don’t do that
Don’t sit with so much tension. Don’t relax your corners when you slur. Don’t cut off your notes with your tongue. Make sure you don’t drop air support! Don’t let your chin collapse on that high note!!
What if I said, no matter what, don’t think of a white elephant? I bet you thought of a white elephant. Or I might say don’t scratch your nose…at all costs. Your nose suddenly itched REALLY badly, right?
You just had the exact intense desire to do that which you have just been told not to do – you almost HAD to because that’s all you were suddenly focused on.
Putting the “do not’s” in your mind is pretty much saying “do it”.
You are not doing yourself any favors by stopping a bad habit until you know what to do instead.
“Stop twa-twa-ing your notes” (SO common)..becomes “buzz that on the mouthpiece, then blow through the phrase”.
“Stop sagging your pitch in the low range”..becomes “keep the corners tight and focus your air forward”.
“Stop breathing in through your nose”..becomes “feel the wind flowing in and out of your mouth”.
There must be a new habit to replace the old one.
I don’t believe that I am doing any students any favors telling them what not to do until I have given them a valid and helpful replacement. I believe the white elephant can be replaced with something better by stressing the “do this” mentality. If a student focuses primarily on what to do (not what NOT to do), the good habits will replace the bad.
Many students arrive at college with loads of bad habits. It can be challenging to reinforce positives that replace negatives when we see our students only once a week. The affirmation of replacement habits needs to be constant. Since stalking our students throughout their day to check their progress is frowned upon, we have to be creative.
One solution that I have found to be quite helpful is what I call the “Body Awareness” sheet. Let’s take a hypothetical student who has 5 bad habits that have been positively replaced: incorrect right hand position, tense shoulders, incorrect mouthpiece placement, slouching posture and shallow inhalation. This is quite a list.
A Body Awareness sheet from my studio for this student would have each habit listed in a different bright color as such:
Right Hand Position at 3:00
Relax Shoulders
Mouthpiece Placement
Sit Up
Deep Breath
The assignment is to have this brightly colored sheet on the music stand every single time the horn is out of the case. The student is to read through the list thoughtfully and continually as a referral until it is unneeded because new and improved habits have replaced the bad habits, and have become instinctual.
We need to make sure our voices are floating in the heads of our students at all time…”what would my teacher say?” This could be the next best thing.
