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Yiggy
Sep 12, 2004

"Imagination is not enough. You have to have knowledge too, and an experience of the oddity of life."
I play sitar and have been studying the classical style for about six years, four of those more seriously with instructors. Presently I'm living off my savings and studying abroad in India to study in the old fashion style. By their standards I'm straddling the line between beginner and intermediate. Ideally by the time I leave in October I'll have passed that line. Probably still a few more years away from more advanced level playing. I didn't get started until my mid 20's so I'm a good deal behind.

WIth regards to practice, my current difficulties are maintaining my calluses. Especially with household chores and doing dishes in particular, its been difficult to keep them firm and building up. I tried using dish gloves but its so humid and hot here that hand sweat builds up in the gloves pretty fast, so I gave up on using them. With this problem, I can only get about two, sometimes three hours on good days, of practice in before finger pain gets to be too much. So I have to kind of prioritize my sessions and get a good mix of different things. Normally I'll go through some variation of

1) Scale exercises, spanning about 2.5 octaves. I've started extending up to the top of that third octave, but it involves pulling with a lot of tension on the string and that, so far at least, is really tearing up my middle finger and shortening my session. I've started moving downwards which isn't painful at all just involves some unusual string hopping (as far as the instrument is concerned) so I'm shooting for 4 octaves eventually, which is a really nice range for sitar when the instrument can handle it.
2) Short, repetitive exercises. Normally I'll do some mix of ascending and descending runs ranging from 3 to 6 notes or so, slowly moving all the way up and down in these increments. String bending exercises on both fingers, stacato and more glissando like meends both. Gamak exercises. Other arbitrary exercises to practice specific techniques.
3) Slow repertoire, normally around 36-42 BPM. This tends to focus more on string bending and ornamentation, nesting different time signatures (in western terms) within the standard beat cycle. Gradually introducing melodic phrases with 32nd notes in increasing longer stretches,employing different techniques and ornaments.
4) Medium repertoire around 120-140 bpm. Unlike the slower stuff this normally has less emphasis on slower, meandering string bending and more emphasis on melodic flourishes, jumps up and down the string, grouping notes in interesting ways, and eventually rhythmic taans.
5) Jhala and fast repertoire, this is a section that kind of takes advantage of some of the sitars features, is normally faster and more rhythmically oriented, but also juxtaposes fast strumming on certain strings with graceful meends and string bending on the main string, creating a contrast of fast and frenetic with slow and graceful thats kind of nice and sounds really good with a tabla player.
6) ALap, which I've been slacking on a lot lately. This stuff is normally arhytmic, focusing just on melodic phrases. Lots of string bending, trying to get interesting combinations and phrases out of a single stroke and then hitting lots of differerent notes on one or two frets before the sustain drops out.

Normally I'll start off just running through a section, and then if I have a rough spot or a taan I'm not sounding good enough on I'll stop and focus on it until satisfied, lots of repetition. In one session I'll normally be focusing on either slow or medium/fast, with lots of grinding. With a tabla player I'll normally try to get a whole performance worth of stuff in, from slow to fast, repeating certain areas and taans as needed. I meet and practice with a tabla player three times a week, and lately we've ended up spending a lot of time evening out my pacing on one of these more complex taans that I've been struggling with. My clarity and ability to play the notes is pretty much where it needs to be, but I keep missing my return back to the 1 beat by a half beat or so, sometimes too fast, some times too slow. Its got these three pauses that are really tricky. So thats been getting a lot of time attention lately.

I tend to focus on individual modes at a time, and since I've arrived here in Kolkata my teacher has given me a bunch of material to work on in one of these ragas. Hes been out of country for about a month but gets back next week, at which point we're supposed to start focusing on improvisational music, which I'm looking forward to.

When I have lessons, which are almost daily when guru is in town, they tend to progress through first playing older material, whatever I was supposed to focus on or had just been taught, get critiqued with specific points to focus on in future practice, and then new material. I generally make an audio recording, which I then listen over and transcribe in my practice sessions. From there I have to commit it to memory, which gets intense when there is new material almost every lesson. The material I've received is ultimately supposed to build a scaffold in my head to make improvisation easier, and I've noticed a better ability to express myself when I'm dicking around and playing just for fun at the beginning and end of practice sessions. I'm starting to improvise shorter phrases and fills within the more structured material I have, which is fun.

Its all a slow process, but being able to recognize progress and see improvement in your chops is such a satisfying feeling. Theres also no other motivator, and worse feeling, than hearing from your guru "Oh, you've been practicing that how much? ...It really ought to be a lot better than it is..."

Yiggy fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Jun 29, 2013

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Yiggy
Sep 12, 2004

"Imagination is not enough. You have to have knowledge too, and an experience of the oddity of life."
Could you elaborate briefly?

Yiggy
Sep 12, 2004

"Imagination is not enough. You have to have knowledge too, and an experience of the oddity of life."
Well, its good you're making progress, but respectfully I just want to say you're being too vague and cryptic. I'd like to believe in This One Neat Trick that Music Teachers don't want You to know, I would...

To try and understand better, how much of this is a case of playing unconsciouslly and how much of it is to be conscious of one's playing in ways that alot of beginners haven't had pointed out? Is this what you mean by it being different for every instrument?

Yiggy
Sep 12, 2004

"Imagination is not enough. You have to have knowledge too, and an experience of the oddity of life."

CowOnCrack posted:

First I want to say, god drat you, and all musicians will die penniless because of the internet (contrary to popular opinion, on the whole the past 15 years have been devastating to the livelihood of musicians). It is only recently that I've come to realize how much all of this 'free on the internet' poo poo is screwing people over who make their living through this knowledge because the system is not set up to give them proper compensation.

Well, for what its worth I don't think a lot of the educational material and instructional youtube videos widely available are worth the bandwidth. For aspiring musicians who want to learn to do more than fake a few songs a lot of times they're going to end up needing to track down an instructor at some point anyways. Of the "professional" musicians I knew from my area back home, if they didn't have a day job than teaching was normally their steadiest form of income. As a performer I think it'll always be slim pickings, but the teaching side of things seems safer to me. Having tried earnestly to learn from books, info found on the web, and the occasional video here and there, they're just not very effective, at least they weren't for me. And believe me, I resisted at first and was not thrilled about finding a teacher for lessons, but in my experience the glut of noisy, low signal instructional material on the internet is not a real substitute.

As I see it musicians and musical instructors are more in danger from the declining value of arts and art education in our society, rather than the get-what-you-pay-for competition available freely on the internet. Most musicians can't make a buck these days off their skill, but realistically most musicians never could. There was a NYTimes piece recently about the problems facing Julliard grads. Its the weak economy and collapsing municipal support for symphonies and orchestras that is killing off the classical musicians, not youtube.

quote:

[...]

The method of thinking hard about what you are doing in a very analytical and deliberate way, however, seems universal and also counter-intuitive. It is also extremely difficult to do but vastly more efficient. When I sit down to play something on the piano (old habits), I don't put any conscious thought at all into what I am about to play. Effectively, my brain shuts off and motor memory kicks in. Then I operate at the musical level, which is actually desirable in the end, but is extremely detrimental until the music is flawless. What I never understood how to do is solve the technical problems to begin with, so I was faced with either going nowhere or trying to skip past it to some degree (both are bad).

[...]

Try to access your kinesthetic memory and experience how the motion will feel before doing it. If possible, try to hear the note or sing it before you play it. Use the score to know exactly what you play next. Reference the score for every single note in this method and develop a photographic memory of the score (if you do this a ton for every note anyone can get good at this).

[...]

And that's the idea. Every method I learned involved intense deliberation before and during playing, from visualizing the patterns of the keys to learning every harmony both in how it looks and how it sounds.

[...]

The second a mistake happens anywhere, STOP immediately. Go to that area including how to get into that area, i.e. where the actual mistake was, which is more often between bars. Get used to practicing from the 3rd and 4th sixteenth of a bar. Go there and for every mistake do this brutal work 5 times correctly. After learning the piece this way, it will be so solid that you can safely enter the music level and your brain and fingers won't be left behind. These methods aren't magical, just impossible to figure out on your own. But once you understand them they make perfect sense and are very logical.

Thanks for typing that all out. Not being anything more than a dabbler on keys, I was mostly interested in the general idea and method of deliberate practice you were thinking & learning about.

This sort of deliberate practice is very similar to how my current teacher instructs me to work on things. At first I wanted to contest it not being so rare or counterintuitive, but... even though its how I've currently learned how to go about practice, my last teacher back home never really broke things down for me in this way that my current teacher seems to be doing. So maybe it is a little less obvious. It never seemed counter-intuitive to me though, just something I didn't realize to do, out of laziness no doubt.

The big key to me, is the stopping on mistakes, grinding them out, and not moving on until the phrase(s) have gotten focused attention and work. My last teacher in many ways was too lackadaisical, small errors and flubs would go away with "time and practice." My current teacher, not so much. He tells me every time I screw up, which can be disappointingly often some days. And we stop and don't move on until I get it right or we run out of time. "No compromise!"

As for some of the other parts, there are differences which probably come down to different traditions and musical styles. For instance, the knowing the score, what the next note is and what it sounds like, is much less of an issue in my music study because what is composed is going to be memorized, and the system of notating and learning the melodies is such that you have the pitch memorized and the verbal solfeggi phrases too.

One possible difference I might be able to add to your deliberate practice is that when I have problem phrases or technique, in practice I'm not supposed to just grind out the phrase isolated from the piece, but also writing some sort of more general exercise which emphasizes the pattern or technique, and then playing it all the way up and down the register to practice it on all notes. Sort of like the Hanon exercises. Sometimes its just practicing a specific method of attacking or approaching a certain note, over and over again. Sometimes its interval training, rhythmic exercises or practicing permutations of different subdivisions. Since most of the music is improvisational, the exercises are important since you want to able to play certain combinations and techniques anywhere and everywhere.

Still, thanks again for the tips. At some point once I'm home again I need to sit in front of the keys and study harmony some more, and so that advice in particular, thinking about harmonies and the sound before playing them out, should be helpful.

Yiggy
Sep 12, 2004

"Imagination is not enough. You have to have knowledge too, and an experience of the oddity of life."
July was a good month for my music studies. Once Guruji returned, just as planned we started working on improvisational playing, which has been a lot of fun. Guruji had said the method and point of instruction during this time was to sort of hold my hand and slowly guide me up a path so that I feel how easy it is, rather than stumble over how difficult it seems conceptually. That rather than being some sort of musical, mystical inspiration it is always very systematic, logical and rooted in simple mathematics & lots of practice.

The manner and method of practice for this sort of playing has also shifted in some interesting ways, with the practice starting to resemble a sort of research and exploration into possible paths, combinations and patterns. Using specific techniques to emphasize certain motifs which in turn can be used to incorporate some of that repetitive, grinding element of practice which is still important.

If anyone is interested here is a sort of summary of the road map we took. I know alot of western classical music isn't improvisational, and so appeal may be limited here. But a lot of the fun of music is writing and composing, and improvising is just composing on the fly. These concepts are all just as handy for practicing composition, even when not on the fly. Before beginning, Guruji had made sure I had a firm command and memorization of the fast and slow repertoire I'd been studying before and a more intuitive understanding of the rules for the mode/raga we've been studying.

The steps we took went like this, taking place over the course of roughly 26 hours of instruction:

1) We started out improvising alap phrases. Alap is just pure melody, without any fixed rhythmic cycle or steady beat. This allowed us to just focus on combining notes in different ways, learning different aesthetic principles, cementing a more intuitive understanding for the rules of the particular mode. Early lessons on this would essentially have my Guru playing short phrases which I would have to repeat precisely, sort of like melodic simon says. While short at first, the phrases would gradually lengthen, and eventually Guruji would be intentionally playing phrases too long for me to keep all memorized before it was my turn. The point then being for me to comprehend and recognize whatever thematic motif or general melodic movement he was making, and then improvise a similar phrase. Despite being arhythmic and fairly unstructured, there was a general method of starting at the main tonic (imagine the middle C on a piano) and then start exploring the octave below it, gradually revealing one note at a time as you descend and showing the different ways you can construct progressively more interesting phrases with more notes. Once you reached the lower octave tonic, you return to the center and slowly start exploring upwards. Gradually, with all octaves in play, improvisations start to highlight parallel melodic phrases spanning the different registers. With the whole modal terrain revealed you meander back downward to the central tonic and move on to the next phase.

2) Next we moved into jor, where slowly rhythm becomes introduced to the improvisations. There is no fixed rhythmic cycle, but there is a steady beat. One of the key elements in this section was to begin the practice of counting while playing. Even though there is no rhythmic cycle framing things, phrases tend to be grouped in combinations of 4 and 8 beats. Much like alap there is a method of starting at the center, moving downwards, then returning and going upwards. Over time you play faster and faster, and within the different tempos the point is to emphasize different techniques which aesthetically match those speeds. So for instance, when playing slower, there was a lot of string bending and graceful gliding between notes. As we moved faster, you'd see techniques like hammer ons, pull offs, more sliding. At the faster tempos you start to get faster rhythmic playing from the strumming hand, string plucking on the left hand, and quick, jerky string bending. A key point in jor is to show how the melodic terrain explored in alap can now be accented and ornamented in a variety of different ways.

3) Jhala. This was faster. more rhythmically oriented playing. Indeed, in this stage the drummer accompanying is now playing a rhythmic cycle which you're to stay oriented with. A key element here is thinking of various interesting ways to break up and combine strumming multiple strings and plucking individual notes in various combinations of 16. 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 being a sort of base line, but which can quickly become dull and uninteresting when not changed up. So then you start playing with combinations like 3 + 3 + 2, 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 +4, 5 + 3 + 5 +3, 4 + 5 + 7, 3 + 5 + 4 + 4, 1 + 7 + 4 + 4, etc. Like in jor, counting is very important while playing, but now there is a pressure to count in interesting ways. These variety of different combinations become much more important in the next few stages. Aesthetically, they're also nice in that you're experimenting in different ways to create syncopation, and it appears at times like you may be losing the rhythmic cycle with stranger and stranger combinations, but then always returning back at the 1 beat on time with the drummer.

4) Improvising with compositions. This series of stages was really the meat of most of my lessons in July. The thing to keep in mind is that compositions in this style of music generally only span one whole rhythmic cycle, sometimes more than one rhythmic cycle. During this stage, my lessons would essentially consist of my Guru and I playing the composition together and then taking turns trading phrases, always joining and separating with each other at the appropriate times. Often times we'd practice with a drummer since the rhythmic cycle is so much more important. One of the key benefits of trading phrases back and forth is that my teacher would progressively introduce more and more complex ideas, which I would then have to try to implement in a different improvisation.

a) We started with the medium/fast tempo compositions. These compositions are sixteen beats, and they will typically always begin on beat 9. At this speed, subdividing the beats by two notes each gives you plenty of density in your melodies. To start improvising in this context, we would start the composition at beat 9, play through the end, and then begin the improvisation on the 1 beat (called the Sam, short a). At the beginning I was only responsible for generating 16 note phrases, or 8 beats of material. This is where the conceptual breaking up of 16 practiced in jhala started paying dividends. At first I could only play different combinations of four, but slowly I'd get the hang of it and start playing around with 3s, 5s and 7s and generating some nice melodies. A key thing to work on here is that steady counting while playing, but in the context of not losing your count as you try to generate melodies. Some of the difficulty in this is that the Raga has rules about how you can not end a phrase on certain notes, how you cannot play certain notes too many times or give them too much emphasis. So you have to start developing strategies of optimal starting, stopping and turning points along the scale. The other key aesthetic point is that your melody has to flow back into the composition smoothly on beat 9. You can't climb all the way up the register and awkwardly jump straight back. However, with only 8 beats, this wasn't so problematic.

b) After a few lessons and plenty of practice exploring different 8 beat phrases, we would double it to 16 beats, but with a twist of sorts. The first 8 beats would be improvisations just like before, but the last 8 beats/16 notes would be a Tihai. A Tihai is essentially a phrase repeated three times. However, they are composed so that the last note of the Tihai phrase is the exact same note of the composition that you're jumping back into. This can create a wonderful dramatic effect and allow for more complex possibilities of nesting tihais within tihais. At first it was simple, some combination of notes for the first 8 beats, and then the last 8 beats/16 notes would be broken up as such: 5 + rest + 5 + rest + 4. So for instance, the note on the 1 beat of the composition is an A. An appropriate 5 note tihai phrase would be something like C - D - F - G - A, so that you get on beat 9 you start with C - D - F - G - A, rest, C - D - F - G - A, rest, C - D - F - G and then right on the one beat you come slamming home on that A, flowing directly back into the composition. This creates a real nice sense of tension and release.

c) From here we would drop the tihai's and play 16 beat/32 note phrases without that sort of special threepeat ending. This puts the improviser on the hook for a longer phrasing, forcing a greater creativity and skill in composition. With longer and longer stretches of notes, it becomes more difficult to avoid monotony, and so practice becomes less about keeping a short string of notes together, but rather now combining themes and motifs together in interesting ways. SO for instance, maybe the first 8 beats/16 notes will explore some repetition among two or three notes, the next 8 beats will then be a longer run along the register. One difficulty that pops up here is that while improvising, in longer stretches it can be easier to wander too far off path. You have to return back to the compositions at specific points, and so if you wander too high or too low, you won't make it back home in time. So now the improviser is juggling the counting in his head, generating the melody, but also being mindful of position and distance along the register in ways that are not so problematic in shorter phrases.

d) After the previous stage, we switched gears into improvising within slower compositions and tempos. Essentially the density of the improvised melodies is pretty much the same including speed, but the composition itself is much slower. So that unlike medium/fast tempo where each beat was subdivided by 2 notes, in slower tempo every beat is subdivided by eight notes instead. Also, compositions start on beat 12 instead of on beat 9. In this context, we would begin the improvisations at the very end of the composition, beat 9, and come back in at the beginning on beat 12. This leaves the improviser responsible for 3 beats/24 notes. This is essentially the same thing that was going on in a faster context, but at first it seems a little difficult because you're mentally chopping up your foot tap by eight instead of two. To ease into this context, at first we would repeat the same 8 note phrase three times. Then we would repeat a phrase twice and come up with a third, before finally experimenting with three different eight note phrases and phrases which span 16 and 24 notes with groupings of 9 and 11.

e) Once I had a solid grasp of three groupings of 8 in slow tempo, we jumped back into fast medium tempo and started experimenting with groupings of 4 eights, which in the medium tempo compositions will span an entire rhythmic cycle. At first this would be accomplished by experimenting with three 8 groups as before, and then using a preagreed upon 8 note run for the last group, eventually improvising that as well. With a firm command of improvising across one rhythmic cycle, we introduced much longer tihais which now also spanned a whole rhythmic cycle, ultimately resulting in a 32 beat/64 note improvisation. The breakdown in these were some sort of improvisation in the first 16 beats similar to what we were working on at that point, and then for the last 16 beats/32 notes using an 11 note tihai phrase, so that the last note (# 33) lands appropriately back into the composition. THere were two styles of doing this, either playing all of the 11 notes ("breathless") or introducing a pause, so that you had, for instance, 9 note phrases with pauses inbetween, Those would go something like 9 notes, 3 rests, 9 notes, 3 rests, 8 notes, and then landing back in the composition.

f) From here on we worked on two things. We had all of the basic concepts in place to progressively lengthen the improvisations in interesting ways, both in slow and fast compositions, always in time with the composition. Next, since extemporaneous thinking doesn't always line up with the beat cycle, we started practicing jumping in and out of the beat cycle at different, unorthodox points instead of just the 1 beat or the 9 beat, etc. So for instance I'd play the composition to the point where I'd normally start improvising, then toss out two beats and jump in late. At heart this is just breaking up those 8's and 16's as before, but now with rests. However, its a little more difficult doing it on the fly and catching yourself so that you jump back in quickly after slipping up or thinking too slowly, as you don't want to leave dead time where the drummer is playing on without you and you're having to calculate when to jump back in.

Thats essentially all of the steps we took, and earlier today after finishing the longer formed improvisations I was told I pretty much had the basic tools for improvising and researching melodies on my own, and so we're finally moving out of the one mode I've been practicing in for the past four months. For me its all very exciting. I go back home at the end of this month, and once I'm away from the pressure of needing to practice what Guruji wants me to practice, I'm going to start experimenting with this sort of improvisation in the context of chord changes and try to start tackling jazz, which is different in some ways.

I hope that will be of use to some of you, or possibly encourage people to work on improvisation some. Don't tie yourself to the page! There is great freedom to be explored off of the written staff.

Yiggy fucked around with this message at 11:26 on Aug 5, 2013

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Yiggy
Sep 12, 2004

"Imagination is not enough. You have to have knowledge too, and an experience of the oddity of life."

Jazz Marimba posted:

(preface: I'm a drummer/orchestra percussionist)

So I recently discovered that instead of reading sheet music every time I play it, I kinda just ingrain it into my muscle memory, and then glance for differences/key triggers to know what I should play. How can I fix this major fuckup?

In my tradition the music is generally all memorized anyway (for percussionists too) but they are still concerned with this issue. It is generally solved by attaching every note and percussion stroke to a short, normally monosyllabic word, similar to solfege in Western music. So like, for melody in the West we have Do Re Me etc. In Indian music its Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni Sa, and they learn and memorize all of the melodies by committing verbal strings of these notes to memory. They do it for rhythm too, its called taal theka. So on the tabla, for instance, there are tons of different ways to hit the drum to get a different sound or timbre, just like a drum kit. Like a hand slap on the left will be a ka, an open note strike a ga, right hand rim hit a ta, etc. Point being that they'll then remember their rhythmic routines and fills as combinations of these words, and have them memorized much like a poem. That way they both know exactly what is they're supposed to be playing and tell if they're wrong, but also, no sheet music. In performances they'll also occasionally use it by reciting a combination of bols/words extemporaneously and then replicating it exactly on their drums.

That may not be all directly relevant to you, and what you're doing might not necessarily be a mistake, but I just wanted to share how one classical tradition addresses that issue.

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