Category: Music Business

How Contagious are Wind Instruments?

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Hopefully by the time you’re reading this post it will be out of date. Currently my area is still under a the 2020 pandemic lockdown and the only music performances going on are digital. But as we start to open things back up again there are questions about how soon we can get back to making music together again. One major question that I wondered about is how contagious are those of us playing wind instruments? If we’re carriers of covid-19 or flu are we putting our fellow musicians at risk by playing our instruments with them? There are some researchers who have been looking at this, including some from the Frieburg University of Music and the Bamberg Symphony. Dr. Sixto Montesinos helps us with translations from those publications.

To the best of our knowledge, there are no measurements of the viral load in the blowing air of wind instruments at present. It is known, however, that wind instrument playing requires an intensive exchange of air in the lungs and respiratory tract with sometimes high air pressures. To what extent the viral load is reduced by the airway in the instrument is unclear. It is to be assumed that the release of the breathing air into the environment during playing can lead to virus-containing aerosols. In addition, playing wind instruments causes condensation of the exhaled air in the instrument, which is to be regarded as another potentially virus-spreading material.

Risk Assessment Regarding Corona-Infections in Music Making

“We (The Bamberg Symphony) believe that playing a clarinet or a horn, for example, hardly releases any aerosols because the air flow in the instrument is slowed down where the sounds are generated.” said Marcus Axt, Director of the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra.

The Bamberg Symphony

So preliminarily, it looks like woodwind and brass instruments don’t increase the risk of spreading the covid-19 virus, although as far as I can tell they don’t address the need for emptying spit (I mean, water) from the water key. Joking aside, while it’s mostly condensation that we’re emptying out of the spit valve, there must be some spit getting in there and we already know that the inside of brass instruments aren’t always the most sterile environment to start with.

A number of the ensembles that I work with have members who are more at risk from covid-19. Some of these groups also cater to audiences that are older and in the high-risk population. Many of the venues where I play have smaller stages where musicians really need to squeeze together to all fit. Before we go back to playing together it would be nice to know for sure that we’re not inadvertently putting our fellow musicians and audiences at risk.

Then we also need to consider private lesson teaching. I fortunately have a larger room for my at-home music studio, but in the past I’ve used very small offices to teach private lessons where it’s not really possible to stand 6 feet apart. Many of my colleagues use very small rooms to teach their private lessons in.

I’m glad that there folks out there taking a science-based approach to what sort of risk playing a wind instrument will be as we start playing together again. So far it looks like the risk will be minimal based purely on playing your instrument near other musicians, but please keep in mind that the results are still preliminary and will require further research. I’ll post any updates that I learn about here, but please also pass along any information or articles if you happen to come across them in the comments below.

Business Advice For Freelancers

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Erin A. Paul is a freelance horn player and she has some advice for freelance musicians. If you’re a student musician hoping to perform professionally, or even an experienced freelance musicians, it’s worth a look.

Freelancing has a lot to do with who you know, and what they think of working with you. The most important lesson my teacher Dan Grabois drilled in was to “be a good colleague.” Not only will your working life be more enjoyable, but it will help you get asked back to the gig. Once you’ve reached a certain level on your instrument, it becomes less about your playing, and more about what it’s like to work with you!

She makes a point that is similar to things I’ve mentioned before. When I’m booking musicians for my band, I don’t contact the best musicians first, I get in touch with the competent musicians who are reliable and easy to work with. When those players are both outstanding musicians and also good colleagues, that’s a bonus.

I think that Paul forgets a few key things, such as arriving early (early=on time) and helping with stage setup/tear down (or at the very least keeping out of the way). But she also listed a few things that I forgot or didn’t think of.

Don’t wear strong perfume or cologne, especially not in a pit.

And it should go without saying, but there are a couple of musicians that I work with somewhat frequently that should, er, maybe take more frequent showers and try out some deodorant. One of my “gigs from hell” stories from way back involved traveling a long distance to play for free and then having to sit next to a musician who’s body odor was overpowering.

Here’s another piece of advice from Paul that I didn’t think of earlier.

Don’t forget the gas money.

Always offer gas/toll money, even if you don’t have cash on you. Car ownership is not cheap, especially in NYC. If it weren’t for that person owning, maintaining, registering, and driving the car, you probably couldn’t have gotten to the gig! If you want to be really nice, text the driver before pickup and ask what kind of coffee/tea they like.

It’s great to car pool with other musicians to gigs when you have a long drive time ahead of you. You save on gas money and hopefully the company you have along the trip makes the travel go easier. It’s very nice to have someone around to help keep the driver awake on those gigs when you’re traveling home late at night. But it sometimes amazes me how often people forget to chip in a few bucks at the end of the night. Sure, if you didn’t ride along with me I was going to have to drive there anyway so it’s really not a huge deal, but at least offer something.

It unfortunately seems that Paul’s blog hasn’t been updated in over a couple of years. Many of her posts would primarily be of interest to horn players, but others are good for any musician. You can check out more articles by Erin Paul here.

How to Discuss Music Online

~ wilktone ~ 4 Comments

Having a comments section here in my blog is sometimes a double edged sword. I do feel that one of the most powerful tools the internet can be used for is the ability for us to question and discuss things with people that we would not otherwise get the opportunity to interact with. The flip side of that benefit is that online discussion often breaks down and has the opposite effect that we want. I see this all the time on brass fora. Too often folks offer advice to someone they have never seen or heard play before. Sometimes I question whether the confidence they seem to have about their responses are unjustified. Sometimes those folks don’t (or can’t) demonstrate even basic competence. Joey Tartell has noticed similarly and written about this phenomenon in his blog post, Nuance.

I do not argue with these people.  In fact, I choose not to engage with them at all. What I’d like to discuss today is what’s missing from so many online discussions.

One common pattern Tartell notes is the false dichotomy, when a disagreement is framed as either all or nothing, black or white, without acknowledging that there can be a continuum of possibilities and shades or gray in between. My posts a while back about the relative value of metronome practice is one example. The ensuing discussion between blogs and in the comments section kept getting reduced, in spite of my efforts, to “metronome practice is bad versus metronome practice is good.” There was little room to discuss the nuance between. Another similar pattern is the assumption that when someone says one thing is good, that means the author is calling something else bad. The metronome discussion is another good example. Just because I find a metronome a good practice and teaching tool doesn’t mean that using other approaches are bad.

Tartell lists several suggestions for how to make an online discussion more fruitful. Here is his basic list, but I suggest that you go over and read his elaborations on his original post.

  1. Decide what’s important to you.
  2. Will getting involved do any good?
  3. Stick to the subject at hand.
  4. Realize that other people could have something important to say.
  5. Not all opinions are equal.
  6. Know when to get out.

Playing for Swing Dancers

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I’ve been playing gigs for dancers since I started playing professionally, but in the past few years a very active community of younger swing dancers has emerged and I’ve been playing a lot more. I’ve been fortunate that the bands that I work with also happen to be made up of swing dancers (some quite good!), and so I’ve been picking up on a lot of what dancers are looking for from the bands they book to play their events.

I’ve only performed with Laura Windley a handful of times, but she has a unique background as a singer, dancer, and event organizer that makes her advice on this subject worth listening to.

I’ve been seeing a bit of this lately with some local bands who would like to play for swing dancers – bandleaders who contact local organizers to promote their events or about being hired, but have very little experience playing for dance events (or playing for swing dance events specifically, as opposed to ballroom events or more general dancing) or had past experience playing for dancers but haven’t kept up with trends in music in the swing dance community. Several people have written blog posts about playing music for dancers and I agree that the music is the most important aspect and that feedback should be considered, but I want to focus on relationships and communication.

Laura notes something similar to what I see all the time – excellent jazz musicians who don’t play in a stylistically appropriate way when playing jazz from he 1920s and 1930s. I guess I was lucky in that my undergraduate jazz teacher (Dr. Tom Streeter) made sure that the jazz band was regularly performing swing music and performing it correctly. A lot of jazz programs tend to emphasize modern jazz (nothing wrong with this, per se), and sometimes a student’s interests will pull them in one direction and leave a hole in their stylistic knowledge.

There have been great swing bands that lost gigs because they insisted on featuring their soloists for umpteen choruses and the songs ended up being 10 minutes long. If you have never danced to an uptempo song for 10 minutes, try running for 10 minutes and see how winded you are. You want the dancers to be exhausted at the end of the night, not in the middle of the first set. The guidelines and norms are there for a reason, and the reasons are generally practical.

Selecting the tempos of the tunes and how you put them together is very important for keeping dancers on the dance floor. Too many fast tunes in a row and they will start sitting out tunes. Too many of the same tempos in a row gets repetitive. One dancer/musician I once asked about it said that he likes to put dance sets together in groups of three – medium, fast, medium. When you repeat back to another medium tempo you want to have a slightly different tempo or groove to help provide variety.

But there are exceptions. This past weekend I performed for a Balboa dance weekend. This particular dance is done to faster tempo tunes, so we ended up playing more faster tempo tunes than we might have otherwise. James, the bandleader was very careful about tempos both dances we played, frequently double checking with a metronome. He had also arranged one chart to exactly fit the length of time needed for a dance competition.

Needless to say, in addition to being an excellent ragtime, stride, and swing pianist, James is also a swing dancer. The two dances we played went very well because he understood exactly what the dancers wanted and was organized so that the band was prepared to do it.

Again, I’ve been lucky that I get to rub elbows with some dancers and musicians who are plugged into the swing dance scene at a national level and gotten to tag along to perform at events around the south east. It’s been an invaluable help for those times when I’m the band leader on a dance show or even if dancers show up to one of my regular big band gigs. If you’re wanting to break into this scene, check out Laura’s post.

9 Things Professionals Avoid

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Or rather, 9 Warning Signs of an Artist. While it’s generally better (pedagogically) to talk about what to do, rather than what not to do, this page has nine things that are signs of an amateur. Here are three of the warning signs, with a couple thoughts of my own.

1) Amateur Artists wait for Inspiration

You’ve got to set a work schedule and stick to it, regardless of whether or not you feel like doing it.

2.) Amateur Artists work until something else comes up

While the author is mostly referring to your time spent practicing/composing/painting/etc., I would also add that “amateur” artists also seem to feel that you can drop a gig commitment if a better one comes up. That’s not a sign of a profession, in spite of the fact that sometimes professionals seem to think this is cool.

3.) Amateur Artists are constantly changing their focus

While an amateur tends to change their style or medium as the mood strikes them, a professional artist knows that a “jack-of-all-trades is a master of none”.

I would add that as a musician, being a “jack of all trades” has allowed me to be successful precisely because I’m able to do so many different things, albeit in the field of music. I’ve been able to do this, however, because I’ve spent time working on mastering my skills in a couple of areas (trombone playing and composing) and then building off of those abilities to branch off into related things (conducting, music administration, etc.).

9.) Amateur Artists isolate themselves from the artist community

This brings up a couple of thoughts. First, professional musicians usually quickly learn how small their community actually is. It’s not hard for a musician to get blackballed from gigs because word can get spread around that such and such a player is difficult to work with or doesn’t follow through on commitments. When you isolate yourself from the rest of your peers, you can miss out on not only the word that’s going around about players you may want to work with (or not), but you also miss out on having your peers help you fix a broken reputation.

The other thought that comes to my mind is they myth of the “loan wolf” teacher who has a pedagogical method they push and build their reputation around. Students become an echo chamber of sorts when they go on and teach similarly, without regard to checking out what other folks are doing and what other fields of pedagogy outside of music are doing. If pedagogy is the science of teaching, then we need to treat our teaching more like a collaboration among other teachers. No one pedagogue has all the correct answers, no matter how distinguished or charismatic.

The Orchestral Dream (has been) Dead

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The Phantom Brass blog recently posted an article by Matthew Waters where he declares, quite accurately, The Orchestral Dream Is Dead.

If we’re looking at the numbers alone, the odds of winning a position is astronomical. According to data collected by Datausa.io, 8,133 Music Performance Degrees were awarded in the United States in 2015. As of May of 2017, there are 8 members of the Regional Orchestra Players Association that pay over $25,000 base salary a year, with an additional 49 under other collective bargaining agreements with the AFM. That means there are 57 orchestras that one could theoretically find full-time employment with. Fifty-seven. That doesn’t mean there are 57 positions open a year. That means there are 57 full-time jobs in that industry, that have maybe a few vacancies total per year. Needless to say, the odds aren’t good with 8000+ bachelor’s degrees in music being awarded every year, and that number continuing to grow.

If I understand correctly, I think that Waters means there are 57 full-time orchestral “employers,” not jobs, since many musicians are employed by each of those 57 orchestras. His point, however, is quite valid. If you’re looking for a full-time orchestral job your chances of finding one are quite small. Waters also comments on how the music scene in southern California, where he is based, is difficult for even very fine musicians to earn a living.

This solution is simple, but certainly not easy. It requires the individual and institutional realization that there is a huge amount of space in the music industry for more than just tenured orchestra performers. We have the opportunity to be live-streaming artists and YouTube clinicians. Private instructors and ensemble founders. Arts administrators, music directors, arrangers, composers, and copyists. The problem in most of the training grounds today is that players are funneled into preparing for a job that they have little to no chance of winning, while totally neglecting all of the other possible jobs that are likely be a part of a successful music career. In performance degrees especially, we’re trained to do only that- perform.

Personally, I find it odd that music students in performance degrees are trained only to perform in orchestral styles, but that’s perhaps biased by my own education, teaching experience, and personal interests. I went to a liberal arts college for my undergraduate studies, majored in jazz studies for my masters, and my doctorate is in trombone performance, but I maintained my interests in a wide variety of different musical styles and topics and my degree track emphasized pedagogy. So when Waters comments, “If we’re not going to summer festivals, winning mock auditions, and outplaying everyone else in our studios, we feel like failures,” I find it an unfamiliar feeling.

But what is one to do if your dream is an orchestral job? Give up before you even try? Get a fall back degree? Go for it and risk failure?

I’ve never been particular interested in a full-time job in an orchestra, but I have been able to get paid to perform with regional orchestras regularly in the past (for disclosure, I don’t do a lot of orchestral playing these days, but that’s largely due to being busy doing other performing and not making an effort to do more than the occasional subbing). I don’t see orchestral playing as being any different than being a successful freelance musician in the first place. We all have our wheelhouse, and if yours is orchestral playing than you can focus on that side of your playing and make that your primary performing goals. Don’t neglect your skills in other types of playing too, however, and be ready to do a lot of different types of performing if your goal is to be a successful music professional.

And as Waters suggests, be ready to do some things that are peripherally related to your musical performing and get some background and education in those things. Teaching is the obvious one, but I generally don’t recommend you go into music education full-time unless that is your goal. Too many music students get a music education degree as a “fall back” and then end up miserable because they don’t enjoy it enough to justify all the non-musical stuff that goes along with it.

Keep in mind that overall, Americans change jobs between the ages of 18 and 48 an average of 11.7 times. That can be in the same career, but in non-musical fields people change careers all the time and still are happy and successful. The bottom line is that you, as an individual and as a musician, cannot be defined by your job, but by who you are and your attitude towards what you do.

This is the new reality for anyone pursuing a music career, and it’s time that we faced that. The skills that are needed to win an orchestra position are developed at the cost of excluding almost of all these other skills. It is a single-minded pursuit, and it is destructive for the vast majority of music students. We need to broaden our training and bring musical education into the 21st century.

On Learning the “Classics”

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I recently came across an interesting blog post Ronan on his Mostly Music blog. This post, entitled 21st Century Bebop, asks some good questions that jazz educators might want to consider.

In a musical world which has moved away from traditional jazz repertoire, at least as far as the vast majority of the general public is concerned, what is the relevance or otherwise of these skills – playing standards, playing changes, playing common repertoire, the swing idiom etc. etc. ? Why, the question is often asked, should we spend so much time teaching a type of music that hasn’t been popular for over 60 years? What is the relevance of standard repertoire in the 21st-century, and are we holding onto this type of teaching out of some misguided sense of loyalty to the past?

Years ago, when I was still teaching in academia, I was sitting in on a juried recital for a drummer jazz studies major. He was accompanied by a couple musicians that he played around town frequently with and they seemed to draw the music primarily from the tunes they play on their gigs. The performance was excellent, but I was concerned about the lack of variety I heard. Afterwards, I commented to the student’s studio instructor that I wanted to hear something in the swing style and was confused when he insisted that there was. It took me a moment to realize that while I was talking about a jazz style and repertoire from the 30s and 40s, his instructor was thinking of something that had swing 8th notes.

It still seems strange to me that an undergraduate student completing a bachelors degree in jazz studies would go through 4 years of higher education and not be required to demonstrate a familiarity with performing in jazz styles developed prior to the 1950s or 60s. Perhaps it’s my professional bias as a trombonist to find myself performing traditional jazz and swing styles more than a drummer might, but I see a familiarity with the history of the style to be more than simply being professionally ready to play a gig where you need to play in a non-contemporary jazz style. Ronan addresses this too.

So – technique, aural training, harmonic knowledge, rhythmic skills, reading skills, musical memory, deep listening, understanding of form and the ability to instantly create melodies over moving harmony. All of these are necessary in order to able to be able to play standard jazz material. This is a serious set of skills for any musician venturing into the professional music world, and some or all of them are transferable into any kind of musical situation you may be find yourself in.

I would take this a step further. I may be misremembering who exactly said this (and I may even be making this up entirely, but the point is still valid), but I think it was Wynton Marsalis who said it’s equally important for jazz students to get experience learning to play “classical” music as well. First, the pedagogy and practice on development of instrumental technique has been refined already with classical studies to a point that I still don’t see with jazz methods. The skill set you will learn from performing a classical recital or performing in an orchestra or concert band is going to benefit in a way that playing in a jazz combo just can’t provide. For example, if you’re performing a solo concerto you are going to have to have the chops to make it through all the movements and play what’s on the page, whereas when we improvise we unconsciously make choices that we already have the technique to play. Classical music challenges jazz musicians to improve their skills and become familiar with phrasing, articulations, and other nuances that you just won’t get playing contemporary jazz.

And, for that matter, I make the same argument for classical musicians learning to improvise and become familiar with jazz styles. I’ve listened to and played many pops concerts and noticed how uncomfortable the classical musicians sounded trying to phrase and articulate jazz and pop styles.

Of course we’re all going to have our personal preferences and strengths. There are some musical styles that I have little to no interest in learning to perform and others that I have made a conscious effort to become as good as I can playing. However, my experience has been that becoming a well rounded musician has been beneficial to performing in my preferred styles. Furthermore, my abilities as a “musical chameleon” have made it possible for me to work successfully as a professional musician and music educator in a wide variety of situations that many of my peers cannot.

Are Big Band Brass Players Losing the Concept of Being Team Players?

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Playing trombone is NOT like punching people!

I remember reading this essay by Doug Yeo years ago, Me, Myself and I: Are Orchestral Brass Players Losing the Concept of Being Team Players?. Back in 1997 Yeo expressed his concerns that trends in orchestral brass playing had not necessarily been for the best.

Go into the parking lot of any brass conference, convention or workshop, and you’re bound to find more than a few cars with the bumper sticker that reads, “Question authority.” Some would argue that this mindset is the province of trumpet players alone but that surely is not the case. Over the past twenty years, American orchestral playing has been undergoing a significant change, as brass players have (with some notable exceptions) asserted themselves beyond their traditional role in the orchestra.

Most students go through their “loud” phase, of getting together with other players and just knocking the living daylights out of orchestral excerpts. This can be great fun to do, good for the face and boosting to the ego. But excerpt sessions don’t always relate to the real world, and as many brass players have developed a more “muscular” concept of playing, the American orchestra has, in my mind, begun to suffer.

Yeo’s essay is specific to orchestral brass playing, but much of it seems to relate to big band brass playing as well, at least among the big bands I get to hear and play in. The details are different, as are some of the influences, but a lot is similar.

The job of balancing an orchestra lies with the conductor alone. But there is no denying that a 15 member brass section can ruin any orchestral concert (despite what the conductor wants) very easily as the combined volume of the strings and winds can never compete with that of even a single trombonist. Arnold Jacobs once told me that in his view, the bass trombone was the instrument of the orchestra that had by far the greatest “high volume potential” owing in part to the fact that after the flute, the bass trombone utilized the highest flow rate of any wind instrument, including the tuba.

John Berry, in his excellent jazz pedagogy text The Jazz Ensemble Director’s Handbook, wrote about the “Monster Bass Trombonist.” He’s describing a common trend in student musicians, not professionals, but occasionally I run into this player in the professional world (not recently, and not anyone I work with regularly now!).

About once a decade the music world renders up a bona fide (pardon the pun) “Monster Bass Trombonist” – you know, the guy who can play louder than any human on earth…

…A good MBT (or even a bad one who thinks he’s good) can “cop an attitude.” He becomes a star. He basks in compliments. He becomes a junkie for oohs and ahas. He craves ever more. He plays LOOUUDD!!! . . . All the time!

Well, it’s not just bass trombonists. You find them in the whole brass section.

In his essay, Yeo brings up equipment trends in orchestral brass playing.

Part of the problem is simple ignorance; the idea that Bruckner symphonies are to be played at maximum volume would horrify Bruckner, the reserved, insecure, Catholic composer of music for and about the church and the inexpressible “beyond.” Let us not forget that his symphonies also require us to play as soft as possible. Unfortunately, many players look at passages marked fff and simply blow until the seams pop. Unsatisfied with the way their instruments respond to this treatment, they continually hunt for something that will allow them to play even louder with a reasonably good sound. Hence, we now have tenor players in many major orchestras using bass trombone slides and 3 or 4G mouthpieces, and bass trombonists without leadpipes, playing mouthpieces that resemble tuba mouthpieces, and gigantic dual bore slides. All of these changes do indeed allow players to play louder.

This mirrors equipment choices of big band brass players, although the influences are different. Many big bands pride themselves on the “faster, louder, higher” school. Certainly big bands like Stan Kenton and Maynard Ferguson have greatly influenced big band style and the demands of those styles strongly influence big band brass players to make certain equipment choices that favor louder and higher.

About 15 years ago I went to a clinic the great big band composer/arranger Bob Florence was giving. One thing that really stuck with me is that he said, if the details I remember are correct, that he never uses mp dynamics any longer because bands never play soft enough. If he wants mp, he writes p. For p he writes pp.

I’ve been playing and directing the Asheville Jazz Orchestra for a while now. We’ve played a lot of gigs together, but some of the ones that stand out in my mind as being particularly good were those times we played without a sound system. Everyone listened closely, especially during solos, and dynamics were played consistently correctly. Knowing that there wasn’t a sound technician “fixing the mix” for us forced everyone to become team players. It was just a mental switch, but it made a huge difference in the overall quality of our music.

What about your experience? Are the big bands you play with a “blast fest” all the time? What gigs have you played were the musical quality was excellent specifically because everyone was a great team player?

Communicating With Sound Technician

~ wilktone ~ 5 Comments

I just got the following email with questions about how to communicate with your sound technician.

Hi

I have played in big bands many times where the sound men didn’t really help all that much. Frustrating.
You sound like you know what you’re talking about!!
Right now – I am directing a Praise Band in Xxxx Xxxxx, XX. I don’t know who to contact about some questions I have to help me communicate with the sound man there. Are you interested or able to help me?

Some questions I would like to address – –
-How to communicate with the sound man while on stage in front of church. Reason it is so important during the performance is because the sound man doesn’t have any ears. :/ Need to tell him when to turn up mics (for solos and duets and when the inexperienced guitar player’s part is actually being play correctly so it should be turned up, etc. etc.He seems to have a mind of his own when it comes to vocals being above band volume.)
Uff. Seems so hopeless. He can speak to me on the mic he has connected at the board. However, he never knows when I NEED HIS ATTN. (I can’t really use my hands to signal him on stage during the service)
I tried a 2-way radio but he didn’t want to wear ear buds all the time (as I can understand).

Thanks, Diane

Diane, it can be very frustrating working with sound technicians who can’t or aren’t willing to help you out. Unfortunately, many sound technicians have the idea that they know better than the music director how the band should sound and want to do their own thing, regardless of what you ask them to set up for you. Since I don’t know your particular sound man personally and the performance situation, I can’t give you specific advice, but here are some general things you can try or think about.

Treat the Sound Technician As An Integral Part Of Your Ensemble

This is just interpersonal skills 101, but I feel it’s important that your sound tech feels that you take him/her seriously and trust their judgement. That can be a double edged sword if they don’t have the same vision for the sound as you do, but start from that point and go from there. I try to remember to thank our sound tech during the performance the same way I introduce members of the ensemble on stage. The trouble is, the better the sound tech is at doing his or her job, the more “out of mind” they are. Sometimes I mention to a sound tech before the show that if I forget to thank them on stage that it means I was extremely happy with their work.

So basically, remember that you will catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

Spend Some Time in the House Listening To the Ensemble With the Sound Tech

Whenever possible (hard to do if you’re also performing as well as directing), spend some time out in the house at sound check and listen to how it sounds. See if you can get the sound tech to mix the sound as close to how you want it to be so he or she gets an aural picture of your needs.

Since I most perform with jazz groups when I use a sound system, I have to trust that the sound tech understands what jazz is supposed to sound like. Too often they come from a background of mixing sound for rock groups and then have a skewed understanding of how things should be miced. With my big band, for example, I want the sound tech to mix the band in such a way that we’re approximating the sound of an all-acoustic jazz ensemble. A sound tech with experience mixing rock bands will often want to over-mic the rhythm section and we end up with an unbalanced sound. With a sound tech I’ve not worked with before I will step out into the house to listen to the mix during our sound check to ensure that it sounds right.

Find a piece or tune that involves everyone in the group but is also simple enough that they can run through without you up on stage. During sound check run out to the sound board and help your tech mix it the way you want. Since it’s hard for you to communicate during the service, try to take care of as much as possible ahead of time.

Communication While On Stage

This is frustrating, and I don’t have a good answer. Maybe some visitors reading this can offer suggestions. The best sound techs are focused during the entire show and keep coming back to watching the music director. When they do, you can unobtrusively point at the vocals and then point down to indicate to turn them down, etc. If you work with the same tech regularly you can both come up with some specific hand signals to help make your on-stage needs clear. But if your sound technician is not paying attention, that’s not going to help.

The best solution, if you can find a tactful way of doing so, is to make your sound man understand that it’s important for the music that he keep his attention on you and make your adjustments as needed. Another option is to get him a “liaison” between you and him to assist him during the service. That assistant can be someone charged with keeping an eye on you and passing along your needs, freeing him up to focus on other things.

Thoughts For Further Discussion

What advice do you have for Diane? What are your strategies for working with sound technicians? What’s the worst performance from the sound tech that you’ve ever dealt with? What are the best experiences you’ve had with a sound technician and why was it so good? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Weekend Picks

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It’s been a while since I’ve been able to post some weekend picks for you. Here are some random music-related sites for you to browse this weekend.

Do you like brass band music? Do you like drinking? If you like both, you probably would love Serbias Guča Trumpet Festival. The Dragačevo Sabor Trubaca brings in more than half a million people to a small village in Serbia for a wild weekend of brass bands and drinking.

It is believed this Balkan brass tradition emerged in the early 20th century, around the time Serbia, Greece, Montenegro, and Bulgaria formed the Balkan League to battle the Ottoman Empire in 1912. “During the Balkan Wars, and then during World War I, military bands came through the area, playing mostly brass instruments,” Smith says. “These instruments were adopted by the Balkans, who created brass versions of pre-existing folk songs. In Serbia in particular, they embraced brass music to the extent that they consider it their national style of music.”

You can read more about it in A Frenzy of Trumpets: Why Brass Musicians Can’t Resist Serbia’s Wildest Festival.

If you are studying aural skills or teaching ear training it’s nice to have a repertory of familiar songs to help you recognize intervals.

Although some may have changed since this article was posted in 2013, it gives you some practical advice for dealing with flying with your musical instrument. As always, check ahead when traveling with your instrument.

Lastly, remember to Be Like Bill. See more of Bill here.