Play Better with this One Weird Trick!

Yes, I am writing recorder clickbait! I couldn’t resist.

Mostly that’s because I am delighted by the very idea of recorder clickbait!

But it’s also because it’s exceedingly rare that I, or any other music teacher, can offer you a simple trick or quick fix. Learning to play music is a schlep. It involves the slow accretion of a constellation of complex, evolving skills and processes across very long time horizons. It is not straightforward; it is not linear; and in fact I’d pretty much call it hack-proof.

Except, that is, for this one weird trick!

So what is it, already?

Pretend there’s a note after your last note.

Lasts notes are challenging. I can’t tell you how many saggy, warped, droopy final notes I’ve heard (and produced!) over the years. I think it’s because once you get to the last note, it’s easy to drop your concentration. Part of you thinks you’re done playing, so you let your air, and your musical intention, quit before the note does. This leads to endings that are out of tune, wobbly, and/or just plain blah.

But if you pretend there’s a note after your final note, I can almost guarantee that you will invest your former last note, now pretend second-to-last note, with air, life, and shape. You won’t let your breath down early, or lose your musical intention, because you’ve convinced yourself there’s more music to come.

Then, once you’ve played your note, you can let this imagined future dissipate.

Don’t quit making music before you quit making sound! Pretend there’s a note after your last note.

It’s one weird trick that, yes, actually works.

Help! I Can't Get Rid of My Vibrato

You know the sound you wish would come out of your instrument– it’s round and resonant, like a bell. It’s warm and clear and centered, a beautiful, smooth stream of air.

But when you go to play, that’s not the sound you hear. Instead, your air stream is turbulent, maybe even rough, wobbling up and down with a constant vibrato you can’t seem to get rid of, no matter how hard you try.

What’s causing this? What can you do?

Vibrato you don’t have control over, and can’t get rid of, is called involuntary vibrato. It’s an extremely common problem in the recorder world, and one that, with time and proper technique, you absolutely can surmount!

Unlike voluntary vibrato, which is used to intensify or otherwise decorate specific notes and is completely under the control of the player, involuntary vibrato is constant and rudderless, occurring without a player’s conscious direction.

Most of us have heard players who play with involuntary vibrato. Maybe you’re one of them. If you are, read on for answers to some frequently asked questions!

Why does involuntary vibrato happen?

The short answer is constriction. When you play, air needs to get from your lungs to the instrument. You can think of the passage between your lungs and your instrument as a giant tube. If the tube is open and relaxed, air flows smoothly through it, like water through a smooth riverbed. But if there is constriction in the tube, you get turbulence, an air stream that flows more like water moving over rocks. If you’ve got involuntary vibrato, you’ve got constriction somewhere in your tube.

What is causing my involuntary vibrato?

There are three main technical problems that cause involuntary vibrato. One of the three causes usually predominates, although they absolutely can combine.

1) Insufficient air. If you’re not taking in enough air for what you want to play, muscles around your tube will attempt to compensate by squeezing the air you do have out.

2) Too much air. If you’re taking in more air than you need for what you want to play, you’ll have to engage muscles to work to hold some of your air back. This will also cause constriction.

3) Miscellaneous tension! The catch-all category. Something is squeezing where it doesn’t need to squeeze. You’re doing more work than you need to do, which, for recorder, is never a good thing.

How do I get rid of my involuntary vibrato?

For most people, there isn’t a quick fix, but you absolutely can reduce and even eliminate it over time. How you go about doing that depends on what’s causing it.

1) If you have insufficient air, you’ll want to work on taking better breaths that allow you to support your sound without squeezing. Often this will involve breathing lower, allowing the belly and sides to expand. Good breathing is at the heart of any wind instrument’s technique, and the recorder is no exception. Want more tips? My Breathing Webinar is full of practical advice. Get access here.

2) If you have too much air, you’ll want to work on taking in just enough air for your needs, and letting go of all the air you have.

3) If you carry miscellaneous tension, you’ll want to begin to very deliberately practice relaxed production, zeroing in on where you’re carrying tension and experimenting with techniques for letting it go.

What if I like my involuntary vibrato?

I definitely come across people who simply like the way their involuntary vibrato sounds. If that’s you, don’t worry: I’m not here to wrest your vibrato away from you. What I will do, though, is urge you to make that vibrato a choice, something you select deliberately rather than something you simply can’t stop.

How Not to Breathe

I may be dating myself, but I used lo love watching a reality show called “What Not to Wear.” Each episode, Clinton and Stacy, the tough-love, unfailingly stylish hosts, would attempt to wreak a fashion transformation on some poor fashion disaster who’d been nominated by their nearest and dearest.

Each makeover was different, but there were thematic through lines. Effort spent on one’s appearance was to be reinterpreted as self-love (since I watched most episodes in ratty sweatpants, I’m not sure this lesson stuck). Cargo shorts were unacceptable at all times. And one directive graced nearly every episode: “Dress for the body you have, not the body you want.”

I think about Clinton and Stacy sometimes when a student tells me they yet haven’t developed a plan for breathing in a particular piece because they want to wait until they’re able to play the piece faster. Usually, this means the student still doing what I call “freelancing–” breathing whenever they run out of breath and damn the musical consequences!

So often, in my best fashionista voice, I bust out my What Not to Wear line: “Breathe for the tempo you have, not the tempo you want!”

It’s a simple concept, but it’s important. Breathing does so much more than simply replenish your oxygen stores. Breathing, for a wind player, is musical punctuation, as vital to your musical message as periods and commas are to your words. When you postpone integrating your breathing into your piece, you are jettisoning a vital piece of the musical puzzle, something that should always be a part of your playing, no matter how fast you’re going– or want to go in the future.

And to be frank, when you do speed the piece up, a lot the breathing work you’ve already done will carry over. It’s possible you may ultimately omit some breaths, but you’re unlikely to change their location, and it may just be a matter of keeping the same number of breaths but recalibrating how much air you take in on each.

The time to think about breathing isn’t some distant musical future when your fingers are flying over the holes.

It’s not the day you click the metronome up to the magic number. The time to think about breathing is now.

It is always, always now.

Three Top Breathing Mistakes....and How to Avoid Them

Ah, breathing! Breathing is literally the one activity we are all doing all the time….so you’d think breathing as we play would be simple, right?

Alas, breathing for recorder playing is a more complex process than breathing for, say, Great British Bake Off reruns. And as with any complex process, it can go awry in multiple ways.

Fortunately or unfortunately, these ways tend to be fairly predictable. (As an aside, I can almost always tell if another wind instrument lurks in a student’s past by observing them breathe- and a good chunk of the time, I can even tell which one!)

So what can go wrong? Here are three of the patterns I see most often in the wild.

1) Nose breathing In a world of near-infinite complexity, sometimes it’s nice to be able to give a nice, straightforward answer to a question.

So: Should breathe through your nose to play recorder?

No.

No nose.

Your nose, for the duration of your playing, is dead to you.

Why? A couple of excellent reasons. First, your nasal passages are a heck of a lot smaller than your oral passage, which means that moving air through them is much less efficient. if you breathe through your nose, you are resigning yourself to taking in less air in more time- never a great idea.

The second reason is less intuitive, but also important: It has to do with your velum (otherwise known as the soft palate). In order to achieve a resonant tone, you want to raise your velum as you play. Want to know how to raise it? Yawn- you’ll feel how your velum lifts to close off the nasal cavity from the oral cavity, increasing the size of your resonating chamber and preventing the movement of air between your mouth and nose. If velum is raised, as it should be, nose breathing is not possible.

Instead of breathing through your nose, gently release your top lip from the instrument to take in air through your mouth.

2) Assuming less is more. Repeat after me: There is no trophy for fewest breaths taken.

I feel like many of us carry around the unspoken idea, perhaps formed in the bowels of 7th grade band, that the longer you can go without taking a breath, the cooler you are. Alas, not so! Striving, consciously or subconsciously, to take as few breaths as possible can get have many unfortunate consequences, from inhaling so deeply the air becomes difficult to control, to squeezing out uncomfortable-sounding notes at the ends of breaths, to “hoarding” breath and consequently producing a weak tone, to skipping over important musical phrase breaks.

Breathing is an integral part of playing a wind instrument- embrace it!

3) Doing too much. All sorts of breathing woes fall into this category, but they boil down to this: Breathing for recorder should feel relatively easy. If it feels arduous or effortful, chances are you are overfunctioning, doing more muscular work than you need - or should- do.

Instead, try to find a way of breathing that allows for the minimum of muscular effort to meet your needs. I promise you’ll be happier.

******

(Want to go more into depth on breathing? I loooveve this topic, and have a whole webinar on breathing for sale here.)

(Bonus tip: fire does not improve things.)

How Low Can You Go?

The four lowest notes of the recorder are no joke.

Sure, they seem like a a joke sometimes: a mean-spirited practical joke in which you expend Herculean effort only to be rewarded, even in the best-case scenario, with a wisp of sound.

And of course the worst-case scenario is worse, involving squeaks, squawks, gasps and awkward silences.

But low notes (I’m talking about F, F#, G, G# on an F instrument; C, C#, D, D# on a C instrument) absolutely can be accessed reliably and beautifully, sounding each and every time you attempt them.

It just takes a smart and deliberate learning process.  

Accordingly, here are my four top tips for working toward reliable, lovely low notes:

1)   Accept low notes for what they are.  On most recorders, low notes are never going to be loud or ringing or present. And trying to make them loud is only going to make them crack.  Part of the beauty of the recorder and other historical instruments is that each and every note has a slightly different timbre and volume- unlike modern instruments for which timbre has been flattened throughout the instrument’s range. So enjoy the soft sounds of a recorder’s low notes.  Played properly, they are dark and soothing and beautiful.

2)   Think like a doctor.  If you miss a low note, don’t just jam your fingers down again and again trying to make it come out.  Not only is this a recipe for frustration, but even if you eventually hit the note, you’ve lost the opportunity to diagnose what went wrong with your initial attempt.  A missed note isn’t a tragedy; it’s an opportunity to gather information about what’s working and what’s not. Low notes usually fail for one of two reasons: too much air, or leaking fingers.  So sit with your error for a moment while running through a checklist to determine what, exactly, has gone wrong.

a.    First, lower your breath pressure.  If the note comes out as you blow less, you’ll know that you have to work on your air and/or mouth shape.

b.    If lowering your air does nothing, try picking up your lowest finger (if you’re on an F, say, move to the G).  If your playing clarifies as you do this, you’ll know that your problem was with finger 7, your pinky.

c.    If the G is still a no go, continue to pick up fingers, one at a time, to figure out which finger was leaking.  Fix it, then head back down again, one finger at a time.

3)   Play the note.  This sounds almost too flippant to be helpful, but I’ve consistently found that it is.  In order to play a note well, you need to spend time playing it.  And not just playing it, but deliberately cultivating your awareness of what it feels like, sounds like, and looks like to play your low note in a relaxed way.  So once you’ve found a good low F, hang out there for a while. Relax your fingers, jaw, and tongue, etching the feeling of successful playing into your body and mind so that you can access it more easily next time.

4)   Go home. After you’ve spent sufficient time hanging out on your low note to ingrain how it feels, make it your home.  My favorite exercise for low notes is one I call “home base.”   Play your low note beautifully, long and low and slow.  Then leap up one note and return to home base. Then two notes, then three notes, returning home to your low note every time.  This helps ground your low note as something to be leapt from, not to, while improving your ability to move from high to low.

Enjoy your low notes!  (Quietly.)