Category: Pedagogy

Learning Absolute Pitch In Adulthood

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Full disclosure, I don’t possess absolute pitch nor am I an expert in this field. I do find the topic fascinating, however, and when I came across a recent study about learning absolute pitch as an adult I was curious to learn more.

Just in case “absolute pitch,” sometimes known as “perfect pitch,” is unfamiliar to you, it is the ability to identify and sing pitches without a point of reference. It’s distinctly different from relative pitch, which is the ability to identify pitches based on the sounds of intervals using a point of reference. People who possess absolute pitch frequently describe the sounds of different pitches as having a sort of “color,” which researchers call “chroma.” It’s not pitch memorization, where an individual memorizes the pitch of an A440 by carrying around a pitch fork all the time, the different pitches has a distinct chroma that is as identifiable to them as red is different from blue.

Absolute pitch is very rare and conventional wisdom has been that it needs to be developed in childhood and can’t be learned as an adult. That said, a recent study, “Learning fast and accurate absolute pitch judgment in adulthood” by Yetta Kwailing Wong, et al, makes a compelling argument that certain training methods are able to obtain results among musicians without absolute pitch that are quite similar those with absolute pitch.

Wong and the other researchers trained 12 musicians for 8 weeks using an online computerized training program. The program was not easy, it involved at least 25 hours total with at least 2 hours of training per week over that time. The system was designed to start with identifying a single pitch, but over many different octaves, which I gather was one of the unique differences between this system and earlier ones. Once the participants were able to pass the test to identify the single pitch accurately a second pitch was added and so on. This doesn’t mean that the subjects heard only one or two notes, they heard many additional pitches during their training that were to be considered “out of bounds” until those additional pitches had been added. By the end of the 8 weeks training the participants were shown to be able to accurately identify an average of just over 7 pitches (ranging from 3 pitches at the low end for two subjects to all 12 pitches for three of them) with a 90% accuracy rate.

If these results can be replicated it is a very interesting step forward regarding how we might teach ear training. The researchers haven’t made their training program available, as far as I can tell, but I would imagine that it’s a matter of time before their program, or similar ones, becomes available. I also imagine that the training would involve a cost to take as well, but if the program is shown to have similar results for most adults it might be worth the expense for many musicians.

The full paper is available here. A summary of this research can be found here.

You’re Going To Be Fine – Talking Embouchure Injuries with Brad Goode

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Brad Goode is an amazing musician. You’re probably most likely to know about his jazz trumpet playing. He’s also an excellent composer and bassist. He has also struggled a number of times with injuries to his lips that have seriously hindered his trumpet players.

Recently I came across a video podcast series, Trust the Process, that is devoted to helping musicians deal with injuries related to playing their instruments. Episode 4 is an interview with Brad Goode.

Here are a couple of quotes from the video that I found particularly interesting or insightful.

Understanding good brass technique and preventing injury go hand in hand.

For those who prefer not to think about brass technique, this is the best argument I can think for why you should understand brass technique.

There are many, many brass teachers not teaching embouchure. And not dealing with the subject of embouchure but believing in a magical thinking system where if you just imagine the results strong enough everything will be perfect and you won’t need to know anything about embouchure.

I find it truly amazing how many intelligent, well-intentioned, and experience brass teachers and players buy into this “think system” approach. And many are quite defensive if you point out the absurdity of it. And as Brad mentions, more players than not who get injured have been indoctrinated into this idea.

There are a few things he says that I question or disagree with. For example, while Brad is correct that different brass instruments require different approaches, I’ve found that the basic principles apply to all and they are more similar than many give credit. But I imagine that if we discussed these differences and similarities in person we’d find we’re more aligned than not here.

The whole interview is interesting and worth watching. I will definitely be checking out more of the Trust the Process series.

Brass Embouchures: A Guide For Teachers and Players – NC Trombone Festival Recording

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Yesterday I attended the North Carolina Trombone Festival, held at Appalachian State University this year. It was a wonderful time. I heard two very fine trombone choirs perform, the ASU Trombone Choir and the Charlotte Trombone Collective. The Performer’s Showcase Recital featured a number of the guest artists and most performed pieces I wasn’t familiar with already. I got to meet some colleagues from around North Carolina that I haven’t met before and also finally met a couple of teachers face to face for the first time.

There were also some workshops and I gave a presentation on brass embouchure technique and pedagogy in the morning session. While preparing for this I spent some time practicing it and recorded myself. Here is one practice session, unedited, but I think that it will get the points across pretty well. I didn’t write out everything I planned to say. Instead I had some bullet points of things I wanted to say in my presenters notes (as well as on the slides) and spoke about them off the cuff. I think that this makes a live presentation feel more natural, but on video it perhaps comes across better to recite something prewritten. What do you think?

At any rate, here is the practice session for anyone who is interested but wasn’t able to attend the festival or went to another workshop at the same time.

If you’ve read through some of my embouchure materials I’ve already posted here you’ll recognize the discussion as well as many of the examples I use. But it’s possible that this format and organization works well for some people as an introduction or review.

North Carolina Trombone Festival Embouchure Presentation 4/13/24

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Coming up next month, on April 13, 2024, I will be presenting at the North Carolina Trombone Festival. I will be giving an presentation on brass embouchure technique titled “Brass Embouchures: A Guide for Teachers and Players” at 10 AM.

The boilerplate release forms that I received to participate this year mention live streaming. If the event is streamed or recorded, I will be sure to post links here for folks who might want to tune in.

Regardless of whether it is going to be streamed, I will practice the presentation (in part so I can be sure to get through everything in the allotted 45 minutes) and will probably record my practice. If I get a decent practice recording I’ll post it too, so even if the NCTF doesn’t record or stream it you’ll be able to watch it later.

How to Flutter Tongue on Brass

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To be honest, I’m not sure how effective this will be for teaching brass players how to flutter tongue. If you came here looking for help learning to flutter tongue please leave a comment after trying this out and let us know if it helped.

Flutter tonguing is an effect that brass players are sometimes asked to play that provides a raspy or growling effect. I use it quite frequently when I’m playing plunger trombone solos. But many brass musicians have trouble with it and simply can’t do it.

The technique itself is, I feel, almost identical to rolling your “R’s,” something that is common with some languages like Spanish. I never had any trouble with this, so when it comes to teaching it I have been at a loss. But recently I happened to come across this YouTube video from the Breakthrough Spanish channel, teaching how to roll your “R’s.”

One of the takeaways I got from this video is how rolling your “R’s” is more difficult with a harder consonant before it. When we articulate notes on brass most of us will employ a “T” or “D” consonant to start the pitch, but if we’re articulating too hard on the beginning of that note it doesn’t allow the tongue the flexibility it needs to flutter. One key to learning how to flutter might be lightening up on the initial attack or trying it out with a breath attack.

I suspect that the “ara” trick explained in this video might also be very helpful for developing a good flutter tongue. Quite often I find that tweaking a playing technique away from the instrument and then transferring that skill to playing is a very effective practice approach.

If you can’t already flutter tongue and try this out, please come back and let us know in the comments how it worked for you.

Legit Pedagogy versus Jazz Pedagogy

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Note – This post was inspired by an essay that Brad Edward’s wrote over 10 years ago. In fact I had started writing up this one a while back, but never got around to finishing it and publishing it. As I was looking through some old drafts, I came across this one and decided it was time to finish it.

I want to start this post off plugging Brad Edwards’s blog post (Encoding Habits) that got me thinking about this particular topic. In Brad’s writeup he poses an interesting hypothetical question when confronted with a relatively young student who wants to begin working on orchestral etudes. He described some thoughts he had when considering if the student was ready.

 [I]f a high school player starts working on these excerpts without solid technique and possibly not a clear concept of “how it goes” musically, they will probably struggle with the excerpt.

Furthermore, if they learn that excerpt with bad habits, they can pull out the same music years later and BOOM those old bad habits are right there!  It’s as if the bad habits are literally encoded into the music.

Brad Edwards – Encoding Habits

Brad’s discussion that follows is worth reading, but the above quote struck me as familiar. While I do tend to focus my artistic efforts on jazz, I also love playing classical music and keep a foot in both worlds, both as a musician and a teacher. While attitudes have changed, there still are some caricatures of the “jazz” teacher versus the “classical” teacher when it comes to how to approach teaching.

How might we look hypothetically at Brad’s thought, but from the standpoint of a young jazz student?

If a high school player starts working on improvising over tunes without solid technique and musical understanding they will probably struggle with the tune.

Furthermore, if they learn that tune with bad habits, they can play over the same tune years later and those bad habits return.

There are two parts to this conundrum.

First, there is the issue of the student playing with poor technique. This is one of the reasons why I tend to isolate technique practice and separate it from musical practice. I know that this idea isn’t very popular with some players and teachers who prefer to teach everything through assignments of music, but making technique corrections can take years of practice. If there is a concern about playing mechanics limiting the student’s abilities then I prefer to address them through assignments of exercises. The exercises should be simple enough to describe and while they might be a challenge to play, the student’s attention should be focused on playing correctly, not playing musically. The idea here is that fixing playing technique separate from music will keep the student from having to split attention into both how he or she is playing and how expressive he or she is playing. Once the technique has been assimilated it will become the way the student always plays – because that’s what works. This won’t risk teaching an unmusical performance because we’re going to work on playing with expression too, just at a different time.

The other issue is the musical understanding. This one is conceptually a more difficult concept to work with, I think. Let me offer a personal example.

For years as a young jazz student I struggled with playing the last measure of Blue Monk correctly. If you’re not familiar with the tune, the last phrase is played twice, but offset by a beat the second time in an unusual way that is a huge part of Thelonious Monk’s compositional (and improvisational) style. While playing the head I was constantly turning around the beat on this last measure and coming in a beat late on the repeat. I was aware that I was doing this, but I had a lot of trouble feeling this phrase differently from the way I learned it. Making the correction involved replacing that mental concept with the correct one through a combination of listening to the tune a lot and adding a mental count of the remaining beats to how long I hold the final note (“2, 3, 4..” instead of intuiting that the final note of the phrase ends on the previous measure).

I happened to be jamming on this tune last night with some students and didn’t screw up that phrase. I have established a new habit where even though the phrase still feels funny to me (I think that was what Monk was going for anyway) I no longer worry about playing it wrong.

Another example is the changes are too unfamiliar or move by too fast for the student to comfortably negotiate. Much like addressing technique separate from music, I like to address improvisation through isolating a particular topic and removing other elements from the mix for a while. For example, if the student is having trouble making a ii-V-I in a particular key I would have the student practice just that phrase outside of the context of the entire tune. If the tempo is the issue, we slow down or even eliminate tempo altogether. If the student has trouble playing good note choices I might have him or her practice improvising by only playing chord tones.

When practicing in this manner, the only thing you’re going to focus on is your particular practice goal. Anything else that comes out and happens to sound bad is OK for now. Improvising is a little like juggling many balls. If you focus on one ball, other balls that have not yet become unconscious will be dropped. That’s OK, you’ve now identified other areas that you can work on at another time in the same manner. Fix one issue at a time.

Jugglers have an expression, “If you’re not dropping you’re not learning.” As musicians and music teachers we should take a similar approach. Lessons and practice sessions are about identifying mistakes and correcting them by focusing on what’s wrong and what should be happening. I don’t feel the issue is so much about the risk of encoding a bad habit that comes back years later, but rather the lack of identifying the mistakes and making the effort to isolate and correct them early on.

Skill Consolidation to Optimize Practice

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I’m always looking around for research based ideas on how we can improve our pedagogy and practice. I came across this article a while back, bookmarked it, and then promptly forgot about it. It concerns research published in 2016 called Motor Skills Are Strengthened through Reconsolidation, published in the journal Current Biology.

The key to learning a new motor skill – such as playing the piano or mastering a new sport – isn’t necessarily how many hours you spend practising, but the way you practise, according to a 2016 study.

Scientist Have Found a Way to Help You Learn New Skills Twice as Fast

No big surprise there, we already know that how you practice is more important than what you practice or how long you practice. What I’m curious about is what practice strategies had the most benefit.

Recent evidence has shown that memories can be modified through reconsolidation, in which previously consolidated memories can re-enter a temporary state of instability through retrieval, and in order to persist, undergo re-stabilization.

Motor Skills Are Strengthened through Reconsolidation

Reconsolidation is the process where memories, including how to perform motor skills, are recalled and changed as new knowledge is (or motor skill development, in this case) are added. In order to ensure this is happening the materials or skill being practiced are subtly altered in subsequent practice sessions. In the paper quoted above the researchers used a specially designed computer mouse that worked through squeezing it. Test subjects were asked to practice moving the cursor on a computer screen using this unfamiliar mouse. After six hours they were asked to repeat it, but one group of the subjects were asked to practice it using a subtly different squeezing technique. These subjects ended up outperforming the group that practiced the exact same mouse technique.

The key, according to the researchers, is to mix up the practice in subtle ways, not drastically. There also needs to be a six hour gap between the initial practice and the subtly altered practice in order to give the brain enough time to consolidate the original practice.

It’s also important to note that this study only looks at a particular skill, moving around a cursor with an unconventional mouse. It’s not a slam dunk that a similar approach will work for practicing a musical instrument, but there’s also no reason to believe that it won’t.

How can we subtly alter the materials we’re practicing to achieve the reconsolidating effect? The closest analogue to the experimental design I can think of would be to practice on a different instrument, not necessarily a different instrument type. For example, I tend to select which trombone I practice based on whether I’m practice jazz or classical music, but when working on something like lip breaks or fretting patterns for jazz improvisation they could be practiced on my large-bore orchestral trombone instead. Another similar idea would be to practice on a different brass instrument altogether, say working on mechanical corrections to your embouchure on an instrument with a completely different sized mouthpiece.

There are obviously some other ideas that could provide a similar benefit. What thoughts do you have on how we can subtly alter our practice in order to maximize the benefits?

Reinhardt’s Embouchure Types Explained (and some thoughts about the IVA type)

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YouTube user “Trumpet Thoughts” (Donovan) put together a video that describes the three basic embouchure types using Donald Reinhardt’s terminology. I found it to be a pretty good basic description of the three basic embouchure types.

If you followed my link above the video you’ll see one of my summaries of these three basic embouchure types. Reinhardt did distinguish embouchure types into more detailed categories than the three basic ones, but these three types are enough to describe any functioning embouchure. The only difference between some of Reinhardt’s less common embouchure types and the three basic types is often just the position of the musician’s jaw while at rest. For a little more detail about these embouchure variations you can see my Reinhardt/Elliott Embouchure Type chart.

For example, my own embouchure technically would be categorized as a Reinhardt IVA embouchure type. In other words, I have a low mouthpiece placement so the air stream is directed up, and I pull my lips and mouthpiece together down to ascend (which Donovan discusses as a “pivot” in his video). But the only difference between my embouchure and Donovan’s is that I play with a receded jaw position and have a lowered horn angle.

Horn angle can be a very personal embouchure characteristic, even between players of the same embouchure type. If you look around my web site you’ll see some examples of Very High Placement (Reinhardt IIIA) embouchure type players that have the typical straight out horn angle, but some play better with a receded jaw position and a lowered horn angle. Most Medium High Placement (Reinhardt IIIB) embouchure type players have a receded jaw position and a lowered horn angle, but there are also many who play best with a horn angle close to straight out.

Reinhardt felt the lowered horn angle on an upstream player to be important enough to warrant its own embouchure type. On one of his instructional tapes he described a IVA.

I almost think of a Type IVA hasn’t developed and [is a] Type IV that hasn’t gotten around to being a Type IV, if you know what I mean. In other words, the horn is on its way up but never got there, so to speak.

So You Think You’re a Type IV – Donald Reinhardt instructional tape

On that particular tape (and on others) Reinhardt discusses working with a student’s horn angle by having him or her practice with it too high and too low for periods of time, then “whittling” the horn angle in over time. And you can also certainly find downstream embouchure type players who have horn angles that are different from what is typical. To my reasoning, a Low Placement embouchure type with a lowered horn angle (Reinhardt IVA) is really no different conceptually and doesn’t really require any shift in pedagogy from standard Reinhardt type IVs. Nor does it seem to be that much different from a Very High Placement (Reinhardt IIIA) who plays better with a lowered horn angle.

Horn angle is a continuum. At what point does a Type IV become a IVA? With any student, regardless of embouchure type, I want to help the student work out their own idiosyncrasies, including, but not limited, to where their horn angle works best for any particular note. With similar horn angle variations found in all the embouchure types I don’t see a need to separate the upstream embouchure type performers according to their horn angle.