Category: MY MUSIC

Mouthpiece Deprivation, and the Saxo-fooooon, and Making Good Art

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UPDATE (6 July 2013): Woohoo! My Barone mouthpiece arrived in time to be carried back to me by my friends! Here’s the snap my friend sent me: I’m excited to get it on the horn and start getting a feel for it! Original Post: So, a week or so ago I screwed up my tenor sax mouthpiece. I was having some problems, and there was a persistent, weird problem I was seeing–my reeds weren’t really sealing, and I was seeing a weird moisture buildup on the table of the mouthpiece, where no moisture should have been going. It was happening …

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On My Practicing: An Update

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Original Post (updated at end of post): I have stopped posting here regularly about what’s going on with my return to playing the saxophone (because my practice log notebook, though no longer daily, is publicly available to anyone interested), but I’m in a contemplative mood about it all now, so I figured I’d post. In exciting news, the overtone exercises I’ve been doing at the advice of Phil Barone had been paying off. I really am a lot happier with my tone than I have ever been, and I’m getting a richer sound. Not only that, but I’m getting pretty …

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Out from the Sinews

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In a book I read long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the Christopher Dewdney wrote in his book of poetry The Radiant Inventory about neurology, using the most brilliantly poetical and beautiful language. He wrote about all kinds of things, of course: books of poetry are like that. But among the things he discussed in the book was the neurobiology of break-ups, and why they are so difficult. I can’t quote the book, or even paraphrase it in any way I’d regard as trustworthy–my copy is somewhere in that other galaxy where I read it, in a box, floating …

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Practice Notes Shared at Evernote

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One of the things that has been surprising about moving to a new computer is being able to access social network/media services so much better than I could in the past. While my first instinct is to blog everything as a way of putting information into accessible storage, it’s not really the most efficient way to do everything. So I’ve been exploring, and one of the services I’ve found to serve a purpose I needed is Evernote. While I don’t think posting about my music practice here is a terrible idea–and I will be posting sometimes as part of my …

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Morosco Exercise, And Moving Forward

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So, a little digging reveals the Victor Morosco exercise that Phil Barone described to me has been posted online with more detailed explanation. (Presumably posted by another of Morosco’s students?) Or, at least, it’s an exercise that very, very closely resembles the one Phil reccomended to me, and which seems to teach the same essential things. Since I’ve only been doing the Morosco exercise a couple of days, I can see what I’ve been doing wrong in terms of the articulations, and it helps me understand parts of the exercise I didn’t get from Phil’s explanation. It’s also pretty in …

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