Degree of Difficulty
Here’s another tip that I wish I had figured out earlier- if you want a great performance, make what you practice harder than what you want to perform. There are many sports examples- some elite basketball players do shooting drills with an extra insert on the rim so that the opening to the basket is smaller than regulation, so that when it comes to game time they have a little more margin of error. Many baseball hitters work with weighted bats, and so on. As musicians, in any style, we can make this work for us.
This approach is especially useful with sticky technical passages. Let me give specific ways to work with this idea, using some excerpts from music I’ve been dealing with:
One piece I’ve performed multiple times it the Creston Sonata for Alto Saxophone, with, er, varying degrees of success. The first movement has a few really tricky technical passages at MM 126, and even after practicing to that speed, I was inconsistent. If I were to approach that piece now, I would make my goal to play that technical stuff at MM 140, a little but faster than where I intend to perform it. That way, 126 feels easy. (Or at least easier. I don’t think that piece will ever feel easy to me.)
Earlier this year a big band I coach played the Mingus/Joni Mitchell classic “Dry Cleaner From Des Moines”. On the original recording, Jaco Pastorius plays this unbelievable lick into the top of several choruses. In this arrangement, the saxophones have a version of Jaco’s lick:
As you can see it’s a funky ascending chromatic pattern- up a tritone, then a fourth, then up a half step, down a fourth, down a tritone and so forth. When I practice this, I just keep going, then do the same thing with the pattern descending:
3. Play a hard lick backwards. Back to the Creston. In the third movement, there’s another nasty 16th note lick that gives me trouble to this day:
It’s not a complicated pattern- a Bb major scale in a descending pattern. But it lays a little funny on saxophone, and it gave me fits! What I would do now, is play it as written, but also backwards (in retrograde, if you want to be nerdy):
And, of course, you could also string the original and the exercise together:
I can assure you, if you nail this, this section of the Creston will feel like cake. And perhaps more importantly, you are building skills that are transferrable. You will probably see other tricky licks in Bb in other music, and you have “banked” this information in your fingers and your brain. There are many more ways to apply this, but using this idea can be a game changer.