THE TWO TYPES OF PRACTICE THAT TRANSFORM YOUR CLARINET PERFORMANCES
Transcript - Clarinet Ninja Podcast
It was a long time ago, I would say in the early 1990s, that I learned what can happen if you don't prepare for a performance properly. I had practiced what I thought was properly, and I still stand by the fact that I was probably very capable of playing what I was trying to perform that day. But the performance didn't go so well. And I remember, there was, like, a wall of people in front of me. It was a very interesting auditorium. And I did not play my best. I remember the very visceral feeling of, "This will never happen again." Because it was embarrassing. It was upsetting. It was disappointing. It very much felt like all the work that I had put in didn't count. And in the ensuing years, there's been a lot of years since then, I've been researching, figuring out, and test-driving a lot of things that will make your performances better because it's made my performances better. I know this from real life experience.
Welcome to the Clarinet Ninja Podcast. My name is Jay Hassler. As always, I'm doing my best to bring you the finest in clarinet information and entertainment. Today, we're doing information/education/practice skills. And that doesn't really sound that exciting, but stick with me, because the results, the outcome is going to be quite exciting. And that is going to be unlocking your ability to give your best performance, and that is something that we're all looking to do, and it can be elusive. But we're gonna take a little bit of the mystery away from it. We're not gonna use magic. We're gonna use science, we're gonna use strategy, and we're gonna use intentional practice to make that happen, a very specific kind of intentional practice that you've not heard me talk about before, because up until this moment, I haven't shared it. Not out of withholding something from you. I just never thought of it. But here it is.
I'm gonna talk about 2 very specific kind of modes of practice, and there's lots of different kinds of practice that can be broken down within these 2 buckets, these 2 umbrellas, these 2 ideas. But we're gonna look at Practice Practice. That's getting better at the clarinet, getting better at a piece, skill development. And we're gonna look at Practice Performance, which does not build your skill on the instrument. It builds your skill giving your best performance with the skills you have cultivated and developed in your Practice Practice.
A lot of times, we go to a concert, and we see somebody walk on stage and give what seems like an effortless performance. And I've seen it from a lot of people. Just to name a few, Sabina Miner, Ricardo Morales, Anthony McGill, Julian Bliss, and countless other people. And it seems really easy for them. But there's more to it than that, and I can't speak to their experience. I can't speak to what they say about it, but there is a way in which preparing for a performance has more to do than just learning the piece. And let's get into that.
Going back to the '90s, when I had my most memorable disastrous performance, it had all the trappings of what was gonna be successful. In retrospect, I look back on it, and I think, "I missed this important part of Practice Performance." And it's just because I simply didn't know what it was, and I didn't have the experience to know what to do. And I went through looking at my own life, what I had available to me in my own mind in terms of strategies and ideas to work on that. And I talked to a lot of people, asked a lot of questions. There was no internet at that point, remember? And one of the things I was pointed to was sports psychology, you know, The Inner Game of Tennis, even that one about the motorcycles, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. That's not sports, but you get what I'm saying. Some pretty varied places to go to find any information about finding your peak performance.
Subsequently, there's been a lot of research, some really wonderful people that have looked into this specific to musicians. And 2 of them, I have found to be incredibly resonant with me. One, you've heard on this podcast before, Dr. Molly Gebrian. She's written a book, Learn Faster, Perform Better. It is really the most important book I have read in terms of cultivating skill on the instrument and a solid, confident performance when the time comes. The other person who's given us a wealth of incredible material and continues to do so is Noa Kageyama. Everything that they've done, I'm gonna have links to them, so that you can access everything that they have put out in the world. It is all worth your time.
The other thing I'm gonna leave links to, because what he puts out in the world is really great, is the Clarinet Ninja, because when learning clarinet and learning the skills to perform well on the clarinet, there's really no place finer than the Clarinet Ninja Dojo. And I want you to know what it is, and I want you to have access to it. And I want you to very seriously consider joining me and taking this journey, taking your clarinet journey with me alongside you. It is something that has become the most important part of my life, is working with adults who want to learn how to play the clarinet better, more confidently, more successfully, and have the outcomes and the performances that they wanna have.
Speaking of Dr. Molly Gebrian, let's talk about some things that she thinks are really important, and I think they're important too. And that is going in with an understanding of ourselves and what our practicing is actually doing. We have to practice in a way that has an understanding that if we play something, and we don't play it correctly, if we play a wrong note, we play a wrong rhythm, our brain and our fingers receive that information the same way as if we played it exactly right. She talks about this concept called overlearning. And it's, you know, a, this kind of a fancy word, and scientists will do that kind of stuff. But what the point she's making is a point that's, I think, pretty logical just on its face, and I don't think anybody would argue with it if we just kind of look at the idea: if you play something right a thousand times and wrong 0 times, you've really stacked the odds of playing it properly to your advantage. And that's a really, really important thing to remember. Obvious, it's kind of an obvious thing to see, but in practice, in our Practice Practice, it's very important that we go into everything mindfully and intentionally because that is one of the things that will build our memories, our muscle memories, our auditory memories in a way that's gonna be durable, that's gonna stand up when the pressure's on.
Because we gotta think about this. When the pressure is on, if it's a big audience, maybe a small audience, in some ways, a small audience is even more intimidating than the big audience because it's so much more personal. That aside, let's look into strategies about how to mindfully and intentionally get the most out of our Practice Practice.
The number one thing you can do when you're practicing is eliminate distractions. That can be tough to do, and it's gotten harder to do with our cellphone next to us. If you are not using your phone as a metronome, if you're not using your phone as a tuner, put it away. Put it on do not disturb. If you are using it as a metronome or a tuner, put it on do not disturb. Maybe hack off the wireless, you know, no internet, no cellular service, so your phone is just the tool you want it to be, which is a metronome or a tuner. It is very dangerous to have distractions such as that right on our stand, which is why, as I sit here, I can see 6 metronomes, I can see 3 tuners, none of which are my phone. And part of the reason I do that is because I'm weak, and my phone will distract me.
Another thing that we can do in the nuts and bolts, I'm not gonna get too into specific practice ideas, but just general ideas that there's lots of different techniques and ways to do them, but variable practice. Now, variable practice means you don't practice everything in exactly the same way. You don't say, "Okay, I'm going to recreate this exact thing." Because one of the things that will happen in a performance is the context is so much different. You can't control the temperature. Maybe you're standing when you usually practice sitting. Maybe the tempo gets out of control. Maybe it's too fast, maybe it's too slow. Maybe, you know, your pianist wants to play their own speed or their own volume. There's all sorts of things that can happen that are different. And if you're locked into one particular way, that's gonna inhibit your performance. But even before that, in our Practice Practice, it's going to actually slow you down from learning the piece because our brain wants puzzles, it wants challenges. And we gotta give it to our brain.
There's a great online piano teacher named Ashley Young, and she talks about our mind having puzzles it needs to solve. And the more puzzles you can give your brain about the piece that you're working on, the more your brain is going to retain that information. Oh, and by the way, there's gonna be a PDF that you can get that has a lot of this information to remind you and some strategies to use to help you implement some of these ideas into your practice today. So, don't hesitate to click on that link, go to my website, it'll take you right there, and you can get this stuff for free.
I'm gonna tell you the most powerful kind of general practice strategy you can use, and that is spaced repetition. That's what Molly Gebrian calls it. I called it spaced recall because that's what my 10th grade chemistry teacher, Roy Timmerick, called it. And it's this idea that if you want to retain information, the amount of space in between the iterations of that memory, and in the case of clarinet, that skill, really helps solidify it in our long-term memory. So my suggestion, what I do in my practice frequently, if I'm working on something, something's got me, I can't, it's not quite as consistent as I want, it's not as clean as I want, it's not as fast as I want, whatever it is, I'll practice that early on in my practice session and then I will review it at the end.
The important thing about this review is that you remember the first time you repeat this is the time that's gonna give you the most bang for your buck in terms of long-term memory and control to replicate your best playing. If you can do your best playing on this first time in the spaced repetition, it's gonna give you the most impact. So just bear that in mind, because as soon as you play it one time, that's the most important time and if you can get it right in that moment, that's going to help your skills. I just repeated myself, but it's important and I really want you to get this. Because if you play it a second time, you're not replicating the performance situation because our performance happens once and this is your second time, so you're not practicing the skill that is gonna suit you when it comes time to perform.
So a lot of these things and these ways that we practice in our Practice Practice will benefit our Practice Performance later on, which we're gonna talk about in just a minute. All right, so we can set ourselves up in the first kind of practice for the second kind of practice, and we owe it to ourselves because time is money, right? Am I right, my friend? So, like, we gotta make sure we use our time as well as we can and that's gonna give us a lot.
The next thing that's really important is to recognize quality of practice beats quantity of practice every single time. Because again, our mind, our fingers are taking information in. If it's not high-quality information, it's not gonna turn into high-quality skill. So as frustrating as it can seem sometimes, focus on the quality of the practice you're doing, not the quantity. Because it can certainly feel good, "I practiced for 4 hours." Yeah, it feels good, but was it worth your time? And it's difficult, particularly when maybe you don't have that much time. Has that ever happened to you, where you don't really feel like you have enough time? A lot of our time can be kind of wasted if we're not practicing in a high-quality way.
These are things that we work on in the Clarinet Ninja Dojo, and that's something that is the magic of a course that you can sign up for that isn't just a course, that's not guided by somebody. Because what the Ninja Dojo is, is recorded support materials with meetings as a group with me to really refine these practice skills, because they can be challenging to cultivate on your own. There's no doubt about that. And it took me a long time to cultivate these practice skills because I didn't necessarily have somebody sitting close, metaphorically speaking, to me, really helping me understand and really showing me how to do it. Because I've seen some really, really incredible results. Every week, I sit down and I hear people do things they couldn't do a week ago, 2 weeks ago, 3 weeks ago. They can do them now and then that builds upon itself so that their improvement starts to exponentially get better. It's incredible to see and I want you to be a part of it. Sales pitch over.
What you can do right now is use Molly Gebrian's idea of red, yellow, green, and that's, if you take a Post-It note, and I suppose they don't actually literally have to be red, yellow, and green, but you have to have them graded. Green means I got this. Yellow means, you know, I think I got it. Red means I don't got it. And then that tells you where your practice time should be spent. All too often, we understandably enjoy playing things that we're good at. So we spend a lot of time on the green. The green doesn't need us. The green's ready to go. It's the other ones that need us, particularly the red.
So if you practice those spots rather than playing the whole piece, that's a Practice Performance technique, not a Practice Practice technique. So we're gonna practice the spots that we really need and the way I talk about it in the dojo is to say, you know, you build it out because what we need to do in those spots that are difficult is get that spot even down to what interval is hard. If there maybe is just 2 or 3 notes in the course of this 2 or 3 measures that are really the problem, if you can isolate those, identify them, isolate them in practice and then build out from there because I think everybody knows this feeling where there's the spot that you've practiced, you know it, and oftentimes, and I know this has happened to me and it always irritates me, I play the hard spot, yes, and then I take my eye off the ball and one of the spots that was green, tank job, right? Things, the wheels fall off in a spot where they never have before because I just had this experience of really feeling elated that my practice paid off.
And so my suggestion always is practice the runway to get to the hard spot and then practice a little bit after the hard spot so you have that chunk that is the hard spot but you've got the sides of it all built out too so that the wheels don't come off after you nail that part in the performance. That actually is one of the most common performance challenges that I have isn't the spot, it's the easy spot after the hard spot. That's where things can go wrong.
So that is just kind of personally one of the things that I think is really important in terms of strategy, where we just add a little bit of time onto our Practice Practice, and a little bit of strategy, and we completely eliminate what for me is one of the biggest kind of unseen pitfalls in a performance. But tonight, if you go through your music and you organize it, just no instrument out, because you already know, if you're working on a piece, think of the piece that you're working on, and put those spots in.
I use a way to mark my music that I'm really partial to, which is I put a, I use a lead pencil and I use paper music. And I put a little check mark, little, very light, very erasable, in the margin. And I know that that spot is in that line. And after I look at that line a couple times, I know, I'm clear as to what the spot is, so I don't actually need to mark that spot. So I'll have the check marks in the music, and then as I practice them, as I go through them, if I can play them 10 times in a row perfectly, and then go to another hard spot, do that 10 times in a row perfectly, then go back and play it again 10 times perfectly, I can erase that little check mark. And I can erase it so that it was as if it was never there.
Because I gotta tell you, if you're using paper music, which I love, I'm not a big iPad fan, I know a lot of people are, but you can completely erase something on an iPad. But if you're using a lead pencil, don't make big marks so that you can never unsee them, because I gotta tell you, once you get done practicing something, you don't want to have the reminder that you used to suck at it. That never helps, right? Because then that just creates the anxiety all over again when you interface with that music and you remember, "Oh, right, I used to not be able to play this." Because then you're thinking, you're having a negative thought instead of the positive thought, which is, "Hey, I got this one. I know this one. I can see what's coming."
And I want you to think of these spots similar to what it's like to drive in a city where you don't know and you've got your GPS on, and your GPS is telling you where to go. And if not for this GPS, you'd have no idea. I just got a car for the first time in 30 years and I'm experiencing that. Got in the car yesterday with my daughter, had no idea where I was going, but I was also confident I would get there. But I was having to, "Turn left now." because I didn't know where to go. And I remember when I used to drive around California, I would know ahead of time, like, you know, a mile ahead of time, I would just know. There was no GPS, I would just know, "Get in the left lane. This exits left. I'm gonna get over here and I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do this." So I knew my way around.
And that's how I want you to feel when you're looking at your music. Like you know the pathway, you know how to get there, and you know what is along the way. Because if you're using your music like a GPS to tell you what's there and you don't already know, you're not using the printed music in the way that you should. It should just be reminding you of what you already know, and you should already know what it says before you get there, and you should have that map planned out before you walk on stage.
Now we're gonna take this idea of being solid with all the notes, all the music we absolutely can play all of it. How are we gonna then take that information and organize it into this very streamlined thing where you know what's happening and you know what's going on? We've got to put that to the test. And the way we do it, it's not brain surgery, and I'm glad about that because I don't think I would be a very good brain surgeon, is we practice doing it. You have to practice the performing.
And if you're playing a recital, it can be expensive to hire the pianist for more rehearsals, for sure. I get that. If you're playing an orchestra concert, you don't get any more rehearsals than what the orchestra has scheduled. You know, so we do have to figure out our ways to do this. If you're taking an audition, like an orchestra audition, that's a little easier because you can replicate that any number of ways. You can play it for your stuffed animals, you can play it for your family, you can play it for your friends, you can play it for your enemies. You can do whatever it is that you need to do.
But here is the thing you have to do. Take that phone that I told you to put away and just record yourself. Record that performance. Because what you want to practice doing in this moment is practice thinking ahead. You wanna think about what it is that you are going to play. When we're practicing and we're thinking critically, we're Practice Practicing, we're trying to get better at playing the clarinet. So, we're analyzing, we're thinking, "Okay, I need more air, I need to do this, I need to..." And all these technical things that we need to do in order to get better at playing the clarinet. That's great if you're trying to get better at the clarinet.
But here's something you should not do when you're performing, don't try and get better at the clarinet. When you're on stage, play the clarinet. Don't actually try and get better at playing the clarinet. Those inputs that we give ourself when we're Practice Practicing aren't relevant on stage. And unless we practice performance, we're not gonna be skilled at thinking ahead and letting go of all those other things. And that's where the research and the information that Noa Kageyama puts into the world really, really stands out. It is incredible stuff, because he really gets into the psychology of how to do that. I can't speak to it all so well, because I'm not him, and he's the expert in that, but I can tell you that I belong to his website. I get his newsletter, I read his newsletter, and it matters. It's good stuff.
One of the things he talks about in his work is conscious control, which is Practice Practice, versus trust in your preparation, which is Practice Performance, right? We just gotta go for it. We've gotta go. We know the music. You gotta sing your song, right? You've just gotta play. But it's hard to do that if you don't practice doing that, if you don't intentionally do it, because we're all gonna, we all have tried so hard to get better at the clarinet, it's hard to stop doing it at times.
The other thing that is really, really, I think, inspirational that he talks about is this idea of taking our nervous energy. "Wow, I'm in this performance, it's all resting on this one moment. It's finally here. All these hours of practice you did, here's the moment." I remember standing at the side of the stage before I was playing the Copland Concerto in the Philippines, that was a huge hall, and I was playing from memory. And I'm standing there thinking, you know, "Do I even know how to play the clarinet?" And I walked out on stage, and I gotta tell you, it feels weird to walk out on stage with no music. And instead of saying, "Oh my god, oh my god," there's a moment where a switch flipped, and I said, "Okay, we're doing this. I'm doing this, and we are going to have this experience together. Let me show you this piece."
And fortunately, this was many years after the early '90s, and things went extraordinarily well. It was one of the best performances of my life, and I had a really, really wonderful time presenting that piece and showing how much I love it to people that also wanted to love it. And I think that that's another thing when you're in a performance. Nobody, whether you're in an audition, whether you're doing a recital, whether you're playing a concerto, everybody wants you to be successful. Nobody wants to hear you do badly. Everyone's rooting for you. Keep that in mind.
So when we're doing our Practice Practice, we have all sorts of strategies, you know, of varying the rhythm, playing something slow and moving up the metronome. There's all the things that we do, and we're not talking about those specifics today, because that would be a super long podcast. The idea is we have all these skills and we practice how to get better at the clarinet. When we, and we can get really good at getting good at the clarinet. But here's some ideas about how to practice performing.
One of the things everybody says to do, and it can be, it can seem like not a really great use of time, quite honestly, but that's wrong. It's an incredible use of time. If you're taking an orchestra audition, do as many mock auditions as you can. Play for people, and don't just play for people, practice the whole thing. One of the mistakes I made early on in my auditioning career was, I wouldn't practice my ritual the day of the audition and I would sort of wing it. And that's never a good idea, because here's some things you need to know for any performance, and particularly an audition.
How long do you need? What's your optimal amount of time to get yourself ready to do your best playing? You have to practice doing that, because there'll be times where you'll get somewhere and they'll say, "Oh, we got a room for you," and then you're in there for an hour. But you, if you know you only need 20 minutes, you can sit and breathe, you can do lots of things. What you probably shouldn't do is get your clarinet out for an extra 40 minutes, because what are you gonna do? Unless you know what you're gonna do with that extra 40 minutes, you should not use that. Because what's gonna happen is your mind's gonna start to churn. If you make a mistake on something, that's gonna erode your confidence. You really need to just do what you've practiced doing in order to practice being there at that audition. And you can practice that in a mock audition. You can practice that in a simulated performance of any kind, right?
I mean, let's say you have an orchestra concert and you want to practice doing your part at the orchestra concert. You certainly can't get the whole orchestra to come and do it with you, so you gotta sit in your room, you gotta find out, "How long does it take to my perfect read?" And then, maybe you don't have to play the entire concert. That might be a little ridiculous to sit in your room by yourself and play the entire concert. But I would, and I have looked through the music, thought about it, think about what I'm hearing, "What do I hear before I come in on these rests? What's my cue to come in?" You know, because if you know the music, you don't necessarily have to count the rest. And you probably should know the music well enough you don't have to count the rest. And just be able to know when to come in. "This is when I hear this, this is when I hear this," right? And then I know, when my eyes move to the top of the next page, that's when my solo happens. You might wanna play through that solo just mentally go through the whole thing so you know where you are. You're not using the music as a GPS. You are, you're in control. You know where you are, you know how to do it, and you know what's happening. That is going to yield a great performance.
Because I can't tell you how many times you'll be sitting next to somebody who does something weird. Perhaps you do something weird and knock yourself off your own game. Maybe it's too cold. Maybe it's too hot. Maybe you were late to the performance and you're a little bit out of breath. You know, it could be anything. Maybe the soloist gets sick and the order of the pieces change. You have to be ready to pivot and do the things. But most of the time, none of that's gonna happen and you should just be ready to do your thing and be able to do it at the highest level. Which, in that moment, doesn't have to do so much with focusing on how well you can play the clarinet. It's how well can you play this piece right now by knowing when to do the things you know how to do?
So, I would say, on a big performance, a performance that really matters to you, let's say you're giving a senior recital, whether that's a senior recital like you're gonna graduate college or you are indeed a senior and you're gonna give a recital, either one of those situations, practice your routine for days beforehand, right? Maybe go to a different room in your house. Go to a place where your reeds aren't gonna feel the same, because they're not gonna feel the same in your performance hall. And you've gotta be able to figure out which one's the best in that situation, be able to be okay with it, be solid, be able to really trust your equipment, be able to trust what you're doing, and go through that routine so you know in each piece where the spots are. Practice actually doing that so that that way, when you get to that performance, you are ready to do that performance.
Again, this has nothing to do with getting better at the clarinet. It has to do with accessing your best clarinet playing at that very moment. As you get closer to that performance, when you record, let's say you record your simulated performance, your mock audition, whatever it is, that's where you get the information about what might go wrong at your audition, because it will have gone wrong in the simulated performance. That's where you take the spots and those are the spots that you practice. Those are the things that you do. You still do some Practice Practice on the week of your performance, but by and large, what you're doing is you're getting ready to do your best playing, which is more up here at that point.
I would really say what you need to know every time you're looking at a piece of music is what the spots are, where you are on the map, right? That is going to give you more than you can possibly imagine, if you're not already doing that. And again, remember, at this moment, at this stage of practice, the build it out method, right? So, when you are doing the spot, practice the couple measures after the spot too, so that is equally as bulletproof. Because if it's not, your relief, and a well-earned relief maybe, but will derail you, because you gotta stay on your game and you gotta keep that in mind, that all of it is looking forward.
Even the easy spots, the spots that you've never made a mistake on before, that there's no need to practice. I played a wrong note. I won't tell you where. It was on Broadway, and it was embarrassing. It was embarrassing. And it wasn't, it was an easy note. It was a very, very easy note and I'd played it right 600, 700 times before in my life. Still got it wrong, because I wasn't, I wasn't together in my head. I was thinking about something else. And I said to somebody, "Yeah, well, it's not even something that you really needed to practice." And they said, "Well, evidently it was." And that makes, they make a good point, right? But the point that they're making, they weren't a musician, is that I need to, that was a Practice Performance. That was a performance-related mistake, not a can-you-play-it-on-the-clarinet mistake. Those are 2 different kinds of mistakes in performance, right?
One of them is an error in preparation, like, "I'm not good enough to play this." That's happened in performances. Not so much to me anymore, but it has, I won't lie. And it's probably happened to all of us in some way. But then there's also the kind of mistake that is a lack of Practice Performance or performing in the moment, of really always thinking ahead, really always having your mind on the next note, being able to hear it. And then if you've practiced, practiced, practiced, you can then execute everything that you need to execute. But it's just a matter of practicing staying focused on that because all notes have equal importance, but they're not all created equal in terms of how hard are they to play. And so we can't sleep on the easy ones and that becomes part of your Practice Performance, your simulated performances, your mock auditions, and all of that stuff as well because we don't want any of that to slip away. And that's the best way to stay on top of it.
So here's my invitation to you. First of all, would you have a conversation with me? Would you put something in the comments? What's worked for you? What's been a challenge? What if this resonates? You know, have you had an embarrassing performance? Have you had an incredible performance? What was your difference in preparation? What was your difference in mindset at the time? I would love to hear from you. You can email me, [email protected]. You can go to my website, clarinetninja.com. You can get my free beginner/refresher course. You can email me. You can leave a comment here on YouTube. You can leave a comment, rate and review while you're at it, if you're listening to this as a podcast because really, seriously, all that stuff actually really does help this get to other clarinet players who might like it. And I would love for them to hear it. And I would love for them to share in the conversation that I would love to have with you. The Clarinet Ninja Forum on Facebook. There's a good place. I've been trying to get that going. It is, it's difficult to start a group on Facebook. I don't know if you know that. And I'm challenged with it, so please help me. Join and start a conversation and so that I can join in too.
So my invitation to you beyond that, and please do that. Like, subscribe, yes, 5 stars. Thank you. But even more than that, I want you to pick something. If you're practicing the clarinet and you just like playing the clarinet and you don't have anything specifically on your radar on the future, pick a performance day. Make it 3 weeks from now. Whatever it is that you're practicing now, you're gonna perform that day. No matter what it is. Etude, piece, even just a study in a book. And go through all of this. Get your roadmap together. Know which is the hardest spots. Practice the hard spots, not the easy spots. Build out, build up, a performance day routine. Follow that performance day routine. Do a couple simulated performances the week before, maybe 5 days before, 3 days before, one day before, and then that day. Record all of them. And I would keep those recordings just to see the trajectory of how things went, to see if there's changes that you can make, because we gotta get information to make sure that we are succeeding in this path that we're on. And that's gonna give you a lot of information.
I can't tell you how much it means to me, if you're listening to this now and you're still here, how much it means to me that you are here and that you're doing it. These ideas are going to help you find your best playing. It's gonna help you build your best playing and then find that very best playing when you're in a performance because they are 2 separate things. Remember, there's Practice Practice, and there's Practice Performance. And you gotta put it all together and when you do, you're gonna unlock your highest ability level on the clarinet. And then with the continued good practice that you're doing, that level's just gonna get higher and higher and your performances are gonna get better and better.
The quickest way to that, I'm gonna say it again because I know it's true, is the Clarinet Ninja Dojo. Would you check it out? Check it out, check it out, because it is really fantastic. It is a bunch of people that really, really are doing the thing on the clarinet. They're getting better, they're having a great time doing it, and they're doing it with, I would conservatively say, is the most fun person that plays the clarinet, and that's me. I only sorta, I'm only sorta joking about that. So anyway, if you would, check out the Clarinet Ninja Dojo. It is the place to be if you are looking to get your clarinet playing together, get your skills as much together as possible, and then take those skills and put them into a performance with your Practice Performance. You gotta build those skills and the most fun way to do it and the quickest and the way with the most integrity is, I firmly believe, the Clarinet Ninja Dojo. So check it out. I would love to talk to you about it. If you have any questions about it, if you wanna do it but you just have a couple questions, I will answer them. Just reach out. I'll be there. I'd love to see you there. And happy practicing and happy performing. We'll see you next time on the Clarinet Ninja Podcast.
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RESOURCES MENTIONED:
Dr. Molly Gebrian - "Learn Faster, Perform Better"
Dr. Noa Kageyama - The Bulletproof Musician (bulletproofmusician.com)
FREE Practice Performance Roadmap: clarinetninja.com
CONNECT WITH CLARINET NINJA:
Website: clarinetninja.com
Email: [email protected]
Facebook Group: Clarinet Ninja Forum
Instagram: @clarinetninja
JOIN THE CLARINET NINJA DOJO:
clarinetninja.com/dojo
