Articulation, pt. II

There's more support out there for prioritizing steady tempo and good rhythm over getting all the notes- this time from the phenomenal Bob McChesney, the leading exponent of the 'doodle-tongue' technique for trombonists. (If you're a trombonist, you must immediately purchase and zealously practice his method book. Seriously.) One important point McChesney makes in this video is that for rapid passages, articulation trumps intonation. Our brains lock on to the attack of the note so strongly that minor intonation flaws aren't noticed. A lot of big band/jazz/swing music is up-tempo with lots of notes flying around, so there's a lot of relevance here. 

Not the doodle tongue I was thinking of.
But can he keep a steady tempo?

This brings me back to three previous posts on articulation, the obsessive fetish of 'get all the notes', and reliance on printed music. It might seem obvious that music is strictly an aural and temporal process. Obvious, that is, until you fall into the trap of over-reliance on printed music, which is only a spatial representation of the real thing. The musician's job is to convert those static printed blobs on the paper back into dynamic, audible sound energy. Come to think of it the term 'printed music' is something of an oxymoron. It's printed, all right, but it's not really music. 

If you still think tempo and rhythm are less important than getting all the notes, consider rap and hip-hop, which is music stripped to its essentials. There's barely any melody, harmony, phrasing, etc. yet it's still intelligible and recognizable as music. Why? Because tempo and rhythm are more important than getting all the notes! Now try to imagine the opposite- music with everything except tempo and rhythm. Inconceivable, right? That's the point.

 Mine eyes deceive me. Lend me your ears!

Articulation (attacks and releases) is the main tool we use to define tempo and rhythm.  A focus on good attacks and releases will compensate for missing a few notes here and there, but no amount of good intonation or note accuracy will fix the train wreck caused by reversing these priorities. This fits in with Matts Holmquist's point when he writes about sound envelopes (the 'brick' vs. the 'anthill'). 

Shake off the hypnotic lure of sheet music!  Take your eyes off of it as much as you can. You can even do this while sight reading! If it helps, imagine there's a gorgon hiding right behind your music stand, and she'll pop out at any second and turn you to stone.

Less eyes, more ears. It only seems obvious. 

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Written Music: Anti-Ear Training

Check out this short video of Bill Watrous talking about his brief stint in the Ellington band:





He was "scared out of his shorts" because the majority of tunes the Ellington band was playing had no written parts. At best there was a 'head chart' that had a basic outline of what was to be played. As Watrous says, this was de riguer for many bands in that era, all the way back to Sousa.

Consider that bands like Ellington's were a primary source of entertainment in those days. No internet and no television. Radio and phonographs (in that era) didn't have nearly the sound quality of a CD or even a cassette tape. If you weren't playing it yourself, you were listening to someone else play it- live! It was reasonable for bands to protect themselves against the competition getting access to their charts, thus allowing them to play exactly the same thing. The 'head chart' was just a memory aid for performers, who had already worked out among themselves all the dynamics, articulations, phrasing, etc. Watrous says that sometimes even what was on the bare-bones written charts was deliberately played differently! Every band developed its own unique style this way.

As a consequence of this practice, musicians had to possess keen listening skills to play well as an ensemble. This normally wasn't a problem because band members had enough time to work it out and memorize their parts. Not so for Bill Watrous- he had to come in on short notice and quickly figure out everything without any written part at all. At the time, nobody really knew just where the printed 'head chart' was! Lucky for him somebody found it and also talked him through the tunes, or he would've crashed and burned pretty hard.

Fully written out parts are a double-edged sword. For all its benefits, it does us a disservice because we have the choice not to listen to each other. I also think there can be too much information crammed on the page as well: notes, dynamics, articulations, phrasing suggestions, tempo markings, etc. It's easy to bury your head in the written page and mistake the map for the territory. Too much mental bandwidth is used for visually processing the written music, and it comes at the expense of aurally processing what's going on all around us.

Just keep looking at the page, boy...
 Yessss, ignore those other sounds...

Given this, it's no wonder that so many of us in amateur bands routinely experience individuals or even whole sections who completely ignore that they've veered badly off track or have tuning issues that threaten to shake the fillings right out of your teeth. The seductive draw of the written page functions as a kind of ear training in reverse!


I'd like to experiment with a return to head charts- just a tune or two here and there. Maybe use them as a warm-up tool. Anybody out there know of bands that do this? Put it in the comments!

Notes, Schmotes! Keep a Steady Tempo!

How many times has this happened in your band... Musicians stumble over a tricky passage, and the beat lurches, bucks, and heaves until it settles on a new tempo much slower than before. Hit another tricky passage and the process repeats itself. What started as an up-tempo dance tune becomes a funeral dirge by the end. 

I blame it all on sheet music.

Sheet music is a necessary evil. We need it because it's not practical to memorize dozens of charts, and it's evil because there's a powerful temptation to mistake the map for the territory, wrecking the music in the process. Allow me to explain...

Consider the feat that musicians are required to perform: Transform information encoded by matter in physical space (black blobs printed on a sheet of paper) to information encoded by energy in time (the sound waves the audience experiences). It's a lot like a Fourier transform, if you're mathematically inclined. Your job as a musician is to make that translation happen. 

The important thing to remember is that your audience doesn't experience the printed page. It experiences your transformation of that page. But as musicians, our primary focus is that instruction sheet in front of us, which tempts us to forget that the product we're making from it is what counts, not the instruction sheet itself. You eat the food, not the recipe. 

Here's another analogy:

Imagine experiencing a You Tube clip using an internet connection that's a little too slow. What would you rather watch? A clip that maintains a normal playback speed while reducing video and audio resolution as necessary, or a clip that maintains high video and audio resolution while slowing down (or even stopping) its playback speed as necessary? Nearly everyone prefers the former, and that's just what You Tube does to cope with slow connections. Detail is sacrificed in order to maintain a steady tempo. 

Playing a tune using sheet music is virtually the same thing. We must keep a steady tempo at all costs even if we have to sacrifice the details of notes, rhythms, dynamics, articulations, and phrasing. Nothing is more important than tempo! As I wrote before, physically disengage from your instrument if you need to, but remain mentally engaged and follow along in good time until you can jump back in. 

As Yogi Berra said about baseball, "90% of the game is half mental." Likewise, most of what we do as musicians is a mental process. Let's redefine 'playing music' as doing as much as you can of the list below*, but no more. It's additive, so each step incorporates everything from the previous steps. Do as much of it as you can, and don't do something on the list if you're not already doing everything above it. Note how much is mental and how much is physical:

• Keeping good time requires only mental engagement. No instrument required. 
• Keeping good rhythm might involve minimal physical involvement (chanting/clapping/tapping). Still no instrument.
• Throw in phrasing and dynamics. Still minimal physical involvement (varying how hard you're chanting/clapping/tapping). Still no instrument. 
• The mechanics of good articulation are specific to your instrument, so only now is an actual instrument required, but the right notes still aren't. You can use just one note or even random notes instead.
• LASTLY- Add the right notes. 

If you define 'playing music' as 'notes coming out the horn', you're taking the lowest priority item on the list and making it the highest. Like a house with a bad foundation, the whole structure soon collapses. Keeping good time has to come first, and getting the notes last. Especially in ensembles, chaos ensues when those priorities are switched around because no two people will slow down the tempo at the same time in the same way, so there's multiple competing tempos. That's the bucking and lurching bit I mentioned before. 

You Play How You Practice

Many people have the bad habit of slowing down or even stopping when they miss notes while practicing at home. Because it's a habit, you can't turn this behavior off like a switch when you come to rehearsal. Slowing down or stopping while playing alone is mostly harmless, but it's deadly to ensemble playing. Since you'll play in rehearsal just like you practice at home, break yourself of this habit as soon as you can. Maybe it should be your #1 priority! Use a metronome or a play-along track and practice not slowing down or stopping no matter what. Pick a short exercise, tune, or excerpt so you don't overwhelm yourself or get discouraged at first. Be patient with yourself and remember that changing habits takes time and patience. Becoming comfortable letting missed notes and rhythms sail by is a great skill to have. It helps develop your ear, and it'll help you fix the problems that led to you missing those notes and rhythms to begin with.  

To summarize, stop throwing the music under the bus of get all the notes all the time. Do exactly the opposite! You and your band will be a lot better off!

*I didn't include on this list the process of sight-singing the notes, which could be added in early on since that too is a purely mental process. Doing this requires some ear training, which is always good to practice. Check out Jamey Aebersold's Jazz Ear Training for that. 

Instant Feedback in Rehearsal

I have two deaf friends from my college days whom I'll call R and J. R went deaf as a child while J lost his hearing as an adult, and it's easy to tell who's who by listening to their voices. J's voice sounds perfectly normal to us hearing people, while 'R' sounds like he has a heavy cold, speaks in a nearly emotionless monotone, and mispronounces common words. Figuring out why is no great mystery. J learned to speak while he could still hear, having access to a built-in mechanism that provided instant feedback and correction. R lacked that instant feedback loop, so even though he's capable of producing speech normal to us 'hearies', he can't progress beyond a very basic level despite there being nothing at all wrong with everything else needed to produce speech (i.e. his larynx, mouth, tongue, etc.).

Amateur big bands are in a similar situation with regards to section and ensemble playing because they're mostly deaf to how they sound. Although they're capable of sounding better, they don't have instant feedback loops in place that enable learning. However, unlike my deaf friend R, we have the capability to construct an effective feedback loop for ourselves. And while it's true that many bands record their rehearsals and later upload them to a service like Dropbox, this doesn't constitute an effective feedback loop because:

• The default option is not to receive the feedback. Musicians have to consciously choose to download and listen to the recording. Most of them won't do this.
• Even if musicians do listen to the recording, it's too late to actually correct any errors that are noticed, so they'll likely make the same errors next time. They can't even mark their parts because they can't bring their parts home with them.
• Discussion with other band members isn't possible, which short-circuits most learning opportunities.
• Even those band members who do make the effort to listen to the recordings will discover the futility of the process and stop listening after a while. I sure did.

To have a truly effective feedback loop, we need the capability for instant feedback, right there in rehearsal where musicians can listen to what they played just moments before, followed by a chance to immediately try again. Limited discussion and analysis might also be helpful. Luckily for us in this digital age, we can easily set up instant recording and playback using a laptop (or tablet), the band's PA system, and an inexpensive stereo microphone.

Read this book! (See link at bottom)

The above solves the problem of how to practice, but not what to practice. For that, we need to separate "drills" from "scrimmages".* Drills are short exercises meant to focus on learning a specific skill or two, while scrimmages (playing whole charts) are full-scale rundowns of the real thing that implement those skills. There's little point in running a scrimmage if you haven't practiced the requisite skills. For example, why would a band attempt to play through an up tempo latin chart if they routinely stumble on fast syncopated rhythms? Unfortunately most bands only run scrimmages while somehow expecting the benefits of drills. Some improvement can be made the through brute force repetition of scrimmages, but it isn't pretty and takes way longer than it otherwise could. Speed up skill development by using the Raph etude book along with short sections from troublesome charts to drill particular skills, then go ahead and try those news skills out in full-length charts. 

Putting everything together, here's a model for a typical rehearsal, to be done in the following order:

• Warm-up of some sort. I personally favor an open blues structure of some sort.
• Drills for specific skills that the band needs to improve on, using the recording/instant playback setup described above combined with material from Raph & relevant excerpts from charts.
• Break
• Play whole charts (scrimmages); record & upload to Dropbox as usual.

The specific proportion of time spent on each section would depend on what the band needs, but I think no more than half the rehearsal should be spent on drills and skill development. After all, most people want to play the tunes and have a good time, including me. I also think that the band will recognize the benefits of the drills/instant feedback procedure in short order, so it probably won't be such a tough sell after the ball gets rolling. What's more, as the band learns new skills and ensemble skills improve, less time will need to be spent on drills anyway.

So there you have it. That's my grand idea for how amateur bands can get the most out of themselves and not tear their hair out doing so. More to come!

*This idea comes from the highly recommend Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better, by Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway, and Katie Yezzi.

P.S. My good friend J also happens to be a professional musician. Without his generosity and support I would've quit playing a long time ago!

Keystones, Bricks, and Anthills: How Articulation Makes or Breaks the Band

Holmquist's General Method is so chock full of good ideas that it's hard to know where to start if you're trying to introduce his methods to a band. But after some reading (and re-reading), one particular item came to mind. It's easy to do and requires virtually no training.  The best part is that despite being a small change, it has a big impact on the band's sound that only increases over time.

I'm talking about using your tongue to stop notes rather than allowing the note to gradually taper by stopping the breath. Holmquist calls the former the 'Brick' and the latter the 'Anthill' because of the shape of its sound envelope.

Example of a sound envelope with something
of an 'Anthill decay'. We want our 'Brick'
 decay to be as vertical as possible.

The difference between the two is not in the attack of the note, but the release. The sound envelope of the tongue stop / 'Brick' ends with a vertical line from 100% to 0%, while the breath stop / 'Anthill' has a curve that gradually tapers to zero. So now you're starting and stopping notes with the tongue. This should be the default technique for releasing notes when playing big band music. Read the General Method for further discussion of why this is so. 

What makes the tongue stop / Brick release so powerful is that it's what Charles Duhigg refers to as a 'keystone habit' in his latest book. (Buy the book here; read an excerpt here.) He says keystone habits are "those patterns that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other habits." Here are some of the interconnected benefits that arise when the tongue stop as the default release technique:

• The band immediately sounds cleaner because musicians have almost no discretion about how and when a note is released. The band moves much closer to having only one version of a note instead of over a dozen (see this post for a brief discussion of this effect). Missing a release is just as important as missing an attack!
• In order to successfully release together, keeping good time becomes more important than ever. The habit of mentally subdividing the beat is therefore encouraged and rewarded.
  • Another benefit of mental beat subdivision is the release on longer notes, especially at slower tempos. This addresses the problem I described in 'It's as Easy as 1, 2, -3'.
• There's now double the number of feedback opportunities for musicians to check their sense of time (attacks and releases)
• The tongue stop release of one note sets up the attack of the next note. Not only is articulation clearer, it's more efficient to play as well!
• It's easier to play quarter notes that are unambiguously short.
• Complex rhythms are easier to hear, understand, and learn.
• Clear articulation encourages decisive playing.

Most of these benefits become apparent soon after the switchover is made to use the tongue release, so it shouldn't be difficult to get the band sold on it, even if it takes some occasional reminding to help firmly establish the habit. As the habit gets firmly established, the tongue release creates a virtuous circle of other good habits that allow the band to sound even better over time.

Lost in (Rehearsal) Space

Mats Holmquist has published The General Method, A New Method For a Tighter Big Band,  a book that's a must-read for anyone who plays in a big band. Far more than anything I could ever accomplish as an amateur, Holmquist uses his years of directorial experience to dissect all the errors that plague big bands, keeping them from sounding their best. In subsequent posts, I'm going to delve into some specific areas of The General Method and offer my own responses. 

Danger, Will Robinson! Bad rehearsal space!

The subject of the present post, however, revolves around something that isn't included in the book, but which is nonetheless critical for the band's well being. 

Everything in The General Method is for naught unless the band has a proper rehearsal space. To illustrate this point, here's a story about three bands that I play in semi-regularly. It's something of a natural experiment showing the impact of rehearsal space on a band's performance. 

Here's a description of each band's playing space:

• Band 'A' plays in a noisy, crowded restaurant.
• Band 'B' alternates between the banquet room of a not so noisy/crowded restaurant and a small auditorium inside a senior living facility. 
• Band 'C' plays in the downstairs meeting area of a church.

And here's my evaluation on how well they play as an ensemble:

• Band 'A' is stuck on the 'OK Plateau'. Their book is interesting but not challenging (nothing wrong with that). There's very little attention paid to phrasing, articulation, dynamics, and general music-making. They're playing the notes and not much else. 
• Band 'B' has a more varied and challenging book. Although they're usually aware of phrasing, articulation, dynamics, etc. but they aren't consistent about it. They also miss opportunities to apply knowledge gained in one chart to others. Their playing gets worse at the restaurant and better at the senior living facility.
• Band 'C' attempts some pretty difficult charts and usually does a decent job of making actual music from the notes. They also do this despite not playing as often as Bands 'A' and 'B'. 

The band's choice of playing space has two major effects:

1. You can't rehearse when you're in front of people who have to pay to be there (ex. restaurants). Like it or not, those people are an audience, and the band is performing, not rehearsing. Without rehearsal, mistakes become entrained and bad habits are reinforced. Quality inevitably declines. 
2. The insidious Matthew Effect works over a longer time period. Because of the first effect (above), bands with better rehearsal space tend to play better. This in turn attracts better musicians, which further improves that band. Vice versa for the bands with bad rehearsal spaces. 

In short, if the band doesn't have a good rehearsal space, they eventually reach the 'OK Plateau', where mediocrity rules the roost and music goes to die. If they have a good rehearsal space, there's the opportunity to work and improve. Taking full advantage of that opportunity is something else altogether, and I'll address how that can be done in future posts.