Handy tips

aphorisms and philosophical musings on the clarinet and life gathered through the years

Don Ross

1. Play in the keys? A sequin makes a dandy washer.

2. Keep going, when you do the work things happen that the work doesn’t account for.

3. Teachers are constantly tempted to create false complications. If the task is simple, why hire a genius?

4. So often, it’s not that the teachings are false, but so vague as to equally support many meanings, some of which are false.

5. It’s a long slow, difficult, uncertain process. Try to enjoy it.

6. Thinking you’re wrong when you’re right is just as big a mistake as thinking you’re right when you’re wrong.

7. If you think you’ve done it flawlessly it means you’re not in on the gag.

8. Relaxation, at its very best, is a goal, not a tool.

9. All the idiots in the world want to be better without being any different.

10. I owe a debt to those whose pose became my reality.

11. If it don’t work, it ain’t the right technique.

12. You want to have no-one notice that it’s perfect.

13. An hour of practice and an hour of weight training are worth five hours of practice.

14. There’s no such thing as being reliable most of the time.

15. The only function of everything up to now has been to get us here.

16. Right notes have: right pitch, right shape (articulation), right size (dynamic), right duration, right starting point.

17. To get results from hard work is itself a gift.

18. Knowing the truth is a hobby. To be a professional you have to be able to sell the truth.

19. There’s no point in saying you won’t play the game. The name of the game is “Getting on stage.”

20. It’s the quality of our notes that we are judged on.

21. Tiny crescendos-there’s a big difference between a speck of dust in your eye and no speck of dust in your eye.

22. The Maisonneuve maxim: there are two expressive tools, space and bulge.

23. It’s one thing to be deep, it’s another to make everything so complicated you can’t do it.

24. Mistrust solutions that involve a pulling back of your energy.

25. From Nathan Perelman (Leningrad conservatory) “Be superstitious: fear underworked material!”

26. The worst thing is to be the dimbulb who doesn’t get the joke. The next worst is to be the dimbulb who just got the joke.

27. People aren’t all jerks, but a well set-up project doesn’t depend on people not being jerks. That’s how Julius Caesar did it.

28. Performers are not judged by how original they are, but by how good they are. But good performers can sell the idea that they are original.

29. If it’s not giving the audience your soul, it’s not worth the twenty bucks.

30. If you can’t figure out which side is heavier, the reed’s not unbalanced.

31. You can’t heat a house by holding a match to the thermometer.

32. Mysticism is often more a sign of the weakness of language than it is of any mystery.

33. Your mouth tends to close as you run out of air. Effort should go into keeping it open.

34. Holding your mouth open can force your embouchure to compensate, poising it.

35. “Disappointment is enlightenment.”

36. Self-discipline can be fun if you can talk yourself into getting a rebellious feeling from it. It is non-conformist. “Look at me practicing scales, I’m an outlaw.”

37. There’s no such thing as an escape-proof conclusion.

38. In music we feel that other people feel what we feel, we feel a part of their feelings, that we do not feel in isolation. At a concert we feel that we feel together, together, with trained guys grappling with vibrating things to make it happen. Sell this.

39. Don’t discount the expressive power of steady time.

40. Early success rarely leads to innovation.

41. It’s OK to get mad at yourself. We drive ourselves nuts by being mad at ourselves and then topping that with feeling bad about being mad.

42. If you give too many directions success begins to depend on the practice of ignoring them.

43. Feeling unsympathetic? Does any character flaw account for that amount of damage?

44. Poise involves going ahead and flexing the muscles that you do need.

45. Teeth do most of the work. A virtuoso cannot, in fact, open a walnut with his lips.

46. A short note starts exactly like a long note, it just ends sooner.

47. Legato has more to do with there being no sag in the middle of the note than there being no bump at the start of it.

48. You can’t test a note before you commit air, any more than you can wait to see which plants grow before you water them.

49. Controlling sound by pulling air back is like controlling a horse by tying its feet together.

50. There are no intervals, only the quality of the two notes.

51. Legato fingers- tense the ones that aren’t moving enough so that the ones that are have a control. Michaelangelo cut away all the marble that didn’t look like David.

52. It takes no more skill to make your embouchure clarinet-shaped than it takes to make the water in a glass glass-shaped.

53. Just close your mouth. If that doesn’t give you the right contact point, move the clarinet, not your jaw.

54. Reeds are friendlier and happier if you finish the tip with 1200 sandpaper.

55. Reeds break in faster and last longer if you seal the butt ends with nail polish.

56. When you’re playing them, off-beats might not feel like the weak part of the beat.

57. There must be tension in the jaw for it to be stable. This isn’t biting, just because the fence is solid doesn’t mean it’s chasing the cow.

58. Is a wall passive? Your opinion might change depending on your velocity.

59. Getting the right sound creates the right psychological conditions because it requires them.

60. It’s not that I, personally, am so good, though I love to think so. It’s that the techniques work. The point is that it’s available to anybody.

61. The embouchure’s jobs are to control the size of the gap between the reed and mouthpiece (mostly the teeth’s job) and to hold the clarinet still (mostly the lip’s job). This is not rocket surgery.

62. Smarts are for telling the story, let’s not let it be for producing a basic sound.

63. Diaphragm control- maybe there are sword-fighter monks somewhere who control their diaphragms. Clarinet players only have to control their abdominal muscles.

64. The right pitch is the one everyone agrees on. The troublemakers are the ones who are scared to move and the ones who think they are the gatekeepers of the one and only true pitch.

65. Every chord is out of tune, it’s just a matter of how fast you fix it.

66. With pitch, there’s only one decision to make; you like it or you don’t like it. If you like it, great. If you don’t like your colleagues pitch, and you try to reach into their mouths to change them, they get all like, “stop doing that!”. If you decide to change yourself there are only two directions to go, the one that fixes it and the one that makes it easier to tell.

67. Change pitch by opening and closing your mouth. Don’t make it more complicated than that.

68. “The problems that don’t exist are the hardest to get rid of.” F.M. Alexander

69. “A painting is a thing which requires as much trickery, malice and vice as the perpetration of a crime; make counterfeits and add a touch of nature.” Edgar Degas

70. Does anyone think the Sea Monkeys scam depended on people not knowing what brine shrimp are? No one knows what brine shrimp are: it’s the artwork that brought in the dough.

71. Counting is getting the right amount of subdivisions in every note. Rhythm is how closely those subdivisions match each other.

72. Self-loathing makes self-criticism impossible.

73. If the tongue stops the reed, then we should start notes by pulling it.

74. If the tongue stops the reed, where it hits isn’t so critical. When it leaves is.

75. Fast tonguing is a series of pulls not pushes. To line up, pull your tongue when you move your fingers.

76. Nobody’s embouchure is too tight. Some peoples’ teeth are too close together.

77. Short notes happy, long notes sad. Is that an oversimplification?

78. Define terms by what you do. Cantabile=no taper inside notes. Dolce=slow changing contrasts. Then describe the effect in poetic terms.

79. Now people have enough information coming at them. Don’t sell more, sell that you’ll help them assimilate it more easily.

80. Finger accuracy and rhythm: taking control of where it happens gives you control over when it happens.

81. There’s no such thing as over-blowing, only under-resisting.

82. To prevent your head from rotating back, imagine a beam of light coming out of the top of it.

83. Your body rotates outward when you inhale, inward when you blow. Helping that will help with focus of sound, embouchure and oral cavity and help with continuity of support and legato.

84. Each finger motion should be a mature and fully completed stroke. Go all the way to the clarinet.

85. In slow practice the finger moves themselves should be fast with stops and poses in between them. Like Bruce Lee.

86. Slow practice gives you time to eliminate the hesitations and indecisions in the moves.

87. Sidney Bechet didn’t tour Switzerland until after Stravinsky wrote the solo pieces. Sometimes the truth isn’t all that useful.

88. Air support in fast passages: could you keep pedaling a bike while tapping on the handle bars?

89. Paul Mather, “Some would say the glass is all empty, others would say it’s none full.”

90. Change isn’t the virtue, improvement is.

91. I’m a firm believer in redundancy in my work. I like it. I think it’s good.

92. The clarinet will balance on your thumb better if you twist the reed 2mm left of center.

93. Anyone who ever started a sentence with “I wish there was a piece that…” has the impulse to be a composer.

94. Alan Hacker, “Caring for other musicians, retaining integrity and playing with unaffected expression is the only example.” from a letter dated July 25, 1999.

95. When only one finger is closing a hole, it suddenly has to support the weight of your whole hand. Give it the strength to succeed.

96. If the finger buckles it’s as if the holes moved.

97. Knuckles buckle? Hell’s bells!

98. The fastest innovation puts you in a whole new field. It then ceases to lead the old field.

99. Stability is a terrific athletic goal; don’t let it become your artistic goal.

100. Often our greatest strengths are former handicaps.

101. Part of artistry is the feeling that you can…almost…do that big wonderful thing.

102. Just think of all the things that Beethoven, Bach and Mozart almost wrote, but just…couldn’t…quite…

103. Don’t pull your lower lip into your mouth, just compress it. The clarinet will put what it needs over your teeth. If you pull it in you lose all leverage.

104. The biggest part of clarinet sound is determined by the size of the gap between the reed and the mouthpiece.

105. Gap too big: spread, honky, flat.

106. Gap too small: muffled, choked, sharp.

107. If your contact point is where the reed first leaves the mouthpiece, the smallest move of your teeth has a big effect on the size of the gap. A small motion at the middle of the teeter-totter makes a big difference at the end.

108. This also means that the tiniest motion of the clarinet changes the gap. That’s why it’s so important for your lips to hold the clarinet still.

109. Some players spend their whole careers 1/10 of a millimeter away from sounding good.

110. If the gap is big the reed the reed has a farther trip to make, so it can’t make as many trips in a second. The frequency is lower and so is the pitch.

111. If the gap is small the reed has a shorter trip to make, so it can make more trips in a second. The frequency is higher and so is the pitch.

112. Fine tuning the sound is the other reason why we flex our lips. Denser lips dampen out the high frequencies. Now you can blow as hard as you want.

113. Yeah, it also gives you a better air seal.

114. “Drop your jaw” and “Relax your embouchure” are contradictory directions.

115. Any expression of sudden emotion involves opening your mouth. Clarinet players have to learn how to make big feeling without moving their teeth. An unnatural, learned behavior.

116. There is nothing natural about playing the clarinet; it’s a magical artifice.

117. To refuse to make value judgments is not benign; it’s hostile. It raises bad to equal good.

118. Bike philosophy: if you think there’s no wind, you’re riding with the wind.

119. Legato: don’t move your fingers from a standing start.

120. It’s not that the tongue stroke has to be so light, it just shouldn’t penetrate so far as to bend the reed into the gap.

121. Quotes from bad teachers: “How come that guy gets all the good students?” or even better, and I swear to God true: “It’s not my fault they can’t play. They couldn’t play when they came to me!”

122. Playing a scale or study once is like lifting one weight.

123. Crap is not permanent, though it may be perpetual.

124. No rhythm is going to be more accurate than your half notes are.

125. If your heart doesn’t get broken from time to time, you aren’t using it.

126. Why we flatten the backs of reeds: when a shape of the mouthpiece window bulges out of the reed, it gets caught in the window 100s of time a second. We feel the friction. (It bulges because the part that strikes the rails gets compressed.)

127. Sometimes hanging onto things is more wasteful than frugal.

128. If you try to hold your position, the world grows past you.

129. A dysfunctional orchestra becomes a whole team of goalies.

130. Speed: no bounce in fingers.

131. Smoothness is speed.

132. Some solace for kaks: the only way to find out where the boundaries are is to encounter them.

133. An existentialist manifesto: “Well the weather inside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful. And since we’ve no place to go, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”

134. You could never, in a thousand lifetimes, do all the work that needs to be done. We need each other.

135. To pretend to be stupid is malicious.

136. Rigid dogma can only be supported by pretending to be stupid.

137. The presence of stupidity causes a lot more problems than any absence of intelligence.

138. It’s not that you have to keep your fingers close, just keep them curved when you lift them…they’ll stay close by themselves.

139. If there wasn’t a disconnect, there’d be nothing to do.

140. Those who are most aware of the disconnect are most compelled to do.

141. Updated ending…Romeo: Dude! That’s messed up! (exit stage right)

142. Pitch on throat tones is more volatile because the gap is a bigger fraction of the total length.

143. Players with sharp throat tones actually have a too small gap everywhere, it just shows up more there.

144. If your lips aren’t holding the horn still your teeth will always offer to. If your teeth are doing that job they’ll make the gap too small. They’re enablers.

145. If the gap is smaller you don’t have to create as strong a vacuum inside the mouthpiece to suck the reed shut. That is, you can get a sound (albeit sharp and muffled) with less air. The devil will always offer this alternative.

146. “God made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.” Eric Liddell

147. Mediocre powerbrokers create potential by leaving a vacuum behind them.

148. Why is it possible to work too hard and not hard enough at the same time?

149. We breathe together by first holding our breaths together. That’s what that little pause is.

150. Your sound is your mantra.

151. Serialism is a method for preventing collisions in heavy traffic.

152. It can never be stolen, it can only be accepted.

153. The act of faith is: if you enter the void, you’ll find it populated.

154. The extreme of strong playing is elegant playing.

155. “Sound better” isn’t a thing to do. You need a thing to do.

156. There may not be any people who can’t teach you anything, but there are some who don’t.

157. Not taking breaks is a vice.

158. After ten performances, under-rehearsed material is still under-rehearsed.

159. A good inhale is mostly a matter of letting your abs go. The universe wants you to have air.

160. Song title “You can’t mend a broken jewel case”.

161. Practice making your notes begin now.

162. Nothing is just a gig, there are always people involved.

163. Here’s a tip: don’t play louder than the contractor.

164. The law of stuff: half the stuff you have is crap. Get rid of that stuff and half the stuff you have will be crap. Don’t know how long that keeps up.

165. I find I have to practice every day, or else I don’t.

166. If your focus is everywhere, it isn’t focus.

167. The problem with self-promotion is that people tend to interpret it as self-promotion.

168. The material generates new material. The new material revises the old material. The revised old material generates new new material. Uh-oh, here comes show time!

169. Try to blend in with the non-conformists.

170. Remember, there’s no “I” in pantball.

171. "Punk bands go to extremes to please." What next?

172. Anything billed as "gourmet" probably isn't...

173. You don’t look at a good painting, you watch it like a movie.

174. It isn't that you shouldn't be bitter, you probably should be bitter; it's just that it doesn't get you anything.

175. Some things hurt, therefore you shouldn't do them. Other things hurt, therefore you should do them anyway. Sorting it out, sorting it out, sorting it out...

176. Some players use the word “right” instead of the word “perfect”.

177. Don’t worry about delivering product before it’s ready, it’s never ready.

178. “When man wanted to make a machine that could walk, he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg.” Guillaume Appolinaire.

179. “Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.” Guillaume Appolinaire.

180. Embrace feeling dumb. It’s the first step in being smart.

181. Engage smartation!

182. If we can’t be a threat to the devil, we can at least be a nuisance.

183. Once you’re specific about what you don’t know, you almost know.

184. You need to add a little noise to make lustre out of glare.

185. The more you study, the more specific your intuition becomes.

186. Technique check: are you lifting fingers with the same energy you're striking? Our hands did not evolve to do that. It takes extra will to pop fingers up.

187. “I have to go through a whole box of reeds to find one that works!” Really? And how many eggs do you open looking for one with an omelet inside?

188. To avoid the pain of breaking in reeds, try them on a closer mouthpiece at first.

189. In uneven scales some notes are in time. Those are you. Figure out why the others are delayed.

190. Pooch while vectoring.

191. Just like a sharp knife is safer that a dull one, a fast tongue stroke in legato tonguing is safer than a slow one.

192. The feeling of frustration is how your body decides where to allocate resources. It’s part of the process, allow it to do its work with grace.

193. #17 is “To get results from hard work is itself a gift.” Now we probably have to add “and a privilege”.

194. Once you’ve learned the notes, slow practicing doesn’t do anything unless you’re discovering eccentricities in your movements that aren’t distinguishable at faster speeds.

195. If a student listens to the instruction and applies will, but still gets a negative result, the teaching is wrong, not the student.

196. There’s a human reflex where if you snap your jaws open, your abs move. I exploit this for fast breaths. If I have none time I don’t take a breath, I just snap my jaw open and shut and resume blowing. I’m still surprised to find myself full of air. Takes none time.

197. I know excellent players who really believe that if they’re the only ones in the group playing the right pitch: they win!

198. In music, and probably other things too, no decision you can make is as bad as hesitating.

199. In practicing, like sculpting, your first cut won’t look like much.

200. At its heart, stupidity is labeling something as true which you know to be false.

201. You can’t play a clarinet in tune, but you can play your sinuses in tune.

202. On my crankiest days I feel like “if you aren’t flinging your soul into the void on every note, shut up and get out of the way.” Actually, it’s pretty much how I feel on cheerful days, too…

203. Some teachers make a bugaboo out of biting. It’s like heat; too much is bad, sure, but….

204. To play faster, have your notes not last as long. That’s all a faster tempo is. It doesn’t take a different motion so much as a sooner one.

205. "Breathe from the diaphragm" is like "blue in colour".

206. Electrons don't move from from one energy level to another. They cease to exist at one level and simultaneously begin existing at another. A perfect analogy of finger motion.

207. There are two conditions for each hole: open and closed. I have no sensation of a transitional phase; there is no journey. I teleport my fingers between the two positions. Takes none time. Most of the time my fingers are at rest waiting for the next move...for a faster tempo I reduce the waiting time. The move is the same: instantaneous.

208. To make a scissor motion with the first two fingers on the left hand you flex the little muscle on the side of the hand just below third knuckle (first dorsal interosseous muscle for you geeks). I never flex that muscle when I'm playing clarinet. All motion to the throat keys is done by rotating the wrist, using much stronger muscles. The shape of the hand stays the same, so it rotates back to exactly the place it left.

209. Your internal organs aren't attached to anything but their fluid supply tubes and nerves. When you relax your abs they slither and slide down to the bottom of your abdominal cavity, allowing your diaphragm to do what it is already trying to do without your will: move down. Blowing is squorshing your organs back up into your ribcage like toothpaste. Gross!

210. As air leaves your lungs they get smaller. It's actually fair to say that you get smaller. To keep the pressure the same on the air you have to continually shorten your abs. Imagine rubber bands stretched between your hands. As you move your hands closer you have to shorten the rubber bands to keep the tension the same. That's what they mean by things like spinning the air or following through with your support. For me it's more fun to say "ride your air like a dolphin!"