation around copper wiring, helping channel electrical signals to their destination without interruption. Fundamentally, when we’re playing the recorder, it helps messages travel from the brain to our fingers, tongue and lungs quicker, allowing us to play with greater fluency and speed.

The more layers of myelin we build up, the more accurate and speedier our thoughts and movements become. Uninsulated nerve fibres are like the copper wires used to provide the slow dial-up internet connection we used in the early days of the internet. In contrast, once they’ve been wrapped with myelin they become more like the optic fibre which provides us with super-fast fibre internet today – infinitely quicker.

The best way to trigger the myelination of nerve pathways is by making mistakes (something we’re all very capable of!), before fixing those mistakes through practice. Each time we fire a neural circuit (the path the messages take along the nerves) correctly, cells called oligodendrocytes and astrocytes sense this and respond by wrapping the nerves in myelin. The more often this happens, the more layers of myelin are laid down and the closer we get to building our own human equivalent of a super-fast optic fibre cable. A signal can travel through a myelinated nerve pathway up to a hundred times fast than an uninsulated one, and that can make a huge difference to the speed and accuracy our playing!

A one-way process

Once your body has wrapped a nerve pathway in myelin, that insulation is there permanently. It can only be disrupted by disease, such as Multiple Sclerosis, which destroys myelin. With diseases like this, the loss of myelin means nerves lose their ability to conduct electrical impulses, resulting in a loss of vital motor skills.

If you’ve ever wondered why bad habits are so hard to break, this is because of the one-way nature of myelination. Once you’ve created and insulated the nerve pathway to play a wrong note or rhythm, the only way to undo that is to practise the notes correctly, creating another freshly myelinated one. If ever there was a good reason to practise with care, this is surely it!

Is myelin only used for music making?

Absolutely not - myelin isn’t uniquely used to help us learn a musical instrument. It responds in the same way to any repetition, so it’ll do its job with any skill you’re working on. Whether you’re trying to play a C minor scale, develop your golf swing, memorising where the buttons are on your camera, learning a new chess move or language, myelin is used.

Following Einstein’s death, an autopsy was carried out on his body and the construction of his brain was revealed to be largely the same as other men of his age. However, his brain contained twice as many of the cells which support the production of myelin. At the time, the significance of this was unknown, but as we’ve learnt more about the way myelin works, it seems entirely logical that this would be the case in a man whose brain developed so many ground breaking mathematical concepts. Imagine how much myelin Bach must have had after a lifetime of honing his compositional skills!

Is there a best time to add myelin to our nerve pathways?

In our youth, and as young adults, we lay down myelin astonishingly easily - this is why children pick up new skills at such a fast rate. The ability to myelinate nerves at a high rate continues until around the age of 50. After this it’s a harder process, but we retain the ability to add myelin throughout our life - just at a slower rate. If you’ve ever wondered why it’s so much harder to learn a brand new skill as an older adult (be that learning a musical instrument, a new language, learning to ski) it’s because of this change in the way our bodies create myelin. Please don’t let this put you off though! You absolutely can learn new skills as an adult, but it will just take a little longer.

Something we can all do

The mechanism of laying down myelin is a unifying process for all humans. We often think of the best musicians as having an innate talent, with them from birth; something that’s missing from the rest of us. There may be an element of truth here, but in reality professional musicians and sports people have also spent many years firing particular nerve circuits over and over, laying down thick layers of myelin to help them make music or play sport really well.

I make no claims to be the best recorder playing in the world, but I sometimes see looks of astonishment at concerts and courses as I play fast music. An expression on the faces of the audience which says, “How on earth can it be possible to play the recorder that quickly?!” I don’t have a God-given gift, but instead I’ve spent most of my life practising, insulating my nerve pathways to make my reactions faster and more accurate. I had no idea all this was happening inside my body as I practised, but it means I can still play quickly, even though I’m now the wrong side of 50. If you’ve come to learning an instrument later in life it make take a longer to build up this speed, but it’s never too late to make more of the skills you have. Practise in the right way and you’ll be surprised what you can achieve.

If you’ve ever wondered why humans have the ability to create languages, this is down to myelin too. We have 20% more of it than monkeys – a key difference which means we can talk and they can’t. They have the equivalent of copper wiring, compared to our optic fibres!

The fallacy of muscle memory

The more we develop a particular nerve circuit, the less we’re aware that we’re using it. Gradually the activity becomes automatic; stored in our unconscious mind. This function is often described as ‘muscle memory’. In reality, muscles have no memory - it’s simply a convenient description. Instead, the process of myelinating the nerves makes it seem like our muscles have somehow remembered what to do.

What myelin means for our practice.

That’s the science bit over with – now to figure out what this means for our music making!

You’ll be pleased to hear that you’re not expected to be perfect. In fact, making mistakes is critical. As we recognise our mistakes we then practise to correct them, and it’s the process which trigger the myelination of our nerves. What is important is that you practise in the right way. In Daniel Coyle’s book, The Talent Code he describes this as deep practice. I’ll help you figure out what this is in a moment, but first let me describe a scene I saw time after time when I was teaching children in schools.

Let me introduce you to Tom, a pupil I taught many years ago… Tom arrives for his lesson and plays me a piece of music he’s practised. After a few bars he makes a mistake. Realising his error, he immediately goes back to the beginning to start again, only to stumble at the same spot. This is the crunch point. By repeating that error Tom has already started the process of myelinating the nerve pathway controlling that mistake, meaning it it’s likely he’ll continue making it – the first step to a bad habit!

So what could Tom do differently? To avoid these bad habit making steps, it’s much better to stop straight away and attend to the error. Playing a much shorter passage of notes, ensuring they’re actually right, means you begin to trigger a positive myelination process, insulating the right nerve pathway rather than the wrong one. Of course, Tom is far from unique in this respect. I saw countless pupils do exactly the same during my years as a school teacher and I’m sure I sometimes did this too in my own practice.

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett

This short TED video shows the way Myelin works very effectively, as well as exploring some of the practice tips I’ll talk about in more detail next…

Now let’s take a look at ways you can put yourself on the path to deep practice.

Perfect your practice technique

The first steps to deep practice

Deep practice is a process of identifying and isolating your mistakes, then slowly and carefully, correcting the errors through repetition. At every point you want to ensure you’re playing things correctly so you fire the same nerve pathway every time, allowing your body to insulate it with myelin. Each correct repetition you make helps ensure you build good habits which will last.

The most important way to correct mistakes in your playing and your technique is to slow down. We all want to go as far and as fast as we can, but in reality it’s far better to take things at a slower pace. Let’s take a hypothetical example…

Let’s say you’re working on this movement from Van Eyck’s Der Fluyten Lusthof and you stumble over the section marked in red, fumbling the fingering for the top B flat. These are the steps I would suggest you try to overcome the mistake, ensuring you gain complete fluency through the semiquavers:

1.      Check the fingering for top B flat and very slowly practise moving back and forth between that and top A. Are your fingers moving exactly together? Look at and feel the quality of your finger movements – make them small, quick and positive, while keeping your fingers relaxed. Repeat this movement many times and focus on consistency. Being able to play it correctly a couple of times could be a coincidence, but if you can do it perfectly ten times that’s less likely to be down to chance. Now make the same finger movements more quickly, only increasing the speed further when you have achieved consistency.

2.      Expand your zone of focus a little wider – a note further, playing G - A - B flat - A - G. Still go slowly – if you can’t play it slowly, it certainly won’t happen at speed. Again, make lots of repetitions before speeding up.

3.      Continue this expansion process – perhaps adding in the notes from the four notes before the B flat, through to the end of the beat containing the B flat. At all times begin slowly, focusing on precision and quality of finger movements.

4.      When you’re sure you’ve got the beats around the B flat secure, then go back further and play more of he piece to check if you can maintain the accuracy in the context of the wider music.

This whole process might only take a few minutes, but it’ll have a big effect on the fluency of your playing and can be applied to any similar mistake.

Chunking

Chunking is a term used to describe the process of breaking any concept or piece of work down into smaller units to understand and learn more effectively. It’s immensely useful for music, but is also often used in teaching children to read, and the principles can be helpful in many areas of learning.

The process of chunking involves breaking a piece down into small sections, which you slowly repeat over and over to achieve fluency. The important thing is to begin with genuinely small pieces, playing them slowly enough that you can consistently play them cleanly and accurately. As I suggested with the Van Eyck example above, repeating these chunks ten times is a good place to begin, because that helps you really understand whether you’ve nailed the passage.

When you succeed with an individual chunk, move on to the next group of notes and repeat the same process. When these are secure you can then bring the chunks back together and see if you can play the longer passage accurately. If reconnecting the chunks results in mistakes, choose a slower speed and try again, with lots of repetition.

Speed is a really important element of this process. It may feel like you’re admitting defeat by playing a passage at a metronome speed of 50 beats per minute when the music should really be played at 120. But if you can achieve real fluency and accuracy at this super-slow tempo you’re then in a position to gradually increase the speed. Remember too that you won’t need to follow this approach with every note in a new piece. There will be some passages which fall easily under the fingers straight away, and these won’t need to be chunked. Chunking should be your tool of choice for sections which are on the edge of your technique - the patches which feel tantalisingly out of reach!

Let’s look at the Van Eyck again and I’ll show with different colours how you could break it down. Let’s imagine you’re having trouble with the last bar of line 3. In the three examples below I show how you could break this down into small chunks, before gradually reconnecting those chunks together.

We begin by breaking the bar down into its four beats. Each chunk is shown with a red box. Notice how I’ve included the first note of the next beat into each box - that helps you make a connection between the beats, so you don’t hesitate here when you reconnect them. Play each box really slowly at least ten times, focusing on accuracy and fluency. Only increase the speed you play each chunk when you can reliably play them with fluency. If you still stumble over these chunks, don’t be afraid to break them down into even smaller elements.

Another useful addition to this process is to play the chunks in different ways. You could play them as dotted rhythms or perhaps add some slurs. These additions give you more to think about - if you can achieve fluency with added challenges, playing the music as printed will feel easier!

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When you’re happy with these chunks you can then gradually bring the chunks together…

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Finally, bring all four beats together. If you need to reduce the speed again at first, that’s absolutely fine. Again, fluency and accuracy is always the most important thing. Once again, make lots of repetitions to ensure you’re really myelinating those nerve pathways!

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Extreme Chunking. At one American music school, Meadowmount School of Music near New York, extreme chunking is a technique used in the teaching. One technique the students use is to cut their music into strips (a photocopy, not the original!) and practise these short sections in a random order. They might also breaking the strips down into even smaller chunks and using different rhythm patterns as I’ve described above. Once the strips of music are fluent they can gradually be brought back together, building the pieces back up again in the right order.

If you ever find you can only play a piece of music well when you start from a particular place (often the beginning) this could be a useful technique for you. Breaking the music down into a random order helps you disassociate the different sections from each other. When you bring them back together you should then be able to start from any point with equal ease.

I used a similar process as a teenager when practising scales and arpeggios for exams. Learning them from a book meant I found I could easily play them in the printed order because I’d become accustomed to the familiar progression from one key to another. To prepare myself for the moment the examiner would ask me for scales in a random order I wrote each one on a small card and drew them from a box. Because they came out in a different combination every time I gradually learnt to disassociate the keys from the order I’d learnt them in.

Little and often

If you’re really doing deep practice, it won’t be something you can sustain for long periods. Don’t be afraid to work in shorter bursts - perhaps several times a day. When I’m working in this way on a piece of music I might spend 15-20 minutes really breaking something down, slowly increasing my speed. As soon as I feel my concentration is waning or I begin making increasing numbers of mistakes, I’ll step away from my music for a while and come back in an hour or two. This method of practising is useful if you’re a busy person who doesn’t have two hours at a time to practise. Little and often is the way to go! To really make progress on a new piece of music, it’s important to practise regularly. Even one short practice session every day will have more impact than a longer splurge once a week.

“If I skip practice for one day, I notice. If I skip practice for two days, my wife notices. If I skip for three days, the world notices.”

Virtuoso pianist, Vladimir Horovitz.

Practice comes in different forms

Aside from the deep practice techniques I’ve described above there are lots of other ways you can improve your playing. Treat the list below as your ‘practice menu’. In a restaurant you may choose fish and chips one day, but might be in the mood for roast beef another day. Music making can be the same - there’s no reason why every practice session needs to follow the same pattern.

Contemplative/mindful practice

Not feeling inspired to really work on a whole piece of music? Feeling in a more meditative mood? Try this simple, creative exercise…

Pick an easy scale and play just the first five notes. Keep it really simple so you don’t even need to look at the notes on the page - it could be as simple as C-D-E-F-G.

Play the notes really slowly - spend four steady beats on each note. Do this several times and close your eyes. Really listen to your playing, focusing on your tone. Is it even and consistent? Are you making a beautiful tone that you really enjoy? Are there notes which suddenly jump out, either weaker or louder than the rest? Keep repeating the pattern slowly, aiming for consistency. There’s absolutely no rush - be in the moment and really listen.

Adjust your breath pressure and see what effect this has on your tone. Really focus on the physical sensations. How far is your tongue moving as you articulate the notes? Is the transition between notes smooth or lumpy?

Now think about your fingers. Are they relaxed? How far are they moving from the recorder and are they rising and falling quickly and neatly? At every repetition, be inwardly critical of what you feel and hear, actively adjusting your movements to improve every aspect of your technique.

Even this slow, contemplative form of practice is beneficial, even if you don’t feel you’re making great strides. This sort of practice can be very therapeutic and relaxing. Remember, even at this pace, every repetition and improvement you make lays down a little more myelin around your nerve pathways!

Practise by thinking

As you work on improving a piece of music, it can be helpful to do some mental practice away from your instrument. Studies have shown that just workng through an activity in your mind can help reinforce the skills you’ve been practising. Don’t try necessarily do this with an entire piece of music, but pick a phrase or short section to play through in your head. Count through the rhythms, imagining how it will sound as you play it. If you have a train or bus journey you could take your music with you and spend some of the time on this sort of mental practice. Elite athletes sometimes visualise the skills they use during their training. Gymnasts will think through routines in their mind before competing, and Formula 1 drivers will mentally drive the corners of the race circuit before heading out on track, imagining which gears they’ll use in different places.

Silent practice

Another take on the mental practice I mentioned just now is to work on your music without actually blowing into your recorder. You could hold the instrument and rest the mouthpiece on your chin. I’ve also been known to finger through passages using a pencil or an instrument cleaning rod - especially handy if you want to do some silent practice while travelling on the train! Taking away the sound makes you focus on the quality of your finger movements without being distracted by wrong or split notes. Are your fingers moving exactly together? Look at the way your they’re moving - are they quick and neat, or does one of them look a little sluggish?

Listening to improve your awareness

It’s easy to get obsessed with our own playing, but it’s important to also listen to other musicians - and I mean really listen.

Pick a piece you want to learn, or something by a composer whose music you enjoy. Seek out difference recordings of the same piece (perhaps using a music streaming service, CDs from your local library, videos of performances by professional musicians on YouTube) and try to identify which elements attract you to particular performances. Is it the way they phrase the music? Do you like one performer’s choice of articulation? Does one player pick a tempo which really sings to you, or is is their tone quality?

Be like a child in a sweet shop - pick and choose which elements you might wish to use in your own performances. If there are aspects you don’t like, ask yourself what you would do differently? When you come to play the music yourself, think outside the box and try different approaches. Go on, go really wild! Don’t be afraid to try radically different ways of playing - dramatic tempi, dynamics, ornamentation - and see what appeals to you. Take risks in the knowledge that no one need know about your failures, but you might discover something amazing!

There’s no shame in borrowing elements you enjoy in recordings for your own playing. You might like the way a performer adds a trill in a certain place, or their choice of dynamic for a particular phrase. Imitation is not stealing - you’re just trying on different musical clothes to see which styles suit you best!

Don’t be afraid to use your pencil!

If you’ve been reading my Score Lines blog for a while, you’ll know I’m a great believer in using a pencil to help you add useful reminders or creative decisions into your music. There’s nothing more frustrating than coming up with a really great idea as you practise, only to find it vanished from your brain as you slept and you can’t remember it the next morning! I wrote a blog post all about my enthusiasm for making greater use of a pencil in your music making - if you haven’t already read it, or need a refresher, you can find it here.

Practice should always be an active process

Finally, aways be sure to practise in an active rather than a passive way. Be alert, listen and pay attention to what you hear and feel physically, rather than just letting the music wash over you.

Further practice tips

Here are a few bonus practice tips which have helped me over the years….

Work with music that excites you. If you adore Baroque music, explore that and work with your enthusiasms. If you love jazz, don’t let others tell you you’d be better off learning the saxophone. You can play jazz on the recorder, so pursue your passion because it’ll motivate you to practise.

Fuel your motivation with your successes. Practising can be frustrating and satisfying in equal measure. Don’t always set yourself targets which are really well beyond your abilities. Sometimes pick a slightly easier piece and do some deep practice on that until you can truly play it well. Success in your practice can be addictive. Once you’ve proved to yourself that you can master a piece, that’ll motivate you to keep going and aim higher,

Think of the music you play in a more visual or descriptive way. if you’re struggling to find meaning in the music you’re learning, try to imagine a picture or story to go with it, or find some words to describe the mood you wish to conjure up. As a teenager I learnt a Capriccio by Heinrich Sutermeister on the clarinet and found it difficult to find the right character. Between myself and my teacher we came up with a storyline for the work about a lady having an affair with her gardener and each musical theme related to a character in the story. This did the trick and suddenly my performance came alive! Be imaginative - sometimes a visual or linguistic concept can help you find what you’re looking for.

Make friends with your metronome. I know many musicians have a love/hate relationship with their metronome, but it can be an immensely helpful tool. If you fall into the ‘hate’ category, do take a look at my blog about using a metronome and I hope you’ll pick up some tips to help you make friends with your ticking assistant.

Putting my own advice into practice

To end I thought I’d share a glimpse of my own musical experiences - first from my days as a student and again more recently.

When I first began studying the recorder with Philip Thorby, at the age of 17, he set me what seemed a very dull task - slow scales and long notes, plus some exercises by Hans Ulrich Staeps. I’d only had a year of specialist recorder lessons prior to this and I really needed this concentrated focus to set me up with a truly sound technique. Without the pressure to learn complex pieces of music I was freed up to focus on how I was playing rather than what I was playing. Through the endless repetition of scales and exercises I came to appreciate the satisfaction of playing something simple really well. What I didn’t realise at the time was that I was also laying down thick layers of myelin around my nerve pathways - something I’ve benefited from throughout my musical life.

Since I began my research for this blog post I reaped the benefit of my newfound knowledge when I needed to learn a new piece of Bach. Many of the scale and arpeggio patterns contained within it felt comfortable under my fingers - the nerve pathways I use to play C major, A minor, G major, D minor and other keys have evidently become so well insulated in myelin that I could rely on my fingers to find the patterns easily.

In contrast, passages containing more complicated, less predictable combinations of notes still needed some deep practice. This I did by playing them slowly, figuring out where an occasional alternative fingering might make things easier. I did exactly as I’ve described above, breaking the runs down into smaller groups of notes and made lots of repetitions. If I stumbled, I slowed it down further still until I could play it perfectly. I’d use different rhythms, slur notes that should be tongued so as to make it harder for myself. If I could play these passages well with extra hurdles strewn in front of me, performing them as written would feel like a walk in the park! Gradually I increased my speed, stepping back again if mistakes reappeared.

How long did this take? Remarkably little time. Every time I practised I’d play the music through, paying attention to areas which had settled, and noting the bars that were still rusty. These were the notes I then returned to and did yet more deep practice. Over the course of a fortnight, practising a little every day, I nailed those troublesome passages. I didn’t need to play for hours each day because my focus was laser like. Twenty or thirty minutes of really focused, deep practice is far more powerful than a couple of hours of playing through music, warts and all. Come concert day, the work paid off and all the passages I’d spectacularly fluffed at our rehearsal two weeks earlier had fallen into place - job done!

Could you do this too? Absolutely! Your aspiration may not be to perform a complex piece of Bach, with hundreds of notes per square inch, to a packed concert audience, but you’ll have other pieces you’d love to play really well. Perhaps you want to play your favourite folk song, or get to know a Handel recorder sonata really well, but the principles are the same.

Like many of my readers, I’m now the wrong side of 50, faced with the knowledge that my body will gradually lose its ability to myelinate my nerve pathways as swiftly as it once did. But the nerves I’ve already insulated remain and I can still reinforce those and continued to add newly insulated neural pathways. It may take a little longer, but I know that if I practise in the right way I can still achieve great things.

My advice to you is to slow down, repeat tricky bits often and well, and you too can avoid many of the pitfalls of sloppy practice. Use the knowledge you’ve learnt here as your superpower. Understanding the mechanics of how we learn gives you the ability to achieve more than you imagined you could ever do!

Further resources:

Through the course of my research, these are some of the books I’ve read and benefitted from. If, like me, you’re fascinated by the process of learning I can’t recommend these highly enough. I’ve included links to the books on Hive (my favourite online bookstore), but they’re available from all good bookshops.

Daniel Coyle - The Talent Code

This was a real ‘aha’ moment for me - my introduction to the existence of myelin and a much deeper understanding of how effective practising can best be achieved.

Glenn Kurtz - Practicing : A Musician's Return to Music

Notes on a life spent practising by a would be professional guitarist. I found a particularly interesting parallel to the recorder here. During his studies Glenn has a realisation that as a guitarist he’s a second class musician at music conservatoire - there’s unlikely to be a glittering career playing concertos with symphony orchestras, like pianists and violinists, or even a career as an orchestral player. This struck me as very similar to life as a professional recorder player - ours is a niche instrument whose players have to find their own unique way in the musical world.

David Eagleman - Livewired : The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

A fascinating book about the human brain and its astonishing ability to change and rewire itself, whether through our actions or in response to brain injury or strokes.

And finally, some videos related to the subject of music and the brain

How playing an instrument benefits your brain:

Why you're not stuck with the brain you're born with

A short film about neuroplasticity and the way our brains continually re-wire themselves through our lives as we learn new skills and create new neural pathways.

Learn to love your scales!

What comes into your mind when you think about scales and arpeggios? Perhaps memories from childhood - being nagged by a teacher to practise? Or maybe even a degree of perplexity about exactly what they are?

Many of us have a love/hate relationship with scales. When I think back to my teenage years I realise I owe my music teachers an apology for my lack of application when it came to these fundamental exercises. Time and again I would spend the last two or three weeks before a music exam frantically cramming my scales and arpeggios instead of learning them gradually over a longer period, Fortunately for me, I had an uncanny ability to learn them at speed and I usually got away with this last minute feverish rush of learning. The downside was that I never really absorbed them thoroughly, so within a couple of weeks of the exam I’d forgotten them all again! My slapdash approach must have been infuriating, but those teachers I’m still in touch with seem to have forgiven me!

Of course the irony is I’ve seen the same situation from the other side of the fence many times during my teaching career, quietly trying cajoling my students to start learning their scales and arpeggios as early as possible…

What are scales and arpeggios?

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The first movement of Telemann’s Sonata in F major which is built upon lots of scale patterns.

Scales and arpeggios are the fundamental building blocks of music and all western music is created from these patterns. A scale uses neighbouring notes, while an arpeggio uses the 1st, 3rd and 5th steps of a scale to create a broken chord, where the notes are played in turn to create a melodic line rather than as harmonies.

Major and minor scales contain eight different pitches within each octave, arranged in a particular combination of tones and semitones. On the other hand, a chromatic scale includes all 12 notes - just as you would if you played every black and white note in order on the piano.

You’re probably most familiar with the concept of major, minor and chromatic scales, but there are many more types besides. Pentatonic scales have just five notes (sound just the black notes on a piano and you’re playing a pentatonic scale), modes are created from the patterns made by playing the white notes of the keyboard in different combinations, and jazz musicians have their own varieties of scales.

They’re not just a feature of western music either - in some musical cultures other patterns are used. For instance, Indian music is based on ragas - scale patterns which can include intervals even smaller than our semitone.

Why do I need to learn scales and arpeggios?

This is a cry many teachers have heard from their students in frustration! While they may not seem terribly exciting, learning scales and arpeggios helps your music making in many different ways. Let’s look at some of them…

They help you gain fluency

If we’re to play music with ease and speed, fluency is vital. Getting to the point where your fingers automatically find the patterns needed for each note at speed will allow you to tackle ever more challenging repertoire. If you have to stop and think about which fingers to move before each note (as a total beginner might) your musical lines will lack a sense of flow.

Improve your sight reading skills

Because music is made up of scale and arpeggio patterns, being able to recognise and fluently play these combinations of notes helps you read unfamiliar music more easily. If you want a comparison, it’s a bit like learning to read text. When we first learn to read we recognise the individual letters. Gradually we learn that these letters often appear together in particular combinations so we begin to recognise syllables and ultimately whole words and sentences. The notes of a scale are like the individual letters, while a scale is a long word or sentence which we take in at a glance through familiarity.

Coordinating finger movements

One of the big challenges of recorder playing is the complexity of the fingerings. Modern wind instruments have keywork to help simplify the finger patterns. Recorders lack these, so instead we have to play complex forked fingerings (for instance B flat on the descant or E flat on treble recorder). Shifting between neighbouring notes can often involve moving multiple fingers up and down simultaneously. We can use scales and arpeggios to practise this and make our finger changes neater and quicker.

Coordinating tongue and fingers

Not only do we have to coordinate our fingers, but our tongue needs to match the speed of our finger movements too if we’re to play a genuinely legato melody. Once again, scales can be a useful tool to help achieve this.

Building up speed

Want to play faster? In that case you need to practise the patterns which occur most often in music and gradually learn to negotiate them more quickly. What’s the best way to do this? Yes, you’ve guessed it - scales and arpeggios!

Practising double tonguing

Once you’ve built up some velocity, you might need to explore double tonguing so your articulation can match the speed of your fingers. Again, using simple scale patterns are a great way to work on this without having to think about reading complex music at the same time.

For music exams

Most adult recorder players have no interest in working for exams, but if you’re someone who’s motivated by exams, you’ll need to learn some scales and arpeggios as well as pieces of music. The syllabus for the lower grades may only include a few different keys, but by grade 8 you’ll need to know all the major and minor keys.

Have I convinced you yet?

Assuming I have, you might well be asking some of the following questions…

Do I need to learn all of them?

In an ideal world, knowing all the major and minor scales and arpeggios (plus chromatic and other patterns) is a desirable aim. But this doesn’t mean you have to learn all of them! For anyone even learning a carefully chosen selection is immensely useful.

If you’re not sure where to begin, start by looking at the music you’re currently working on. What key is the piece in? For instance, if you’re playing a sonata with a key signature of two flats, try learning B flat major and G minor - the two scales with the same key signature. The music is likely to work through both of these keys at some point and if you can play these fluently the patterns you encounter in the piece will come more easily too.

Realistically, unless you choose to play Schickhardt’s set of recorder sonatas in every key, most music for our instrument explores a limited range of key signatures. It’s unusual to see recorder music in more than three sharps or flats, so I would recommend aiming for fluency in these keys before you worry about the exotic realms of D flat major or G sharp minor.

Do I have to learn them from memory?

This is a much debated topic among students and teachers. For music exams you’re expected to learn the prescribed scales and arpeggios from memory, but as we’ve already noted, many adult learners have no interest in testing themselves in this way.

In order to play scales fluently from memory you need to be completely on top of the finger patterns, knowing precisely which fingers to move between each note. This requires what is often called ‘muscle memory’, although in reality our muscles don’t have memories. This process is actually achieved by generating strong connections between our brains and the nerve pathways used to send instructions to the fingers. To achieve that (I plan to explore this more in a future blog post) requires lots of repetition, and in my experience, the process of memorising such patterns definitely seems to be harder for some people than others.

Memorising scale and arpeggio patterns presents a particular challenge for players of wind instruments. With the piano or a string instrument, there’s a logical visual pattern as you work your way up and down the keyboard or fingerboard. In contrast, each note on a wind instrument of any type requires a different combination of fingers. Yes, moving between some of these is fairly logical. But I’m sure you’ve noticed how that logic disappears when it comes to cross fingers (particularly flat and sharp notes) or the upper extremities of the recorder!

An additional challenge we face as recorder players is the limited range of our instrument. Most woodwind instruments can play scales covering at least a two, and sometimes three, octave range in all keys. In contrast, the recorder can comfortably manage a handful of scales at two octaves, but for most intermediate level players an octave and a half is the limit. This means scales come in different shapes to maximise the range we cover, either turning at the top or the bottom of the instrument. Remembering which scale follows which pattern is an additional thing to learn and can add extra stress to the process.

For my Score Lines subscribers I created scale sheets showing some of these patterns, which can be downloaded from your Members’ Area. I’ve linked to the treble recorder sheet here, but if you’d like access to all of them please feel free to subscribe here - it’s free and there are lots of other exclusive goodies for you to download besides the scales!

While learning scales and arpeggios from memory is undoubtedly desirable, I would argue that playing them from music is probably just as useful for most amateur recorder players. One of the most important skills to develop is sight reading (I’ve written a blog about this here) and being able to recognise scale patterns and convert them into fluent playing is a great way to achieve this. As with most skills, do this by starting slowly and gradually building up some speed.

How fast should I play them?

As with so many things, it depends! If you’re using a scale to develop your tone you might do best to play it very slowly - perhaps four beats on each note. But if fast playing is your aim you’ll need to take a different approach.

When I first started having lessons with Philip Thorby, I spent about three months solely working on slow scales and other exercises as we focused on developing my tone and legato playing. Ok, this may sound rather extreme, but I was aiming for a career as a professional player so it was absolutely necessary. My technique certainly benefitted from this approach and I finally began to understand scales and arpeggios in a way that set firm foundations for everything I was to learn later. Taking this approach with even just one scale and arpeggio can be hugely beneficial if it helps you focus on the foundations of your technique.

The most important thing is to play your chosen scale or arpeggio correctly from the very beginning. If that means you start out playing each note at a metronome speed of just 60 that’s absolutely fine, as long as the notes are 100% right. When you can consistently play all the notes fluently and cleanly at that speed, gradually increase the tempo until you reach your desired tempo, checking at every point that you’re still maintaining the same consistency and precision. A metronome is a really useful tool here to hold you at one speed.

How often should I practise my scales?

I’m a big advocate of little and often. Having a huge practising splurge on your scales just once a week makes it difficult to achieve consistent results. A much better way is to programme in short, frequent practice times - maybe five or ten minutes every day. This way you remind your fingers of the correct patterns at regular intervals so they become habitual more quickly. Perhaps even keep a recorder out at all times (a plastic instrument can be handy if you prefer to put away your wooden recorders) so you can pick it up and play a scale for a minute or two every time you walk by.

Which variety of minor scale should I practise?

Minor scales come in two different species - harmonic and melodic. Harmonic minors use the same notes whether you’re ascending or descending, so they’re slightly easier to memorise. However, they also include an augmented second interval (the 6th and 7th notes, which sound vaguely reminiscent of a snake charmer’s flute), circled in red below, which is less commonly used in western music.

A Harmonic Minor

In contrast, a melodic minor scale raises the 6th and 7th notes by a semitone on the way up and returns them to their original pitch on the way back down. This is an added complexity to memorise, but these melodic shapes (hence the name) are more frequently found in the music we play. For this reason, if your plan is to practise them with music and you only have time to work on one type of minor scale I’d recommend the melodics as a priority.

A Melodic Minor

Using scales and arpeggios creatively

Most readers of this blog won’t be looking to become professional recorder players, so being able to play in every key with total fluency and at high speed is probably not your aim in life! But you can still use these patterns to improve your playing and have some fun along the way. Here are a few ways you could use them…

Vary your tempo according to your intention

If you want to improve your tone you need to focus on quality rather than speed. For this I would pick an easy scale (perhaps no more than one sharp or flat in the key signature) and play it really slowly. By simplifying the notes you free up your brain to think about breathing deeply and blowing freely, producing the best possible tone on each note. Perhaps spend four slow beats on every note before moving on to the next, breathing as often as you need to, always focusing on using the optimum breath speed for each fingering.

If speed is your motivation, again begin at a modest tempo but focus on keeping your fingering even and well coordinated with your tonguing. Perhaps use a metronome to ensure you maintain a consistent tempo. As you perfect each speed setting, switch up the tempo by a small amount and repeat the exercise several times. If you begin to stumble, take the metronome down by a couple of notches and refine your playing before moving on. Be methodical in your approach and you’ll be surprised how much progress you can make in a fairly short space of time. If you’ve built up a good turn of speed with an easy scale why not take the tempo back down again and try it with a more complex key signature?

Experiment with different articulation patterns

The music we play often contains a wide variety of articulation, from long tongued passages to intricate patterns, where small groups of notes need to be slurred here and there. It’s a good idea to begin by practising scales and arpeggios smoothly tongued, staccato and in long slurs as these all demand different technical skills.

Alongside these single technique scales I recommend you also practise patterns that require you to mix slurring and tonguing - you can see some of my suggested patterns below. These are the sort of patterns you’ll encounter in the real world and if you can apply them to your scales they’ll seem less scary in context. These are just a few of my ideas, but don’t be afraid to come up with your own variations.

Four varied articulation patterns you could try out

Be playful

There’s no reason why you must always play complete scales. Don’t be afraid to be playful and creative. Breaking a scale down into groups of four or five notes, running up and down, may help you really master the transition between specific fingerings more quickly. Once you’ve got that fluency you can then glue these small groups back together into complete scales. For instance, you could break up the F major scale shown below like this:

Breaking an exercise like this down into bitesize pieces is a recognised technique, called chunking. It’s immensely useful as a means of building up fluency and consistency, allowing our brain to focus more efficiently on small amounts of information.

Explore different note patterns

Bored with just whizzing up and down your scales as printed? Why not add some variety and explore them by playing the notes in a different order? For instance you could play each one in thirds like this…

You could follow the same principle with fourths and fifths too, although these are harder….

If you’ve learnt every key how about mixing them all up together? One of my favourite challenges is to go up one scale, then move up a semitone and come back down the next one - for instance upwards through F major, down via F sharp major, up via G major, down via A flat and so forth. The same exercise is possible with the minor keys too. If you can play both of these fluently you can award yourself a generous gold star!

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Major keys

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Minor keys

Finally, look for the satisfaction in a scale played really well!

You may not feel the need to learn scales in every key, and for less experienced players such an aim may be too ambitious anyway. However, there’s a satisfaction to be gained from playing even one or two of them really well, even at a slow tempo.

Scales and arpeggios can be a valuable opportunity to find a contemplative zone, focusing on a simple task done to the best of your abilities. I enjoy spending a few minutes at the start of a practice session playing scales really slowly, closing my eyes and listening to my tone. I focus on the quality of my sound, tailoring the speed of my breath and the strength of my articulation to suit each individual note. By doing this I reinforce the good habits I’ve learnt over the years, as well as warming up mind, fingers, tongue and lungs before I move onto more demanding music.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about scales and arpeggios. Are they something you avoid at all costs, or have you cultivated a love for them? Perhaps you’re still on your journey to becoming a zen scale-master? If you have tips you want to share with others or experiences you’ve found useful over the years please do leave a comment below.

Recorder tips from the real world

We like to think we’re all unique individuals, tackling life in our own special way. But anyone’s who’s worked as a teacher knows this is only partly true. Yes, everyone has a different character, but when faced with a class of pupils you quickly learn there are mistakes that everyone makes.

Photo by Dayne Topkin

I spend much of my working life coaching groups of adult musicians and, while each ensemble is unique, I find myself offering certain key pieces of advice to every one. Many of of you will be familiar with Walter Bergmann’s Golden Rules for Recorder Players - if you’ve been following the Score Lines blog for a while you’ll probably seen them in my first post, back in September 2021. While his advice is encased in pithy sayings I feel absolutely sure each one is founded upon an experience Walter Bergmann had while coaching amateur musicians.

Several people have suggested I share some of my own ‘Golden Rules’ here, so over the last few months I gradually jotted things down as they occurred to me. Now I can’t promise to be as witty as Dr Bergmann, but I can promise you’ll find yourself nodding in recognition at some of them as you glimpse your own bad habits.  No doubt others will occur to me as soon as I press ‘publish’, so this may yet become the first in an series of blogs, but for now I hope you may be able to use some of these brief pieces of advice to avoid some of the mistakes we all make from time to time. 

My collection of jotted thoughts fall roughly into two categories :

1. Aspects of musical notation and how we interact with it

2. Thoughts about playing style and ways to improve one’s performances.

With that in mind we’ll tackle them in that order.

Useful nuggets of notational advice….

Using language to help with rhythms

Some people find it very natural to translate rhythm on the page into sound, while others need a helping hand. It often pays to think of rhythms like multi-syllable words, rather than taking each note on its own, and words can help you remember the way these groups of notes work together. For some reason many of my phrases have a culinary feel. Quite what that says about me and my relationship to food is debatable, but it works for me! Here are some of my favourites, but don’t be afraid to come up with your own too.

Rests as silent notes

It’s easy to view rests in music as an absence of sound - a sort of musical black hole from which light, sound and matter cannot escape. I would argue a better approach is to consider them simply as silent notes. Play or sing through the following phrase and consider where the rests occur. RETYPESET MUSIC - PITCHES WRONG!!!

If you consider the rests as holes in the music, it’s tricky to know where to place the next note. But if you feel them as a silent notes - one which has shape and mass, but no sound - it’s easier to use them as a springboard for the notes that follow. Use this as your strategy when reading music, feeling silences as active rather than passive things and it’ll undoubtedly add rhythmic integrity to your playing.

Feel the dots!

Here I’m talking about the type of dots which appear next to a note rather than above or below them, making them longer rather than shorter.

When reading dotted notes, consider exactly how much extra length that dot adds to the note. Many times I’ve asked children how long a dotted crotchet is, only to hear the reply, “It’s one and a bit beats”. Ah, but how big is that bit?!  Knowing it’s precisely half a beat is important if you’re to place the following quaver with precision.

To place the following quaver accurately you need to feel the beats within the note. For instance this is how I would suggest counting the rhythm below. Actively counting the second and fourth beats creates a springboard for the following quavers. Do this and your dotted rhythms will be precise rather than nebulous!

Iron out the bumps 

If you’ve ever played under my baton you’ll probably know this is one of my pet hates… Assuming you’re following the advice I gave in the point above, you’re now actively feeling the beats within your dotted notes. That’s a good thing, but be careful not to audibly share your technique with the listener through your breath. Often I’ll hear a distinct bump on the dot of a dotted note, or the second note of a tie, rather than a seamless continuation of the pitch. This happens because you’re thinking hard about that inner beat, maybe nodding a little with your head, or feeling the pulse through your breathing muscles. This creates a lumpy sound which isn’t attractive and it’s an easy habit to get into. To find out if you do this, play a short passage with your eyes closed, or perhaps even record it and listen back dispassionately (the voice recording app in a smartphone can be handy for this) and you’ll hear it as others do. Once you’re alert to this bad habit it’s easier to avoid and your playing with sound much smoother.

The last will be forgotten first….

Playing in extreme key signatures is a rare occurrence in recorder music as our repertoire seldom ventures beyond a couple of sharps or flats. Of course, if you have a penchant for unusual key signatures, you’re welcome to explore L'Alphabet de la musique by Johann Christian Schickhardt which contains a sonata in all 24 keys! One thing I’ve noticed over the years is the way musicians, when faced with multiple flats or sharps, will almost always forget the last element of the key signature first. This rule seems to apply regardless of the key, so in E flat major the first flat to be omitted will be the A, and in E major it’ll be the D sharps that are forgotten first. I’ve no idea why this is, but I guess there’s something about the way our brains assimilate new information which must govern this. Whatever the reason, you now know to be wary of the last sharp or flat!

Short just means short

If I had a pound for the number of times I’ve had to remind recorder players about the true meaning of staccato I’d be remarkably wealthy! So often I hear recorder players beating the living daylights out of staccato notes, with a force worthy of Norman Bates in the film Psycho. But look up staccato in any Italian dictionary and you’ll find it simply means short or detached. Perhaps you want to make the conductor realise you’ve seen the staccato markings and are implementing them, but if you don’t want to offend our ears, please don’t make them heavily accented too! 

Short is a relative term

Following on from my last point, it’s worth noting that staccato doesn’t necessarily mean you should play the notes as short as possible. Instead, consider the context of your staccato notes. Quavers in an Allegro movement may indeed need to be very short, but staccato crotchets in an Andante may need to be more generous. If you like rules, perhaps aim to play notes about half the notated length as a starting point. But do listen to the result and see if it feels appropriate to the musical context. The mood and character of the music also has a bearing on the composer’s intentions and the acoustic of the room where you’re playing may come into play too. In the dry acoustic of a carpeted room staccato notes may need to be more generously proportioned, while a voluminous church acoustic might demand super-short notes because the echo will instantly lengthen the sound.

Just how long is a long note?

I often ask students how many pulses they need to feel while playing a minim, and about half of them plump for the wrong answer. Yes, a minim may be worth two beats, but where do those beats start and finish? Imagine your phrases ends with a minim, followed by a silence. That silence begins at the start of the third beat, which means the note before it should continue until the very end of the second beat. This means you must be aware of three beats when playing a two beat note if you’re not to short-change your listener. This principle applies to any long note which is followed by silence - unless, of course, your conductor tells you to do otherwise!

The arrows show how long each note sounds in relation to the beats of the bar:

Playing with style and panache

Just wiggle your fingers and blow!

If you’ve played under my baton at some point there’s a good chance you’ll have heard me utter this phrase. It may sound glib, but there’s a good reason for it. Once before I wrote about the human desire to play music perfectly, or else we’re somehow wasting our time. Now don’t get me wrong, striving for perfection is an admirable trait, but it can also tie you up in all sorts of knots. That determination to fit all the notes in can slow you down, bringing a stilted quality to the music. Sometimes you just have to throw caution to the wind, chuck your fingers onto the recorder and see what happens. It may not be pretty, but there’s a pleasure to be derived from playing with abandon and you might discover a level of fluency which surprises you. If nothing else it’ll reveal where you need to apply more focus in your next practice session.

Perfect your recorder player’s sulk

To create a warm, relaxed sound on the recorder you need to be relaxed too - any tension will soon be reflected in your tone. Before you start playing, take a deep breath and exhale with a deep sigh, allowing your face and throat muscles to go loose and floppy. Aim to retain this lack of tension as you play - allowing your face to adopt what my recorder teacher called a ‘recorder player’s sulk’. Smiling or frowning engages more muscles, creating a degree of tension in your face which can easily travel to your throat. For more tips on producing an open, relaxed tone why not take a look at the post I wrote about tone here?

Don’t forget to blow

When you consider all the things we have to think about while playing the recorder, there’s a lot of multitasking involved - reading notation, breathing, tone, fingering, articulation and more besides. As we become more proficient we learn to juggle these competing tasks, but every musician has limits. When I’m working with adult recorder groups I see this firsthand in two situations - when the music suddenly becomes much busier, or when the players are faced with lots of unusual accidentals. At these points both the quality and quantity of tone often suffer because the players’ brains are instantly distracted by the need to tongue more quickly or to interpret the notation swiftly. I’m afraid I don’t have a magical solution for this one, but self awareness is a powerful tool.

Next time you’re faced with an unexpected flurry of semiquavers ask yourself if your tone quality has suffered because you’ve forgotten about the need to support your breath momentarily. If your recorder is beginning to sound like a wheezy donkey you know what you need to do!

Play with positivity

If you lack confidence it’s tempting to play more quietly, believing you can hide among the massed ranks of players in your local recorder ensemble. In many walks of being a shrinking violet helps you blend into the crowd, but sadly this isn’t the case with recorder playing.

When instruments are manufactured they’re designed to be played at a specific pitch, so each note rings out at the right frequency. In contrast, when you under-blow some notes will sound flatter than others and many of the highest pitches simply won’t sing reliably. Added to that, your tone will be weedy and undernourished. The result? Your playing will stand out from the crowd much more than you intended, and probably not in a good way! It might sound counterintuitive, but use a firm, well supported breath pressure and you’ll find it much easier it blend in.

I often use the word gumption in relation to playing with positivity. What do you think of if someone is described as having gumption? In my mind it’s a person who has a positive, can-do attitude, who will go for it and make things happen. You won’t find them cowering timidly in the back row. Have this in mind as you play your recorder and I bet you’ll make a more confident sound straight away. 

Make your mistakes with style and panache!

Following on from my encouragement to play with gumption, you might be thinking, “But what if I make a mistake? Everyone will hear it!” Yes, that might be true, but we learn from our mistakes, so being able to hear you’ve gone wrong is no bad thing. Tentative recorder playing often leads to a mushy rhythm as you gingerly dip your toe into new musical waters. In my book mushy rhythms are never a good thing! It’s much better to play with positivity (gumption) because your tone and rhythm are both likely to be improved. You’ll also hear your errors more clearly and be in a good position to correct them. Now I’m not advocating making loud and proud mistakes in a concert situation - by that stage you should have practised the music enough to iron them out. But when rehearsing, own your mistakes and make them with style and panache!

Give yourself an improvement target

A strategy I’ve tried recently is to set ensembles a target when we’re rehearsing. For instance, I might ask the tenors to project their sound 56% more so a melody cuts through the texture, or perhaps I’ll instruct the contrabasses to play their staccato notes 48% shorter. The precise figure rarely matters (although a very specific number often elicits a chuckle from the musicians) but the simple act of providing a target usually puts us on the right musical path. Try this in relation to a specific task when you’re practising and you might find it does the trick. 

Tuning trumps dynamics 

The recorder may have a limited dynamic range compared to many other instruments, but it’s still entirely possible to play expressively. For really convincing dynamic contrasts alternative fingerings play an important role and I plan to write more about this in a future post. If you’re not yet comfortable using different fingerings for loud and soft effects it’s tempting to use breath pressure to create these contrasts. Yes, slowing the flow of your breath will make the notes quieter, but go too far and your intonation will also become flatter.

When faced with an extreme dynamic changes in a piece of music by all means experiment, but ultimately I would argue that intonation is more important than dynamics. It’s all very well playing an exquisitely soft passage, but if you leave your listener squirming uncomfortably in their seat because the music is painfully out of tune that positive effect is greatly diminished! In the long term make a point of getting to know some creative alternative fingerings so you can achieve dynamics and good intonation, but remember this will probably need to be a gradual process.

The holy grail of recorder playing - a true legato

One thing which will make you stand out from the crown as a recorder player is being able to sustain a genuinely legato melodic line, with a well supported tone throughout. If you can cultivate a rounded sound while playing with articulation which is super-smooth you’ll bring a new level of expression to your melodic lines.

The words I come back to time after time are singing and fluidity. Aim to sustain your breath and create a sense of connectivity between the notes, just as you would when singing a hymn tune, and you’ll be well on your way. Think of the breath you put into your recorder like a stream following a crease in the hillside and that’ll help you sustain right through a phrase.

I’ve written a whole blog about this topic, which you can find here.

Breathing is good!

Once again we come back to the thorny issue of multitasking. Breath is the lifeblood of our sound, yet when we get distracted by tricky rhythms and challenging fingering it’s so easy to forget this fundamental activity. Breathing is a vital thing to do, whether in every day life or playing the recorder, so don’t be afraid to stop, take a good lungful of air, and regroup - you body and recorder playing will thank you!

If you find it hard to make space to breathe while playing why not take a look at my blog in this topic? 

Get a head start with Baroque style

Most modern music is littered with instructions from the composer, showing you his or her creative intentions. In contrast, Baroque music can seem a bewilderingly blank canvas, with little in the way of expressive instruction. Tempting as it may be to just play the notes and rhythms, you’ll achieve a decent basic baroque style by using these simple guidelines.

In faster music (say Allegro or Vivace) look the notation and identify the smallest note values you have (perhaps semiquavers or quavers, depending on the time signature). These should generally be played quite smoothly. Now look for the second shortest note values - these can be more detached.

Bear in mind that this isn’t a rule, but merely a guideline which can be broken. If the second shortest notes are repeating pitches, or leaping around, playing them detached will almost certainly create the basics of a good Baroque style. But if you have stepwise (scale) passage you might choose to break this ‘rule’ and play them more smoothly. Be open to trying different things and  take every opportunity to listen to recordings of professionals playing Baroque music so you can learn from their example.

Be brave - sit in the front row!

Time and again I go to conduct an ensemble and I’m faced with a row of empty seats directly in front of me. Why does no one want to sit in the front row? Do they think I’m scary, or perhaps I’ll ask them to play a solo? Whatever the answer, I’m on a mission to persuade people that the best seat in the house is in the front row.

Ask any school teacher and they’ll tell you they always look to the back row for the troublemakers, but that’s not the reason why I recommend the front row. The recorder is a very directional instrument, so if you’re at the back of a large group (a massed playing session at a festival, for instance) you’ll hear very little of those sitting in the front row. However, those brave souls sitting right by the conductor get to luxuriate in a wash of sound from those sitting behind them. This creates a real sense of togetherness and gives them the confidence to play to the best of their abilities. Even better, if your ears aren’t as good as in your youth you’ll find it much easier to hear the conductor’s helpful advice. Go on, making it your new year’s resolution for 2024 to sit in the front row and find out for yourself that it’s the best seat in the house!

Eliminate the chiff

When we first learn the recorder we tend to start with a small instrument - perhaps a descant or treble. As we progress we expand our horizons, often trying larger recorders - perhaps the bass or even bigger. It’s easy to assume the techniques we used on the descant will work just as well on the low instruments but some of them need a little modification. I’m thinking specifically about tonguing. Using strong articulation on a descant recorder will often do little harm, but the same level of attack on a bass can create a very explosive sound - often known as chiffing. Think of the sibilant sound you hear when a steam train sets off. A nostalgic sound at a heritage railway, but in the context of a recorder orchestra it can wreck the mood and destroy any semblance of a legato musical line! 

Yes, there are places where this percussive effect may be desirable, but you do at least need to be able to turn it off at will. My advice is to make the gentleness of your tonguing inversely proportional to the size of recorder. On a contrabass you tongue should make the softest of contacts with the hard palate in your mouth, keeping further back from your top teeth, so it imperceptibly interrupts the airflow. Most importantly of all, listen critically to your playing and ask if your articulation sounds appropriate to the musical style. If the answer is no, you need to do something about that!

Make your intentions clear

My final thought is one that occurred to me while teaching online during the pandemic. Clarity is often lost via this medium, but I’ve since found the following a useful concept in person too.

Many of us were brought up to be well mannered we’ll have an innate worry about being tasteless and over the top, Being polite is one thing, but sometimes you have to exaggerate ideas to get your point across. Think of actors on stage. Instead of speaking as we would in conversation, they amplify their gestures and tone to project to the whole theatre. Don’t be afraid to do the same with your recorder playing. Whether you’re using varied articulation, contrasting dynamics or changes of tempo, you need to make your intent clear. In a concert situation, only a proportion of your gestures will reach your audience who may be sitting a long distance away. 

My advice is to imagine your listener is sitting with a copy of the score in front of them, pencil in hand. If your performance has sufficient clarity of intent they should be able to listen to you and annotate the music to reflect what they’re hearing. You could even test yourself by recording your playing and listen back with a clean copy of the score in hand.  Could you honestly notate the details you hear? If the answer is no, you know what you need to do! 

~ ~ ~

No doubt I’ll come up with more ideas in the coming months, but that little collection should give you plenty of food for thought. Are there other topics you consider regularly when playing, or gems of knowledge you’ve picked up from other teachers? Why not share some of them in the comments below - it’ll be fascinating to learn from each other’s experiences.

Everyday Recorder Keep Fit

How often do you practise your recorder? Don’t worry, I’m not making a judgement about your playing or commitment to the instrument, but I am interested. For some people recorder playing is a skill they diligently practise every day, while for others it may be a fun activity they only do in the company of others. Of course, there’s a sliding scale of possibilities between these two options!

Bending the laws of physics

For many of us, simply finding the time to practise is the biggest problem - modern life makes so many demands on our time that it’s easy to neglect our music making.

I don’t know about you, but I often find myself wishing I could bend the laws of physics, creating the occasional 36 hour long day or 8 day week. Now I think about it, perhaps that isn’t such a great idea… Parkinson’s Law (coined by author Cyril Northcote Parkinson in 1955) dictates that work always expands to fill the time available. No doubt, if I had a 36 hour day at my disposal the boring stuff would still squeeze out the time for music making!

Of course, practice doesn’t need to occupy many hours every day – you can make gains in a short time if you know how. When I studied at music college I habitually practised for three or four hours each day. But when I emerged into the world of work I swiftly realised this was no longer practical. To compensate I taught myself to practise more efficiently, learning to achieve in 30 minutes what would once have taken an hour or more.

If you’re busy, don’t neglect the basics…

Inevitably we tend to focus on actually playing music - that’s the fun part of playing the recorder. But by neglecting the basics of technique you may compromise the quality of your music making too.

Below you’ll find a three step programme to help you hone your technique - think of it as a daily keep fit workout for your recorder playing. None of these exercises will take more than a few minutes, but if you do them regularly you will notice differences in your playing.

I’ve broken them down into three easy steps, each of which will take five minutes of your time. Now, you’re supposed to spend two minutes, morning and evening cleaning your teeth and I bet you spend those four minutes brushing without giving it a second thought. Just one of these steps takes only a minute longer. If you’re still thinking, “But I haven’t got the time”, just think of it as one of those non-negotiable tasks we all carry out every day without fail.

First things first…

Always have a recorder out and ready to play!

The simple task of assembling your instrument can create inertia, so why not keep an instrument out together and ready to play at all times? An inexpensive plastic recorder won’t take up a lot of space on your table. If it’s there, staring you in the face every time you walk past, you’re much more likely to pick it up and play!

If you have five spare minutes a day…

Let’s begin by thinking about your breathing and tone:

Step one… Spend a minute breathing deeply, really filling your lungs with air. Keep your stomach relaxed so it can expand as you breathe in. Initially, exhale freely, enjoying the benefits of all that oxygen. As I often tell the recorder players I meet, breathing is an excellent thing to do, whether playing the recorder or in every day life!

Next, try hissing as you exhale, gently squeezing your stomach muscles to control the speed of the air. Varying the strength of movement in your stomach muscles, you’ll hear the sound of your hissing change as the breath moves faster and slower.

Step two… Use the rest of your five minutes to play a simple scale slowly. And I mean really slowly – perhaps four steady beats on each note. Breathe as often as you need to - every couple of notes if need be. On every single note really listen critically to your sound.

Do you enjoy your tone? If not, try using faster or slower air (using your stomach muscles, as in step one above) until you can make a full, rich sound on every note.

If you have ten spare minutes a day…

The next step is to make your fingers neater. Practise all the items above, plus the following:

Step one… Break your chosen scale down into groups of five notes and play these groups up and down, slurring every note. Begin slowly, playing the notes as whole beats at a speed of crotchet=72. Really focus on the quality of your finger changes – make small, quick movements. Playing in front of a mirror is handy to check you’re not lifting your fingers too far from the instrument.

Step two… When you need to move several fingers together, use a mirror to check they’re moving at exactly the same time. You may need to be more proactive with the fingers you lift as these don’t have gravity to help them!

If you have fifteen minutes a day…

You’re making progress on your tone and fingers now, so let’s build up some speed too. Practise all the exercises above, plus these:

Step one… Using the same five note scale patterns you practised in the last step, gradually increase their speed. Continue slurring all the notes. Really listen to the notes (close your eyes – it’ll make you listen more carefully!) and ask yourself if they’re completely smooth and even. If your fingers begin to rush away, use a metronome to help you control the speed.

Step two… Now put your five note patterns back together into a complete scale and repeat the process. This’ll demand more concentration and will help you take stock of your progress.

Don’t forget to keep listening to your tone - aim to maintain the beautiful sound you honed in step one at the same time!

Make yourself a promise…

My challenge to you is to practise these exercises every day for a whole month. Now much as I would love to be able to check in with you all on your progress, that would require me to have days which last at least 96 hours! Instead, make a promise to yourself that you’ll stick with it.

If you can make these simple exercises part of your every day routine, you will see results in a month’s time. If you don’t believe me, why not record your first session? The voice memo app on any smartphone is all you need, or a cassette recorder for those who prefer more retro technology! After a month, record yourself again and listen back to both for comparison.

I’d love to hear how you get on with this. Why not share your experiences in the comments below? Or perhaps you already have your own daily recorder ‘keep fit’ routine - if you do I’d love to hear more!