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TheBandOffice
Nov 4, 2009
Mmmmm a classical music thread. Never thought I'd see one of these here. I'm a Music student (Ed, but Ed here is performance + ed classes), and I play the Euphonium, and therefore will never get a career outside of education :v:.

On practice-chat, one of the things my current instructor has taught me is to have some sort of consistent poo poo everyday. He breaks it down 20/20/20 Sound/Articulation/The Fs (Freedom/Slurs). Within that he has us do ~12 minutes of poo poo that is easy, but allows us to get a good sound flowing. ~6 minutes of stuff we have to work for, and then 2 minutes of HOLY poo poo WHAT IS THIS GOD I CAN'T PLAY THIS EVER, just to keep us working towards our goal. Honestly has probably helped me improve the most over any of the other things I've tried.

And now for a piece that honestly should be played all day everyday: Trombone Concertino - Ferdinand David :allears: Jan Smets

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TheBandOffice
Nov 4, 2009

CowOnCrack posted:

Oh man, this is totally the first piano concerto I'm going to study:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWniulQKw68

The soloist...the orchestra. No words. Inspiration for life!

The video is showing up as removed for me. But I'm going to hazard a guess and say No. 2 or 5? Both of which are beautiful.

TheBandOffice
Nov 4, 2009

Warchicken posted:

I simply can't agree with someone saying not use a metronome for 90%+ of your practice time.

Bingo. This is something I heavily agree with. Now, don't get my wrong, there are times that I will try something up at tempo without a met to see how close I am getting, but that's not often. On the Euph I can generally work it through the fast parts without a met OK, but working my way up on the metronome doesn't just improve my sense of time, it also keeps me honest to the pitches, time, and style. I might not catch that I'm a bit sharp on that B-nat when I'm doing sixteenth notes at q=stupid fast.

Jazz Marimba posted:

To change the subject a bit, how does one structure their practice time? As a(n admittedly not great) percussionist, I feel like I'm wasting a lot of time by not structuring my practicing. So far the one thing that gives me some structure are books, but there's obviously a lot to do in the practice room outside of books...what is it/how do you make it structured?

I go into practice with a plan. I went over my daily routine kind of in my first post, but I break it down like this (I'm brass, so eh):

20 minutes sound
20 minutes articulation
20 minutes flexibility (this is slurs (which are articulation but eh) and making sure that I am able to slot the pitch properly)

With each 20 I do roughly 13 minutes routine stuff (stuff I've got down pat, just to review and get good techniques in my head), 4 minutes of stuff I have to think about (but not too hard!), and 3 minutes of where I want to be (hard poo poo, multiple tounging for me currently).

From there I move into my rep. I like to keep multiple pieces on the stand at once open and ready to play: my current works, and a few that I know I sound good and feel comfortable for me. I will take the harder passages that I am focusing on and try and make them sound like the piece on the right, alternating back and forth between similar sections. This is where I spend the bulk of my practice, chunking up the piece and modeling it. I'll rotate out the pieces I use to model depending on what piece I have down matches what I'm working on: using lyrical for lyrical, technical for technical.

Near the end of the session, I generally try and do a mock run (this is closer to recital/performance time usually). This is met-less and recorded (Zoom H2N is my best friend). I will run it, not stopping for mistakes. The tempo will be performance possibly a bit slower.

Once I've recorded that I'll listen back through it, and mark in the music what needs focus. This becomes my practice for my next session :v:

TheBandOffice
Nov 4, 2009
Man I really want to buy a PBone. I know someone would probably kill me if they saw me playing it but it's just so pretty and :allears:

TheBandOffice
Nov 4, 2009

Jazz Marimba posted:

Basically, I'm really good at reading stuff I already know, and I suck at sight reading. How do I get better at sight reading?

I'm from a different instrument and world entirely but I generally just try and sight read something all the drat time. I'll pull random crap from the library that may or may not be for my instrument and play it down recording it (this is a thing I do so I can go back and look at my accuracy). Honestly I think the answer to get better at sight reading is more sight reading. I like to give myself a timer of 2 minutes to look at the piece before I start playing.

TheBandOffice
Nov 4, 2009

InterrupterJones posted:

On a different topic, I just took an audition a few days ago, and wanted to get some opinions on something. I went in fully prepared and had the excerpts that were requested down to the tee; but as happens every time I get in the room/auditorium, my mind completely shuts down and an extreme amount of nerves start to sink in. For those who have taken multiple auditions - I should specify that these are orchestral auditions - what do you recommend for nerves? I've played in front of my peers a lot before, and have even organized mock auditions myself, but I can't seem to shake the feeling when it comes time to actually make it count. Is there anything I can do to better prepare outside of just taking more and more? Believe me, that's something I'm prepared to do, and am already pretty much in the process of doing.

I've had good luck (not just in auditions, in performing) distracting myself from listening to myself (?probably poor wording?) by singing the tune in my head as I want it to sound. This is a technique one of my teachers gave me, and it's worked wonders from me. It lets me focus on what I want to hear, and hearing something is a good part of the battle for me. Also audition always. Audition for everything. Call in random people you don't know to listen to you blind. Perform always. Never stop performing.

On the other side of the audition process (I'm posting from the high school audition point of view, and poo poo is probably way different up higher), fuckups are usually expected. I help out at a few area high schools and generally help out with brass placement tests. Hawkgirl covered it, but honestly I'm not as concerned when someone fucks up as it is how they recover. poo poo, if they gently caress up and recover that tells me that they're able to pickup when they inevitably get out of time when playing. I'm also a bit odd in that note accuracy isn't very high up in my priorities when I listen to auditions, and I focus more on tone quality and overall affect of the performance. I'm probably broken.

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TheBandOffice
Nov 4, 2009
I've been trying to track down a piece of sheet music for awhile, so I'll post it here. I am either looking for a Symphony orchestra or Wind symphony arrangement of L'Internationale. I have a string orchestra arrangement, but it seems impossible to track down this tune. I've exhausted my resources on this search, but maybe someone can point me in the right direction? I could do my own arrangement but I know there has to be something out there.

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