Posted by: David
In the first article we reviewed the basics of how wind instruments produce their notes, and the fundamental rule: “Warm up before tune up”.
So now you’ve warmed up and the time comes to play your tuning note along with your section colleagues. How do you feel? Confident? Tentative? Not sure? Will I be ‘in’? What if I’m the one who is ‘out’…?
Well, you won’t know until you play The Note.
But don’t worry. Try to play a nice strong ‘centred’ note, with a clean strike and a good tone. A nice bold mezzo-forte semibreve. Play it just like you would if that Note came along in a piece of music. Don’t be shy. Play. Or think about how you would if you were practising at home. Try for the best sounding note that you can possibly produce.
Why am I emphasising this so much? Well, if we are going to adjust our tuning, we need to start from a firm base. If we play a weak, tentative note, we won’t be able to tell whether we are sharp or flat. And next time we play it, it will be different anyway! Everyone has a natural or ‘centred’ way of playing – and that’s the note we need to hear when we are tuning up.
The fact is that good tone and good intonation are inextricably linked. Good tone production comes from developing a good, consistent embouchure, and learning to ‘support’ our notes with good breathing from the diaphragm. That’s a whole other topic, but it will suffice here to say that a good proportion of our personal practice should be playing long notes and listening carefully for a full and consistent tone. Then when we come to play our tuning note in the band it will be a reliable, predictable and ‘centred’ note.
Another good way to ensure we play a nice centred note is to not just play the tuning note straight away, but to play a short scale, ending on the tuning note. So if we are tuning to, say, a written G, it is better to play, say, D, E, F sharp and end up on the G. That will give a G which is much more ‘normal’ for you, with your ‘natural’ embouchure.
That is why some of our band tuning exercises are written like that – an ascending pattern ending up on a sustained note. We are listening to the tuning of the sustained note; the rising scale is just a way of getting there.
So remember, when we play The Note, focus on making a clean strike, a good tone and a confident ‘centred’ note.
Next time we’ll move on to discerning whether we are ‘in’ or ‘out’, and what to do about it.
In the mean time, as always, comments or questions are welcome.
