My thumbs hurt

I guess that's the downside of practicing technique: you risk repetitive stress injury. I've dealt with RSI at various points in my life, generally during periods of high stress and excessive typing. The solution, if you catch it early, is straightforward: stop! And, just as important, get more sleep. I think it's partially immune related, so stress can be a bugger. I started getting some twinges a week ago, then last night my left thumb began hurting. I don't need to practice eight hours a day, so it was easy to decide to just stop immediately, and try and get some sleep. It'd also be helpful to try and get the mechanics sorted out, so that the fingers are always in natural positions, and not moving long distances, but for the left thumb, I find that hard. To access the low keys, D through Bb, I usually pivot at the base of my thumb, and have it bent backwards. Maybe I can do something different, or maybe my muscles and joints can get used to it.

I also found the Health and Wellness forum on the IDRS site. Musicians have a lot of medical problems. In the States, it's particularly bad, since many pros work gig to gig, and have no insurance coverage, in addition to losing their source of income due to the disease. One oboist, practicing for job auditions, seemed to have worked herself into a variety of mechanical problems. And also, to me it seemed, maybe a bit of target panic/focal dystonia, terrifying disorder which seems to be caused by wearing out the mental circuits for a task through overuse. It can be permanent, resolvable only by retraining to do the task in a completely different manner (eg switching from left-handed to right-handed), or giving up on the task entirely. Overtraining can be devastating in many ways, something to think about before practicing all night.

DIY music

So here's a lovely video, of a duo covering "Single Ladies". Not live, but stacked loops, of audio and video. Very nice, pretty funny, and with a homemade vibe. And very YouTube.


And this guy, he can beatbox while simultaneously playing the flute. Amazing. At 20M views, it's maybe the most-watched flute video on YouTube?

Milde 1 after practice

I was going to work on it for a week, then rerecord. Unfortunately, I didn't get to where I wanted, and the week is more than gone. Kinda like lessons used to be. Anyway, this is where it is:


Compare that to a week ago:


Whaddya think, any improvement?

Added: now, compare with a pro.

Daily practice

I've been trying to do more practicing, and less reedmaking, and working on technique, based on the idea that I'm limited by my fingers at the moment. And I'm starting to get a bit of a routine established. For warm up, it's easy to go crazy with scales, trying to do all major and minor, all keys, varied articulations, then add thirds, fourths, chromatic and whole tone, etc. I've had practices where I have completed a full cycle of something, but having worked through that, I'm generally out of energy and time to do anything else. I'm also fond of the interval practice advocated by the Kovar exercise book, and also by Ray Pizzi. The idea is to do an interval up, same interval down, first as whole notes, then as 16th notes, repeated through octaves over the whole range. Kovar starts with F, F#, F, E, and goes through every note, every interval up to about an octave. Again, this would take all day, if you work on each one seriously, with the tuner and metronome on. But if you stop early, you do the same ones over and over. So I use a script to give me a note and an interval, and do typically two or three. I do scales the same way, several at random picked from a wide range of types of scales. I still have major under my fingers better than the various jazz scales, but it's a start. My goal is to not spend more than 10 minutes or so on routine, which gives some time to actually practice something. And closing with the super long tone exercise, 8 beats per note, four notes per breath, two octave chromatic, seems like a good way to build endurance of several kinds without actually taking all that long. It's training, and should be thought of that way.

G8 and G9, and reed relaxation

Wired G8 and G9, the ones I tried to make wide. When I first put on the wire, the reed went onto the mandrel all the way to the handle. After heavy post-tube-formation beveling, and really tightening the wires (2-4) hard, they still fit on the mandrel about 4-5mm past the mark. I suspect that these guys will shrink little when they get soaked, and even if they do, they will still fit far onto the bocal. So, so far, this experiment is a success, in that yes, a wider reed makes a bigger tube. What it'll do to tuning I have no idea -- even if the blade is closer to the rest of the bassoon, its larger internal volume may compensate. I'll find out in awhile, I guess.

Also moved along the next two reeds, these shaped normally. These had been soaking for almost three weeks at this point. I'm not exactly doing two per week, but then, I'm not really consuming two per week either. Besides, letting reeds relax for weeks after forming tubes is commonly recommended. Usually people have mandrel tips for in process reeds to sit on, but I don't, so I'm starting a small collection of wired blanks, just sitting on my desk. I guess the idea is that polymer viscoelasticity allows the stress at constant strain to be gradually reduced over time. Googling led me to a 1954 Nature paper, with the following figure showing the force required to maintain a bend in a beam of hoop pine, under various conditions. Note the time scale: it goes from one minute up to two months. It hasn't stopped changing, but presumably the author got bored after that. But it does demonstrate that yes, it's reasonable for cellulosic material to creep for a period of weeks, so letting the reed sit makes sense.

Milde Study Opus 26 Number 1

I should be making reeds, but instead I'm playing with the recorder. This is the first concert study, which I think I played in February 1986, 24 years ago.



I have no idea why I'm constantly comparing with the old days, by the way. Maybe it's some kind of competition with my teenaged self, some need to exceed what I was then before I can become what I'd like to be now.

What to work on

I'm starting to feel like I kinda know what I'm doing with the reeds... not that I'm done, but rather that I need to work on other things in order to progress. So I actually haven't touched the reeds in a week or so, other than just playing on the ones I have. In parallel, I feel like I've made some progress on intonation. Not that I can always play in tune, but rather that I have some level of confidence (however misplaced) that at least I can hear the pitches correctly in my head. With the knowledge there, the rest is execution. And, even if I'm not right, at least maybe I have the confidence to play anyway. Tone, well I don't know. Some of that is physical, muscle strength, some is reeds and horn, some is technique (eg appropriate vibrato). I've started to try a little vibrato occasionally, but it's not smooth and consistent. Anyway, I think the tone, if not there, is at least not changing quickly, so I'd better get used to it. This is all a little ahead of schedule. I'd budgeted a year for myself to learn reeds, and get my tone and intonation into shape so that I could stand to listen to myself play, before really trying to figure out what I want to do. I don't think I can put that off much longer. This morning I took out an actual book of music, the Milde etudes, and started reading them. They aren't too hard for me to work on, and would be a good exercise. It'd be a good project, to work one or some of them up properly, to play them cleanly and musically. At some point, though, I need to stop finding good exercises, and start working on music.