1) 3 Ways to Reduce Online Noise and Get More Done – a great blog post on how to get some control back when updates, events, subscriptions, etc start to take over your life. I did some cleaning up of my own inbox after reading this and it’s helped.

2) The Mistake that Topples Careers and Industries by David Cutler – a nice little article about keeping an open mind when it comes to your career.

3) Creativity Comes After The Fact – gapingvoid has become one of my favorite things to read in the morning. I even have one of his cartoons as the lock screen picture on my phone. This particular one really made me think… and then get to work.

4) Double-A Goals – some tips from The Musician’s Way on goal setting and attaining!

5) The last one this week isn’t a link, but a picture. I had the privilege of sharing the stage with the famous Don Rickles last weekend. I didn’t get a picture of myself with him unfortunately, but there is some video of his calling me “dragon lady”. It was a very cool show! I did snap a picture of the stage while we were on break:

1) Ten Lessons that the Arts Teach

2) From Alfred Ledger Lines Blog – A cool fun idea to try in the classroom or with private students – The Word: Teaching Composition Using Little or No Theory

3) The Myth of ‘Practice Makes Perfect’ by Annie Murphy Paul
It’s not how much you practice but whether you’re quick to fix your errors that leads to mastery

I’m going to do a series of blog posts about the conference to keep them short and manageable.

FAVORITE PERFORMANCES!

I didn’t get to hear everything I wanted to hear, more or less everything I could have heard. I worked to balance my time between clinics, performances, and the hang / networking. Post-conference people always ask: “What’s the best thing you heard?” Which is never an easy answer when you’ve just been saturated with incredible music for almost 4 days straight! But this year, one group stood out to me:

The Ed Neumeister Quartet with Michael Wolff (piano), John Goldsby (bass), and Danny Gottlieb (drums).

Musically, it was some of the most innovative and creative playing that I heard in a long time. I was transfixed the entire (all too short) 40 minute performance and truly appreciated Ed Neumeister’s writing, especially his arrangement of Take the A Train. Not one of my favorite tunes, but I left liking it again.

My second favorite was the Alan Baylock Orchestra…

Alan’s music just makes me happy. And it has ever since I was introduced to his music when I was in college, and now I’m lucky enough to call him a friend. Alan loves music and it shine through in everything he writes. I left that performance smiling and happy.

Missed Opportunity:

At a conference like this, there’s always something that you miss that you wished you’d seen. Or many somethings. You can’t see it all but you really do wish you could. This year I missed seeing the Bass Extremes featuring Victor Wooten and Steve Bailey. I remember seeing Victor Wooten live maybe a decade ago and loved it. I loved the book he wrote – The Music Lesson – too. I wish I had seen that performance and I know it was awesome, because lots of people told me it was one of their favorites.

1) The 2012 NEA Jazz Masters Awards Ceremony & Concert Webcast

2) One of my favorite videos on why we need to fail to succeed.

3) Think Twitter is a waste of time? Can’t find the point? Here’s a good article explaining how to use it and what’s its good for.

http://diymusician.cdbaby.com/2012/01/twitter-tip-for-musicians-patience-is-a-virtue/

4) http://blog.commpro.biz/thehiringhub/?p=1399
Tips on Networking. 5 easy to follow ideas that are good reminders in this day and age.

5) http://www.feelgooder.com/self-promotion-tips-for-nice-people/ – the title says it all. You don’t have to be a jerk to successfully promote.

While teaching, I always started with 5 notes. Which 5 notes varied depending on the instrument, but I would always make a game out of it for the kids. For the more advanced kids we would do 5 note patterns in major and minor and work on switching keys quickly and easily. In my own practicing, I eventually expanded it to what I’ll show you in this post.

I like practicing five note patterns because they work on the transition between tetrachords. See my post on tetrachords. Note that even though the exercise is written in 8th notes doesn’t mean it has to be played quickly. Since I primarily use it for warming up, I play it very slow, all slurred, and really focus on air support, smooth fingers, and what each pattern sounds like.

There are five different tonalites: Major, Minor, Diminished (WholeHalf), Super Locrian (7th Mode of Melodic Minor), and Augmented.

I definitely recommend memorizing this as soon as possible. Then you can listen to the color of each five note scale piece and what happens to that color when even just a pitch gets altered. It’s a listening exercise as much as finger practice.

Download Five Note Scale Pattern Warm-up in all 12 keys.

1) “My goal in life is to play better tomorrow then I did today” – James Moody

Check out the other videos from that same interview.

2) At the JEN conference last weekend I met a trumpet player named Craig Fraedrich. Check out his Educational Materials on his website

3) If This Then That – ifttt.com It’s a cool little website that lets you set triggers that create responses. The concept is really cool, but I’m still trying to figure out how it all works. I’d love to hear what anyone else using it thinks. It was recommended to me at a clinic at the JEN / TI:ME conference last weekend.

4) Great video on why we need music education in our schools:

5) http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~keller/jazz/improvisor/ This is another new thing that I just discovered. It’s very new to me and I’m still experimenting, but looking forward to seeing what it can for me and my students. Anyone out there familiar with it who’d be willing to give me some tips?

1) http://www.jazzednet.org/

This week I am attending the Jazz Education Network conference in Louisville, KY. It’s been a blast so far and we still have one more day. You can follow what I’m doing on Facebook and Twitter, or check out the hashtag #JEN12

2) http://rachelannpoling.com/2011/11/21/7-ways-to-help-your-blog-go-viral/

I just found this via LinkedIn and I found it very helpful.

3) Greg Fishman talking about his ways to practice his newest book which just came out this week. Definitely check it out.

4) http://www.ti-me.org/

The JEN conference joined forces with the Technology In Music Education conference and so I have been able to attend a bunch of clinics on technology. Super cool. You can following their happenings on hashtag #timejen12

5) http://mustech.net/

One of the people I met today is the owner of this website and was actually able to give me iPad app recommendations that I was not aware existed. His site is definitely worth checking out, especially on Monday when he claims that all his presentations and links will be posted.

Happy FLF! See you next week!

There’s a few things that the iPad can’t do – and music notation used to be one of them. (I’m a Finale person and have been since I got my first copy of Finale 95 on disk.) Just before Christmas, Notion came out and at the introductory price of $.99 I immediately installed it. I figured that even if it sucked, I was only out a buck.

Official Website for Notion

Overall, it’s easy to use and fairly intuitive. When trying to do something new I was usually able to find what I was looking for on the first or second try. It is deifnitely a HUGE leap forward for an app like this on the iPad. Here’s some of my thoughts.

Pluses:

• I dig the sliding piano used to enter notes. Very smooth and easy to change octaves. (If you play guitar you can also enter notes using the guitar)
• There’s a melody mode – for one note at a time entry and also a chord mode – for more than one note.
• Piano keys darken (but are still usable) when you get out of an instrument’s range.
• Note entry makes a lot of sense and there’s even quite a few options for note heads.
• Fixing mistakes is really easy and intuitive
• You can change key signatures in the middle of a piece
• Easy export as a PDF or XML file.
• Can also export MIDI which is pretty cool.
• Playback is great.

Current Gripes

• There’s no blank staff option. You have to choose an instrument. Really annoying if you just want to make a lead sheet or exercise in treble clef. Which leads me to my second biggest gripe.
• You pretty much get a full orchestra of instruments, but extra instruments cost money. Which is fine, except the app designers are obviously classical musicians because I have a free contrabass bassoon included, but no saxophone. As a saxophone player, that’s really annoying.
• Instruments not in the key of C automatically transpose. (I think this is a fine option, but not being able to turn it on and off drives me crazy. Mainly because you have to make sure to think in concert pitch while writing, but switch to transposing while reading the score. Do note that when you export it and open into Finale, you can then decide if you want to view the score in concert pitch and all is right with the world again.)
• Different transposing instruments still have the same key signature. You can change how each instrument transposes in the staff settings, but that part of the program needs work. As someone who understands transposing and does it on a regular basis, I found myself getting rather frustrated.
• When you copy and paste from one key to another, it keeps the original notes.
• Although fixing notes is fairly easy, there’s no mass transpose option. Very frustrating if you’re trying to create something in all 12 keys.
• You can only view 2 measures per line. When you export it as a PDF you only 2 measures per line as well.
• Missing all sfz options.
• No chord changes – but you can workaround by simply using text. Ok as long as you don’t want to actually hear the chords.

Screen Shots

This is a screen shot of what the app looks like on the iPad.

Here’s what the exported PDF looks like.

This is what it looked like when I opened it in Finale.
Not sure why the 8th notes are no longer beamed, or what happened to the title.

So, is it worth it? Yes and no. If the app ever goes on sale again, I would say grab it. But for the regular price of $14.99 (and you’d have to pay an extra 4 bucks to saxophones!) it’s a little steep. There are still a few bugs to work out but I knew that would be the case when I purchased it. If you spend a lot of time away from home and don’t have a laptop, it’s probably worth it. If you’re just looking for something new to do on the iPad, I’d skip it.

Copyright © 2011 maxplanation.com

From Monica Shriver, aka saxymoni, the founder and director of Doublers Collective

Doublers Collective is trying to raise some money. Wanna know why?

This whole fundraising idea may seem a little out of the ordinary to a lot of people. Truthfully it’s all new to me too. I thought I would take a moment and share with you how I ended up reaching the point where I would ask my friends, family, (and perfect strangers!) for money…

I first stumbled upon the concept of “crowd funding” by accident about a year ago. I had just joined twitter and was following a few musicians. One of them was Jason Parker, @1workinmusician. He had tweeted about his Kickstarter campaign. I was curious and so I listened to his playing, read about the musicians he was working with, read his blog and decided to donate. He met his goal and successfully produced a really great CD. I felt like this was such a fantastic way to do things – a bunch of people giving just a little money, coming together to make a huge difference. Plus donations are tax-deductible, which benefits everyone involved!

Shortly thereafter, I attended a social media panel discussion while at the Jazz Education Network Conference in New Orleans. Again, this idea of crowd funding was covered. Things were evolving before my very eyes. I started seeing Kickstarter and IndieGoGo campaigns popping up all over Twitter and Facebook. Of course, at this point, Doublers Collective was a concept. I had a vision and an idea, but I didn’t know how it was going to evolve. I had Fractured Atlas as a resource and I started learning as much a I could about fundraising, business, and social media. When IndieGoGo partnered with Fractured Atlas and waived their fees for sponsored projects, I knew I had to give it a try.

Now I’ve been trying to apply what I have learned to raise money for Doublers Collective. I know that $15,000 sounds like a lot of money, but if you look at the breakdown, I have specific goals for the money. Most of the money is designated for commissions. This is putting money back into the music community and giving some amazing composers a chance to write for something unique and completely different. When Doublers Collective has a decent sized book, we can put on more concerts and clinics, thus providing exposure for those amazing writers and a really interesting concert experience for the audience!

Here’s the breakdown of how we will use the $15000 we raise:

• $10,000 to cover the cost to commission 8-10 pieces of new music.
• $2500 to cover costs related to the recording and release our CD of commissioned works including licensing fees, studio time, CD distribution, etc.
• $750 to cover expenses related to the premiere of 2- 3 commissioned works for Doublers Collective at the North American Saxophone Alliance Biennial Conference at Arizona State University in March 2012.
• $750 to cover renting a performance space and paying Doublers Collective musicians to give a premiere concert of the commissioned pieces in Phoenix, AZ.
• $1000 to use as prize money for a student writing competition. Two of the top original compositions will each receive $500.

So, you’re probably wondering what happens if we don’t raise the full $15,000. Well, we do still get to keep the money we do raise. (We opted for the “flexible funding” from IndeiGoGo.) Whatever we do raise will go towards commissions. That’s our first priority.

Now, I’m not just expecting people to hand me money without justification of my hard work. So here’s what we’ve done to help move things along as well:

• Mike Crotty has donated music that he previously wrote for the sax section of the Airmen of Note, and the arrangements for woodwind ensemble. He has also done 2 additional arrangements specifically for Doublers Collective and donated them. This is truly amazing and we are so grateful for Mike, because without him, we wouldn’t have anything to play.
• Mike Crotty and I have connected with incredible writers from all over the world and secured their interest in the project. These guys are simply waiting for the green light – as soon as we tell them we have secured funding, they will write us a piece.
• I am working on two arrangements of my own for Doublers Collective, with the guidance of Mike Crotty.
• The members of Doublers Collective have rehearsed for FREE for the last year.
• We have performed two concerts in the last 6 months, one which you can view on our Media page. We have an awesome show booked at Sacred Grounds for Feb. 23rd
• I have applied for grants to commission music for Doublers Collective and will continue to do so.
• I wrote a proposal for Doublers Collective to premiere works at the North American Saxophone Alliance National Conference in March 2012.

We really need YOUR help. If you’re interested in helping Doublers Collective raise money you can donate online at www.indiegogo.com/doublerscollective now thru 12/31/11.

If you would rather send me a check, please follow these guidelines:
1. Make the check payable to “Fractured Atlas” (This is very important. If it is made out to anything else, it won’t be processed.)
2. In the Memo line write “Monica Shriver – DC” that way I know the money is intended to be used for Doublers Collective.
3. Send it to Monica Shriver, 902 W. Topeka Dr. Phoenix, AZ 85027

What instruments do you play in your profession, and in what capacity do you play them?

I play piccolo, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, soprano, alto, tenor and bari saxophone professionally in jazz combos, big bands, rock bands, chamber ensembles, orchestras, as a soloist, and in recording sessions.

I also play oboe, bassoon and electric bass for fun, working on getting them to a higher level.

I play just enough piano to be dangerous. I mostly use it for transcription, composing and arranging.

Woodwind Specialist, Doubler, Multiple Woodwinds Performer… there are so many titles for what you do. Do you have a preference for what you are called?

I like the word Doubler, but I know that few people outside of the musician community really knows what that term means. Multi-Instrumentalist seems to be the most user friendly and clear.

Just call us talented.

Did you get into doubling for the money? (haha)… What are you in it for?

I’ve always said that you should “never do the math”, so I don’t know this for sure, but I highly doubt that the cost benefit ratio for being a doubler ends up in the black. I’m not sure if when you factor in the cost of instruments, reeds, repairs, cases, mouthpieces, and sheet music that you can make an argument for being in it for the money. And that doesn’t even include the time you spend learning to play those instruments. The other side of that coin (haha, pun intended) is that many gigs are only available to doublers – such as musical theatre. Nowadays, all the most interesting big band music has doubles. I have worked a lot of gigs because I am a doubler and I also get to do a wide variety of gigs, because I can play a variety of instruments. If you’re just a jazz tenor player, that’s all you’ll ever get called to do.

For example, in a 2 week period I found myself playing: bari sax and bass clarinet in 2 very different big bands, alto and clarinet in a musical pit orchestra, bari in a funk / R&B band, flute with a percussionist and rabab player accompanying dancers from India, bari in a Tower of Power Tribute band, and tenor, soprano, clarinet, bass clarinet, flute, and piccolo in my own group – the Doublers Collective. So cool! (Plus, I get to teach all these instruments as well, which is also rewarding.)

Funny thing is that the more I thought about this question the more I realized that I have really been a doubler since the beginning. I started on clarinet, but moved to saxophone rather quickly. In high school I played saxophones in band and jazz band, played clarinet in band, played oboe in Youth Orchestra, and took oboe, flute, and saxophones to music camp. I played everything in college.

Ultimately, I’m a doubler because I love it. I love exploring the different instruments, the available colors, even just to have a wide range to choose from. I feel like I can say anything I want to with my different voices. I love to explore and with doubling, I constantly have something to explore. It’s an endless challenge and I love it.

How and when did you begin adding instruments? Do you have any opinions on the order that students should add additional instruments?

I added instruments gradually. I usually picked up something new as it was needed or someone gave me an instrument to use. But there were large gaps in my learning, amounts of time that I didn’t play one instrument or another. It wasn’t until my early 20′s that I really focused on doubling and tried to work each instrument as it’s own. Nowadays, my practice routine is really focused so I make sure to cover everything on a regular basis.

I’ve taught quite a few students to double and none of them the same way. Every student is different and I think their individual interest carries far more weight than any “method”. I’ll help guide my students through the experimental stage as they find the instruments that they connect to the most. Hopefully in the process they get enough skills to come back to one later if they want to.

Did anything or anyone ever discourage you from doubling?

I have always loved doubling and I have been incredible fortunate to have acquired mostly pro horns, because cost can be really discouraging. I don’t know if I’ll ever own a $20,000 flute or a contrabassoon, but that’s ok. I do what I can and try to save up little by little to upgrade.

I have had more than a few people tell me that I “should choose one and focus on it”. I get the thinking behind that, but even if I could make a living playing only one ax, I’d never be able to choose. Picking one just isn’t an option for me and sometimes people don’t get that. It’s ok, we each have our own path, ya know?

How does doubling affect your flute playing?

I picked up flute in college, so the thing that I had to work on the most was not projecting my saxophone habits (such as voicing) on my flute playing. It took me a couple of years to master that. Now, I feel like my primary concern is tone. Sometimes playing sax or clarinet for a long time and then picking up the flute, I feel the tension and lip pressure, but I’ve worked hard at going back and forth so it doesn’t take too long to get into “flute mode”.

How do you manage your practice time on so many instruments?

I keep a practice journal of everything that I’m currently practicing and things that I want to practice. Learning that I can’t practice it ALL was a tough lesson for me to accept, but you have to stay focused if you want to get something accomplished. Otherwise, you’re just flapping your arms, so to speak.

If I’m strapped for time, I make sure to do longtones and some free improv on every instrument no matter what. My longtone routine is intense, so it takes me a good 20-30 minutes on each horn. I play a saxophone and the flute everyday, and the clarinet 4-5 days a week.

I also find as much common ground as possible and try to use that to my advantage. For example, I’m currently in a technique routine where I practice all the scales, arpeggios, and patterns starting on a single note. I find that after I’ve worked it all out on sax, the flute goes much quicker. That gives me time to focus on the things that are unique to each instrument and spend more time on that stuff.

What are the most challenging aspects of being a doubler?

Keeping the reeds wet.

In all seriousness, it’s picking up an instrument cold and having it sound as good as it would if you had been playing it the whole time.

There is also learning all the little idiosyncrasies of each instrument – the pinky keys on the clarinet, the 3rd octave of the flute, the palm keys and altissimo of the sax as just a couple of examples. I’m willing to settle for just knowing part of an instrument, I want to know how it all works. That takes time and discipline, and it can be challenging.

It seems there is a very small percentage of women doublers. Why do you think this is?

I have any insight on this one. I’m usually the only or one of the only women in all the groups I’m in. I don’t know why that is. I’m not really all that concerned by it either. We are all musicians and we are in it together. That’s what is important.

What advice would you give to flutists wishing to “branch out” into woodwind doubling?

Jump! Just pick an instrument that interests you and go for it. Get the highest quality instrument you can get your hands on. Get a good teacher who will teach you how to play it correctly from the start, which is way easier than getting a year or two in and having to relearn everything.

Was it always your childhood dream to be a doubler? When did it become your goal?

As I said before, I just kinda fell into it. Music was my childhood dream, and being a doubler just kinda happened along the way. It really became my goal when I was at Arizona State University and was in the classical flute studio and playing saxophone in the jazz department. I had so much fun! After college I started do pit work pretty much right away, which was awesome. Now, I have my own jazz ensemble made up of professional Doublers – www.doublerscollective.com

I’m proud to be a doubler. I enjoy it and am very thankful that I can do such a wide variety of things. It’s a lot of fun for me!