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Hey, here's your Weekly Rx. It's time to face the music.
Words Worth Keeping
"You can't just tap on one gauge and say, 'I'm going to work only on this one thing,' because you have to look at it in the context of all the other moving parts."
— Me, to a client this week.
Real digging. Real effort. No idea if it's the right yard.
This Week
A client played for me this week and wanted to talk about intonation. Fair. It's the thing that will kill you at an audition every time, and there's no getting around it.
It wasn't an audition. There was no committee. It was just me on a call. Their heart rate jumped anyway.
Here's what I didn't do. I didn't hand them a drone and an exercise. They've done the drone. They've done the exercises. They've been told everything there is to be told about intonation.
I hear that sentence a lot. The one that usually comes after it, out loud or not, is: maybe it's just me.
Instead I asked which problem they actually had. Because "my intonation is bad" isn't a diagnosis. It's a symptom, and it can mean three completely different things.
- One. You can't hear when you're out of tune.
- Two. You can hear it, but you don't know how to fix it.
- Three. You know exactly where the note is, you know exactly how to get there, and it falls apart under pressure.
They picked three.
Another intonation lesson wasn't going to help.
Turns out it wasn't a pitch problem at all. It was a playing-under-pressure problem. That's what their elevated heart rate was telling us. And every hour spent on the first two fixes was an hour spent repairing something that wasn't broken.
The Prescription
Most of us run this backwards. We hear a problem, grab the most familiar fix, and go. Drone. Slow practice. Another lesson. Then a fifth teacher with a fifth opinion, and now everyone's telling you something different and you're in a tailspin.
Here's the trap. Working on the wrong problem still feels like practice. You're in the room, you're sweating, you're putting in the hours. Nothing lights up to tell you it's the wrong problem. So you can stay busy for months and never get better, and the whole time it feels like you're doing everything right.
It's a dog digging up the backyard for a bone it buried. The digging is real. The effort is real. The hole gets deeper every day. And if it's the wrong yard, that bone is never coming up. Period. The bone is out there somewhere. Just not where you're digging.
The worst part isn't the lost hours. It's what you start to believe about yourself when honest work stops paying off.
Maybe I'm just a bad dog. Maybe I'll never find that bone. |
That's not laziness, and it's not a talent problem. It's a diagnosis problem, and I've made it myself. I practiced a hard passage slowly, sure that was the fix. It was clean at half speed and a mess at tempo, because slow and fast aren't the same motion. Wrong yard.
Name the problem before you fix it. |
Here's the quick test. If it's out of tune when you're alone in the room, you're in one or two. If it's fine alone and falls apart the second someone's listening, you're in three.
Can't hear it? Train the ear. A trombonist I knew from Boston couldn't tell sharp from flat, on an instrument that's basically one big tuning slide. Nobody would have blamed him for deciding he wasn't built for it. He didn't. He trained himself into a phenomenal player. Can hear it, but can't fix it? That's a technique problem, and a good teacher, a drone, and a method will get you there.
Know the fix, can't do it under pressure? Put the drone down. Play for people, as often as you can stand it. Record every run and listen back slowly until you find the pattern in where it goes out. I'd bet it's the same spots every time, and that's the thing you fix.
If you've been doing the work for a long time and it isn't moving, I'm not going to tell you to work harder. I'm going to ask you which problem you have. There's a good chance the answer feels like relief.
The short version:
- "My intonation is bad" is a symptom, not a diagnosis. It means one of three things.
- Can't hear it? Train the ear. Can hear it, can't fix it? Technique. Know the fix, lose it under pressure? Play for people and record.
- The test: fine alone, falls apart when someone's listening? You're in three.
- The wrong fix feels exactly like the right one while you're doing it. That's what makes it dangerous.
Working on the wrong problem still feels like practice.
Hit reply and tell me which of the three you're in. Be honest. The one you wish you were in doesn't count.
Happy practicing,
Chris @ Honesty Pill Coaching
P.S. Problem three has a cure, and it isn't a drone. It's playing for people, over and over, until the pressure stops being news. That's exactly what the Honesty Pill Audition Community is for: Monday goals, Friday wins, and a monthly Hot Seat where I review real playing live. Scroll down. It's free for 30 days.
Something land? Something miss? Hit reply. I read them.
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