Foundations

In band, we are playing Stars and Stripes Forever for one of our concerts. Though it's mostly quite easy for me, there is this one part where all the intervals (difference in pitch between two notes) are octaves. This poses a big problem for the clarinet as an octave is not the best interval for the instrument. The only reason I could play it well after two to three wacks at it is that I practiced all the intervals of most scales (the Do-Re-Me-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do) already.

Standard in every serious clarinet student repertoire is the Baermann's methods, especially the 3rd one (Foundation Studies). The moment you open up the thick book, you'll notice that it is all scales and intervals of the scales. For any player, scales are boring! Practicing actual music is so much more fun isn't it? But the problem is that actual music don't bring the player much technical skills required to advance one's musical talents. People say practice brings perfection, but wrong practice brings failure.

Spending one third of all my practice time on the Baermann book is quite laborious I can say, but it will bring many advantages. The first and foremost is the muscle memory associated with playing scales and intervals. To put music into simplest terms, they are all scales and intervals. Having muscle memory of the building blocks of music allows the player to focus more on the musicality instead of the fingerings.

The next advantage of practicing scales is that it improves the tone of the player. There's a "bad note" on every wind instrument that either sounds horrible or is terribly out of tune. Playing notes that note repeatedly, like in a scale book, will greatly improve the tone of that note. Since you are playing that one notes repeatedly in context, starting on different notes and landing on the "bad note" or starting on the "bad notes" and landing on another note, the Foundation book helps the player "bond" with their instruments better, creating a more full player with more control over tone and timbre of his or her instrument.

The last benefit of a great foundation is not from music, rather math. I took the AIME (American Invitational Mathematics Examination) last Tuesday (?) and missed (relatively) easy problems with simple foundations. Now I'm scrambling to play catch-up by reading all those Art Of Problem Solving books that I should had read and done years ago.

So what that this mean? For all you clarinet players out there, get the Foundation Studies book and start playing out of it daily. For all you mathletes, get the Arts of Problem Solving books and start going through the chapters. For all you athletes, start running or weightlifting like heck. Without a good foundation, one cannot build a skyscraper.

-runiteking1

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