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In my experience, Saxophone is one of the easiest instruments to learn. There are many different types of saxophone (soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, etc..), however, every saxophone has the same basic key setup. There are 3 keys on proximal end (closest to the mouthpiece) and 3 keys on the distal end (where the sound comes out). The only other important key switches octaves and is located by the keys on the proximal end of the saxophone. Both sets of three keys are played with your left or right pointer, middle, and ring fingers, and the octave key is played with your left thumb. Although this setup is exactly the same for every saxophone, I can play the alto and baritone saxophones with ease, yet I can hardly play the tenor saxophone at all.

Why is this, you ask? Great question!

I believe that this “saxophone catastrophe” can be explained using Fitts’ Law. Fitts’ law calculates the time it will take to affectively perform a movement. So for the sake of the saxophone example, we need to discuss the amplitude and width involved in the Fitts’ Law calculation. As width (size of the key) increases, the movement time will decrease. As amplitude (distance between keys) increases, the movement time will increase as well. So how does this help explain my inability to play the tenor saxophone quickly? Well it happens to be that the bodies of the tenor and alto saxophones I was playing were the same diameter, however, the tenor saxophone was much longer. Because of this oblong shape, the maker of my tenor saxophone moved the keys further apart, but did not increase their actual size. This made it much more challenging to play quickly while still being accurate.

Wait, but what about the baritone saxophone that is even bigger than its tenor cohort, shouldn’t it be even harder to play?

After going back and looking at my baritone saxophone, I realized that although the keys were further apart than the tenor, the keys were much larger so there was a larger area to hit with your finger.

Perhaps I’m not just cursed to never play the tenor saxophone; maybe I just need to invest in one with bigger keys! Fitts’ Law helped me to finally shed some light on my saxophone catastrophe.

The video below is of me playing a scale between two different octaves. Both the lower and upper hands only play three different keys. These keys are placed in the same location on every type of saxophone, but their separation and size will be different.

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Why my voice teacher had one of the most challenging jobs in the world - Procedural Knowledge

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Why my voice teacher had one of the most challenging jobs in the world - Procedural Knowledge

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I have the utmost respect for every type of teacher; they are opening our minds to truly amazing things. I especially have respect for a specific type of education however, vocal education. Singing in itself is not necessarily challenging; anyone can jump on stage and belt out a few lines at a karaoke bar. Singing becomes much more interesting when you begin to delve into the realm of singing healthily for extended periods of time. This form of singing is often what we call “classical style.” Classical singing doesn’t seem challenging until you realize that in order to do it correctly, you have to be doing nothing and everything at the same time. You have to be relaxing your abdominal muscles while maintaining a consistent amount of pressure in your diaphragm in order to resist all of the air flowing out of lungs too quickly, and that is just one of the many small functions that build into the proper vocal technique. So how can you learn how to sing properly?

You have to find a vocal educator that is extremely aware of how their own body works, because if they don’t know what they are doing to perform their own singing there is no chance that they will be able to teach you. I was lucky enough to have an extremely talented voice teacher. The one thing I remember most clearly from my many years of studying with him is that he would always have to perform a specific vocal function before he would try to explain it to me. For instance when he taught me how to “breath into my diaphragm,” this lesson was one of the first he ever taught me because if you aren’t taking a deep enough breath, you won’t be able to sustain your voice. During these lessons, he would constantly stop and take a deep breath himself in order to figure out exactly what he was doing during the movement. After he had an idea of what he was doing, he would proceed to explain it to me, but as soon as I asked him a specific question about something, he would have to stop and try it out himself first. This is because for him, singing was procedural knowledge. Procedural knowledge is the knowledge of a set of separate steps that all combine to perform a task. In this case that task is singing. The thing about procedural knowledge is that it is extremely challenging to put into words unless you are concurrently performing the action and explaining how to perform it. That is why my teacher had to stop and perform every action himself before explaining it to me; he was trying to verbalize procedural knowledge.

A good voice teacher can never be replaced because they possess the skills necessary to perform the procedure involved with singing, and they can explain how to replicate that procedure.

The image below is of a friend (left), my high school voice teacher (middle), and myself (right). This was taken after my final high school performance before graduating. His skills to verbalize the procedural knowledge of singing taught me and all of his students how to properly sing so that we would be able to do it healthily for the rest of our lives.

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Spanish Guitar 101: Finger-picking your way to victory - Bimanual Coordination

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Spanish Guitar 101: Finger-picking your way to victory - Bimanual Coordination

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By Spanish guitar I strictly mean the classical technique; flamenco, jazz, and all other styles will involve slightly different techniques, so they wont be regarded. Fingerpicking is most often used with the classical technique because in classical songs there is only one string being “picked” for each note on the page. This can be compared with the strumming technique often used in jazz music; every notation on the page is a different strum of all six strings. From my personal experience, of all the techniques mentioned above, classical fingerpicking is by far the most challenging. Fingerpicking is the most challenging form of guitar playing because it involves having to pick a string, over the body of the guitar, with your dominant hand while gently pressing down the same string somewhere along the neck of the guitar. This seems pretty simple until you consider the fact that sometimes during the same beat, you can be playing anywhere from only one to all six of the strings, which involves stretching all five fingers on both hands. Maybe this doesn’t seem too tough still? Well try adding in the fact that there are over 15 frets on the standard Spanish guitar, and many pieces of music will involve stretching your left hand over 8 or even more of these frets, while still managing to pick the strings with your dominant hand.

So how is it that we can perform this extremely challenging task, with ease?

We are able to use both hands separately by utilizing asymmetric bimanual coordination. Asymmetric bimanual coordination involves moving both hands at the same time but in different ways, which is exactly what is occurring while playing classical guitar. This is such a tough task to learn because as humans, we tend to perform bimanual tasks symmetrically (both hands do the same exact task together). Overcoming this “human nature” is a challenge, but it is definitely worth it in order to play music such as the song below.

The attached video is of me playing the intro to a piece of music called “Romance D’Amour.” Note that this song involves picking with the three middle fingers of the dominant hand to repeatedly play the top three strings while the thumb of the dominant hand also plucks the bass strings. To make this even more challenging, the notes in this piece of music span the entire neck of the guitar, making bimanual coordination a necessity.

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How to make it seem like you are a professional at reading music - Visual Perception

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How to make it seem like you are a professional at reading music - Visual Perception

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Pick your favorite instrument or at least an instrument you know a significant amount about. No matter which you chose I could bet that at one point or another, in order to learn a song, you had to read notes off a page. Reading sheet music is by far one of the most important skills a musician can learn, but there are definitely people that have mastered this skill at a level much greater than most. These master musicians are so good at reading sheet music because they have learned how to use the full range of their visual field during their visual search. They do this by not only using their central vision (the specific note or measure of music that they are looking at), but they will also utilize their peripheral vision in order to look at measures that are coming up in the piece of music. So how does doing this seemingly minuscule task of using your peripheral vision to read ahead, help you to become a professional at reading music? While the average musician is simply reading their music measure by measure, you can be focusing on the current measure, but you can also be looking at specific annotations that are two or three measures ahead, which makes you not only more prepared but also faster at playing the upcoming notes.

Perfecting your visual search methods by utilizing both your central and peripheral vision can quickly make you a better musician by increasing your skill at reading music.

The attached piece of music "Romance D'Amour" is the sheet music for the song I played in "Spanish Guitar 101: Finger-picking your way to victory." I chose to attach this piece of music because of the annotation "1/2 BV." That annotation means that the highest three strings have to be barred on the fifth fret in order to play that music written below it. Without looking ahead using peripheral vision, it would be nearly impossible to form the necessary fingerings while staying in rhythm.

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How to look like you know a lot about playing piano - Bilateral Transfer

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How to look like you know a lot about playing piano - Bilateral Transfer

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Learning how to play piano is terrible. It takes an extremely long time and an obscene amount of patience. In order to learn how to play piano correctly, you first have to learn some scales and exercises. The most common exercise is to first use your dominant hand (starting with your thumb) and play five consecutive notes either up and back down or down and back up the keys. After perfecting this motion you move to your non-dominant hand. When you first try the same action with your non-dominant hand, it seems much easier. Why is it that after we have learned a skill with one hand, it seems easier to learn it with the other?

This phenomenon can be explained with the idea of bilateral transfer. Bilateral transfer occurs when a certain task, which has been learned by a dominant hand, is then more easily learned by the non-dominant hand. This is likely due to the fact that during the learning process of the dominant hand, your brain created certain strategies, which made it easier to perform the skill. These strategies would be utilized independent of which limb was performing the skill, that is why even though we never have practiced a scale with our non-dominant hand it still may take us less time to learn than it did with the dominant hand originally.

So how do we make ourselves look like we know how to play piano, we utilize bilateral transfer in order to more rapidly learn skills.

The attached video is an example of me playing the scale exercise mentioned above. The scale is first played with my dominant hand and then my non-dominant hand. Since this is not the first time playing this exercise, no bilateral transfer occurred. However, when I first began to practice this exercise, bilateral transfer was key in learning with my non-dominant hand.