How To Clap Your Hands

So this is a matter that I often find very disturbing as a musician. This is somewhat a guide to how to clap your hands at a concert. This is mostly useless I guess as musicians already know this and if you're not a musician you're not reading this but anyway.

I love clapping my hands at concerts or snapping my fingers. It's a bit like "soft-dancing" when you're at a sitted concert.
When I'm playing a concert I'm not so hot on people clapping their hands. Of course, it's really nice and it means the people really are into the music you're playing (unless you're subbing in the local concert band with 10 people eating pies and they're clapping like yeah yeah because the conductor is all hot on making the audience clap their hands). But it can get really disturbing because as a musician you have to learn not to listen to the audience clap because they're not musicians and they don't know what a tempo is or how to keep it. So there are many chances you'll get faster or slower with the audience (usually faster unless we're in the situations described above where the audience just came to eat the pies and you're disturbing them more than entertaining them). And that's a first problem.
A funny thing is, I once played "Music" from John Miles. The middle bit is a 7/4. The audience was clapping every other beat. Imagine how weird it was !!

But anyway, when you're in the audience, this shouldn't bother you too much, you're at the concert to enjoy yourself and if you want to clap you hands, just go for it, even if you're the only one clapping, people will eventually join you (maybe). Plus, the musicians are always happy.
BUT !!
And see, that was a big but (hum).
Don't clap on 1 and 3 !!!
Please please please please please.
Of course, clapping on 1 and 3 is what feels natural, at first at least. Because those are the strong beats, but clapping on them lacks so much energy.

"But, what does clapping on 1 and 3 mean ?"
If you don't what "clapping on 1 and 3" means then that's probably what you're doing. If you know what that means, and you do it, stop doing it and clap on 2 and 4 !!

Beats 2 and 4 are the upbeats, they are usually called the weak beats. That's because when you're playing a classical piece you're accentuating the downbeats (1 and 3). But when jazz arrived, the upbeats grew more and more important and the upbeats are stronger in that style. And since most of the modern music (pop, rock and all that) derives one way or another from jazz, this applies as well to those styles.

So that's why it's always better to clap on 2 and 4. If you don't know what that means, concentrate on how you would naturally clap and clap between the claps you would usually clap and you will be clapping on 2 and 4.

If you didn't get that, let's make a bit of music theory : a piece of music is divided in measures that are themselves, most of the time in modern music, divided in 4 beats :
1 2 3 4

Here's what you're certainly doing :
   1     2     3     4
Clap       Clap

Here's what you should be doing :
   1     2     3     4
       Clap       Clap

Hope it makes it easier for you.

If you still don't get it, ask a musician friend of yours and he will most probably be delighted to explain all of this to you.

In the mean time, I salute you. So go to concerts, listen to music (all styles), and clap on 2 and 4 ;)

Concerning Music

So I decided to take the music matter at hand.

I recently realized that I wasn't improving all that much lately on clarinet and on saxophone.

Still being somewhat a beginner (though it's ok by now) at the flute the learning curve is still rather steep but I fear I might let go somehow just like I did for clarinet and saxophone.

See, I was only playing stuff I knew and I was playing it the same way over and over. That's not the way your learn, is it ? That would be too easy.

My aim would be that next year, I could pass and audition for a cruise line agency on woodwinds. That would be quite the life, visiting the world doing what I love and still have so much free time I could catch up on all those readings I always said I would do or work out to become the gym king (well, maybe my expectations are high). I've read blog posts from musicianwages that hinted that it wasn't the dream life you'd hope for, but what the hell it's now or never.

So my hopes are to pass an audition in one of the many agencies. As an orchestra musicians. From what I hear it would be mean playing in a band formed out of others such orchestra musicians to accompany guest entertainers or to play along shows or, or, ... what do I know. The music played is not amazing but it's still music. I'd audition obviously as Saxophone/Woodwinds. So that means Sax, Flute, Clarinet. At least I hope so because no bassoon or oboe for me (well... yet :D). The audition is mainly saxophone. With sight-reading (I'm a beast at sight-reading I've been sight-reading my whole life picking up a stack of scores and just reading them) as the main part of it. For that I'm all set. I hope so at least. I actually don't know if sight-reading includes all 3 instruments or just the sax but I don't care much as sight-reading is sight-reading. Just a bit scared about the flute though, and I still have to work on intonation in the altissimo register (above high D) in the sax and clean up my clarinet articulation. And some other stuff but I coming to this.

So there's sight-reading but I've also seen in some agencies that they were asking for an etude on each instrument. I don't know what kind of etude they are expecting but I picked the Klose books for both sax and clarinet and Gariboldi etudes for flute (maybe those flute etudes are too low for their expectation but I'll talk about that with my flute teacher). I'll start them over from the beginning, practice all of those and pick those I'm most comfortable with (or at least those with which I'd make the best impression).

Then, last but not least, there's the jazz/improv part. Again, this part doesn't show up for all auditions but it still has to be worked on. So you have to pick a standard (from a real book), some med. swing or something like that, and play and improvise on it. I'm not new to the jazz improvisation but I'm no pro either. So there's still work to be done on that.

So the auditions for the different agencies are a mix of those 3 parts, almost all of them include the sight-reading part, most of them have the jazz/improv part, and only some have the etudes parts. But I have to be ready for those 3 things.

That's what I'll be working on for the next year and what this blog will keep track of.

Time to practice, another post coming up explaining how I'll put that in practice.