Dealing With Frustration in the Practice Room - Zenas Kim-Banther

Trombonist Dr. Zenas Kim-Banther shares a strategy for dealing with frustration in the practice room and generously shares that it took her a long time to get good at this strategy - even though you'd think it would be easy!

Find her full interview here: TBJ211

"What about this passage is giving you the frustration? Is it the consistency? Getting the center of the notes? Is it the rhythm? Is it pitch?

And then just narrowing it down and just keeping it to the most simplest elements.  

If it's something super frustrating, just say, 'I'm gonna spend 10 minutes on this, walk away, do something that I really enjoy,' inviting peace of mind, and kind of go at it.

It sounds so stupid, you'd think you'd figure this out earlier on in your playing. But it took me a long time to really just stop myself from just playing it over and over until it magically gets better. And that's what I yell at my students about all the time. But it's really hard when you know what it should sound like but there's a couple of blocks along the way from getting there.

—Dr. Zenas Kim-Banther from TBJ211

Practicing Tool: Drone Tone

I am a big fan of practicing with a drone. I regularly do scale and arpeggio work with a drone. I much prefer using my ear to tune things rather than using my eyeballs to look for a green smiley face or something like that.

Speaking of green smiley faces, the drone feature on the Tonal Energy Tuner is wonderful. I’ll write about that another time. But today I wanted to talk a little about a less known site called Drone Tone.

Drone Tone is not anything fancy. It only does one thing: it plays drones.

What I love about it is the tone it produces. The drones are comprised of real cellos recorded in octaves. It is a rich sound that is quite easy to tune to. It is also a sound that will cut through a loud instrument (like a tuba!) but still with a pleasant sound. It also has a built-in metronome.

I use the web version but there is also an app for both Android and iOS: Drone Tone

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