Velocity

Summer's almost over, with a new year almost begun. At the beginning of the summer, I'd had great plans to make lots of reeds, go busking, get new experiences, and so on. Almost none of that has happened. I did play with that chamber orchestra, and that's about it. Haven't had a lesson in more than a month... unless you count the tabla lesson from my brother, which we did over the computer. Very hard to make that work: the compression algorithms for video conferencing are optimized for speaking voices, and totally chopped off the resonant ring, making it hard to tell whether I was hitting the drum correctly. Really, I should find a local teacher.

One thing I have been trying recently is changing how I practice scales. When I first started up, I wrote out a chart of gradually speeding up scales, starting at 16ths a little under MM=60, and progressing to MM=120 over a year. Just a metronome click or two per month, I thought. How hard could that be? I kept track of how I was doing, and made the plot above. You can see a linear increase for awhile, followed by a big setback, where I got dissatisfied with the beauty and cleanness of the scales, and reset the metronome. I got up again, working faster for a bit, but not much faster overall. I kinda topped out at 70, and found it hard to do more, playing every key, major and minor, full compass. I then got sick of how much of my limited time I was putting into scales, and stopped recording the speed progress. Overall I tracked this for maybe 8 months total. Since then, I've still played scales, but mostly in the 60-70 window, and experimented tried adding different articulations, etc., but generally trying to not spend too much time on them.

So my new idea is that if I want to be able to play smoothly fast, then I should work on doing just that. New plan: start at MM=100, but very restricted: only C, F, and G, and only five notes at a time, if that's what I can do cleanly and beautifully. I'll try to work my way to playing one octave, up and down, then expand from there, in range and number of scales. If I want to play clean and fast, then do that. We'll see what happens.

Back from a break

I had two weeks off, which was mostly spent driving. My dad's 90th birthday was this year, which turned into a kind of family reunion. Driving down for that, plus dropping my wife at a jazz piano camp, and general tourism on the way out and back resulted in about 7000 km behind the wheel. I didn't bring the bassoon, just because I didn't want to fret about it. Not very much bassoon-related happened; the closest thing was wearing a bassoon T-shirt while hiking in Zion National Park, and getting greeted by a clarinettist. We chatted briefly, he went to school with some Canadian bassoonists that I've heard of. After google-stalking him, it seems that I met Richard Peck, of the Houston Symphony.

The downside to not practicing is that I have a rehearsal tonight, with a fairly high level group, and have to be able to play. I've had just over a day back, enough time to play a few long tones against a drone, but that's about it. Hopefully I won't embarrass myself too badly. This is the last rehearsal before the show, and I missed the previous rehearsal due to being away.

The other music-related thing was being given a set of tablas by my mother. It's not the first hand-drum I have, my wife gave me a small djembe for Christmas a few years ago, which I play occasionally. Tablas are different though; they are a vital part of Indian classical music, which has its own traditions as serious as Western classical music. My mom made me promise to take at least a lesson or two on them before she let me take them away. We'll see how that goes.

Update: The rehearsal went fine. I even got singled out for praise at the end, which was an odd kind of feeling. There was a solo-ey phrase (Dvorak 8, 2nd movement), which I was trying to play out, and heard a violin. I glanced over, being reminded that this bit was doubled with a solo violin. (Or, depending on where you sit, the solo violin is doubled by a bassoon.) Our student conductor, who'd spent the last part of rehearsal importuning the winds to listen more to our rather overbalanced strings, caught this and pointed it out as an example of what we ought to be doing. Okay, so I did end up a bit embarrassed, but not in the way that I feared. I also found out that the conductor knew my name, so that was nice too. I'm terrible with names, so I'm always impressed whenever anyone uses mine.