That Time I Took 211 Days Off

Part 1
By Sarah Paradis, Trombone

On January 2, 2018, my doctor told me to stop playing trombone until I was 36 weeks pregnant, which I was to reach in May 2018. Not all pregnant brass players need to stop playing their instruments, but I was a high risk pregnancy, so my doctor was taking extra precautions.

I effectively got a mandatory doctor’s order to take four months off the horn. And more than that if I’m honest, because I simply did not feel like starting to play again when I was 36 weeks pregnant, and I definitely wasn’t in a place to play for the first 4-8 weeks of my son’s life. As far as I was concerned, it didn’t sound realistic for me to be playing the horn again for seven months.

Seven months is a long time! The longest break I’ve ever taken since I started playing the trombone in 1992 was about 6 weeks after my first son was born. And the next longest break wouldn’t be longer than two weeks. Seven months is more than half a year!

Mentally, I didn’t mind too much about this break because I knew it was something I had to do for my health and especially for the health of my baby. It hurt my ego a bit because I couldn’t play with Mirari Brass Quintet, I couldn’t take any gigs, and I missed out on an audition for my local symphony. But again, my family’s health is more important than any gig, so it was clear what I had to do.

I definitely became a more creative teacher during this time. There were so many times that I knew I could show my students how to play something, if only I could play my horn. Once I picked up the horn and played it for a 6th grade student, and quickly regretted it. I lacked the control that I was used to, and it just didn’t feel good. A few times I buzzed in attempt to demonstrate, and again I kind of wished I hadn’t. Instead, I sang A LOT. And I turned to good recordings A LOT. Also, my ability to verbally describe a sound grew. I created new analogies and visualizations to use to communicate with my students. It was frustrating at times (read: every time), but in retrospect I am sure I grew as a teacher and a musician.

We welcomed our son Henry on June 1st, 2018. He was healthy and we were all very happy! However, like most babies, he didn’t sleep the way adults like to sleep, so the first 4 weeks were very rocky. “Survival” is a word that comes to mind. After that, we found a rhythm, but coming back to trombone seemed very far from a reality. To be honest, it just wasn’t high on the priority list. My sons needed me and I needed to take care of myself by resting as much as possible.

Fast forward to mid-July, when I was invited to play in Opera Idaho’s production of West Side Story in September. I took the gig and suddenly my comeback plan needed to be defined.

For once, I felt like I had a large amount of time to really come back to the horn in an intentional, meditated way. So, I decided that I was going to do it right. I was going to plan it out, follow my plan, keep a journal, and take my time.

In this blog I will detail my comeback process. I’ll talk about the books I used, the plan I followed, and I’ll include excerpts from my journal.

Part 2 will cover the first three weeks of my comeback.

Part 3 will cover the last two weeks and my re-entry into “real life” playing.

Part 4 will summarize the lessons I learned.


Thank you for joining me!
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Part 2

After deciding that I would play my first gig in mid September of 2018, my next step was to plan my comeback. I knew exactly which book I needed to buy:

“Common Sense for COMEBACK CHOPS: A Trombonist’s Guide to Playing After an Extended Time Off” by Ken Ebo

Kind of like it was written for me, right?

There are plenty of reasons people take an extended time off the horn. Ken’s experience was that he was in the military and got deployed for a year of non-music work out of the country. He wasn’t allowed to bring his horn. Other people need to take time off for medical reasons, chop injuries, or any array of other life circumstances.

I think it’s important to make a clear distinction here. I am talking about planned, extended (more than a month) off from the horn. I am NOT talking about randomly taking multiple days off the horn in the middle of a period of time that you are working or in school. I believe the two are very different circumstances. As a brass educator, I think it is very important to play daily, promote healthy playing habits, and perform regularly throughout the school year. As a music student, it was imperative that I play every day, or very close to it. I’m not advocating large amounts of time off in those circumstances. A day off here and there can be good for recovery, but I wouldn’t suggest taking more than 3 days off per month if you are trying to maintain your chops and grow as a brass player.

Anyway…

The book arrived in mid July and I began to look into it. I used Ken’s model to help me plan the length and pacing of my comeback. He had a few preset plans, but I made a “custom” plan that took full advantage of the 40 days I had until the gig. I decided to spend 30 days getting back in shape, and then spend 10 days practicing the rep for the gig. It took me a few tries to get my plan so that it felt manageable but still allowed me enough rest and enough time at each stage.

(You can click on the picture for a clearer view)

You can probably imagine the content of each stage. I can’t go into it because Ken probably wouldn’t like it, but I was very thankful for his book. If left to my own devices, I would definitely want to A) move too fast, B) not rest enough, and/or C) play things that were too demanding too soon. By following his book, I only allowed myself to play the exercises in each stage. Nothing more, nothing less.

I started out with one session a day at first. It was only 10-15 minutes of playing, with lots of breaks in between every exercise. I always started with 10 reps of breathing on the incentive spirometer, then 1-2 minutes of buzzing. Then I’d play. Ken advocates buzzing frequently, so I’d go back and forth between playing and buzzing (and resting) for 15 minutes. By then my chops felt really tingly, and my time was up, so I’d pack up the horn until the next day.

The incentive spirometer: due to my pregnancy, my breathing muscles were all messed up. My lungs/diaphragm/abdomen had been cramped and unused for brass playing for a long time. My lung capacity felt drastically diminished, so I used the incentive spirometer to measure my lung capacity and attempt to improve it. When I started, I was at 2.5 liters, and by day 10 I was getting to 3.25 liters.

I got really detail oriented with my practice sessions so that I could stay focused and complete my tasks without any distraction. I timed my sessions with the timer on my phone, and stopped when my time was up. I turned the phone on to airplane mode so I wasn’t tempted to get distracted by social media or email. I kept a detailed journal and logged everything that I played. These were all great habits that I try to incorporate into my daily practice now.

In my journal, I had a column for my PLAN for the day, then another column for my ACTION, or what I actually did, and a third column that tracked my daily minutes of practice as well as my max incentive spirometer volume. I wrote notes about my sessions underneath. Over time the PLAN became the same every day: Breathe, Buzz, Play. The ACTION column simply kept track of how many times I did each and for how long. Here is a shot of my journal from days 3, 4, and 5.

“What was it like to get back into playing after that long?”

The greatest thing was: I sounded the same. Day 1, I played my horn and nothing had changed about my sound. What a relief! I suppose that part really was like riding a bike.

Another great thing was that I hadn’t lost any technique. What I had lost was endurance and control. These took the full 40 days to get back, so I couldn’t access my technique until I was through the program, but it was there. Once I had regained my “fitness,” I could access the articulation, flexibility, and all other technical ability that I had previously had. *whew*

The not so great, but expected, reality was that I had no endurance. My facial muscles were good for talking and eating, but definitely not good for playing an instrument. Completely gone. In the beginning, I also had no control. I could hold a long note pretty well, but couldn’t manipulate much past that. I remember, around day 4 or so, playing a simple slur exercise that Ken had in stage 1. I played it for my older son, and it was...not good. I was surprised and embarrassed...and worried. “Oh no! This is something I should be able to do!” But I learned soon that thoughts like these will come, and you have to let them go. It’s the great expectation that you have to leave at the door, and just trust the process. For 40 days, in my case. You can have the same standards that you have when you’re in shape, but you have to be OK with not meeting those standards. It takes a lot of patience. A lot.

It’s almost like meditation. You’re supposed to allow thoughts to enter you mind, see them for what they are, and let them go.

Allow the substandard sounds to happen, notate what they are, and let it go. Rinse and repeat, day after day, always aiming for the sound you have in your head.

I hit a bump in the road during week two and came down with a bad cold. This cold, mixed with very inconsistent sleep, left me feeling pretty terrible, but I only had one day where I really was unable to play (day 10). After that, the short practice sessions were manageable.

At the end of 3 weeks, I was feeling somewhat normal... sometimes. I had regained control of slow slurs, and I played my first “high B-flat.” However, I was still having difficulty playing a steady tone in the second partial (low B-flat), and hitting fatigue after 25-35 minutes of playing. To be honest, I had thought that I would be completely back to normal after three weeks of playing, but I wasn’t. It was important that I didn’t judge myself for this reality. Any guilt or doubt would only hinder the process. So, just like in meditation, I noticed that I wasn’t fully back to normal, and I let it go. I got back to work, following the plan. I had to trust the process.

This is how many minutes I spent on the horn per day for the first 3 weeks:

Week 1: 15, 15, 30, 30, 55, 40, 45
Week 2: 0, 55, 0, 55, 60, 65, 70
Week 3: 100, 50, 70, 80, 0, 75, 95

The fact that I had an 8-week-old baby to care for ultimately helped the process, I think. While I always felt like it was a struggle to find time to play (this baby liked to sleep ON me for his naps), the baby’s frequent sleep schedule actually worked quite well for my short practice spurts. I had to play in a practice mute the majority of the time, which wasn’t ideal, but it worked out. I tried to play on the open horn once a day to make sure I was maintaining a resonant sound.

If I hadn’t had a baby at home, my comeback would have looked different. Specifically, I think I would have tried to play more each day from the beginning, which probably wouldn’t have been a good idea. I liked the pacing of my plan. I liked it while I was playing it and I like it now, as I look back on it. So I suppose I owe the baby a “thank you” for helping me manage a healthy comeback! :):):)

Join me in Part 3 for the last 2 weeks of my comeback and my “re-entry” into real life playing!

And then in Part 4, I will summarize the lessons I learned in the process:)

Nervous When you Perform? You're Probably Breathing Too Much!

Wait, what?  That goes against everything we've ever been taught as brass players!  Let me explain.   You know the feeling when you are performing and start to feel anxious?  Your heart rate quickens and so does your pulse.  Your breathing gets shallow and you start to take a lot of them.  But somehow, you constantly feel out of breath.  Here's what's happening:

Consider a normal breath under relaxed circumstances.  You fill your lungs completely full of air, which is made up of slightly less than one-quarter oxygen and the rest nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and other gases.  We'll call all that stuff carbon dioxide for now because that's what most people understand.  While you are playing, your body uses most of the oxygen for, you know, staying alive.  The carbon dioxide is mostly blown into your horn.  Once you're out of air, you take another breath and the cycle repeats itself.  

But here's what happens when you're nervous.  Your heart rate quickens, causing all sorts of problems but most importantly, you take in extra breaths before you are fully out of air.  So here's what we end up with.  You take your first breath and your body uses the oxygen.  You blow some of the carbon dioxide into your instrument.   Then you take another breath, but this time you don't have your full lung capacity to work with because there's still some carbon dioxide left in there.  Again, your body uses the oxygen, you blow some of the carbon dioxide into your instrument, and then take anther breath too soon.  Now you have even less lung capacity to work with, and again, your body uses the oxygen.  At this point, you have a lot of carbon dioxide built up in your lungs and less and less oxygen to work with.  So you feel out of breath and continue taking too many breaths because your body is reporting that it's out of oxygen and panicking.  This is a dangerous cycle when you are already nervous!

You're taking more breaths but getting less oxygen!  So what are some solutions to this?  First of all, the easy solution to deal with this situation when it happens to you:

BLOW ALL THE AIR OUT OF YOUR LUNGS

Find a spot in the music when you can exhale completely and take a fresh breath to re-oxygenate.  Try this right now—blow all the air out of your lungs and take a nice big breath.  Do you feel how it instantly gives you extra energy?  This works pretty much all the time in performance.

Here's the way to avoid this problem in the first place:

PLAY WITH LOTS OF AIR SUPPORT AND LONG PHRASES

Most of us play with a weak and wimpy sound when we get nervous.  Make sure to keep putting lots of relaxed air into your instrument.  And even though your "fight or flight reflex" is telling you to take lots of extra breaths, save them for the ends of phrases, or when you're truly out of air.  This requires some mental discipline but it can be practiced.  Try running up and down the stairs a few times and then playing some long lyrical phrases when you're already out of breath.  The feeling is remarkably similar to what you feel when you're experiencing performance anxiety!  

These techniques won't completely cure nervous performing, but they will get you one step closer.  Good luck, and let me know how this works for you!

-Alex

The Only Resolution You Need to Make in 2015

Happy New Year!

Hopefully you had an enjoyable ringing in of the new year with friends and/or family. Maybe you went to dinner or maybe out for drinks, maybe you played games with your family, or watched the ball drop in Times Square. Maybe you just watched a movie and went to bed before midnight. It was your choice and I am sure you chose wisely. Now we’re on to one of the least successful times of the year. Yup, New Year’s resolution season. We all decide to do something that we’re going to do for the next two weeks and if it doesn’t stick, oh well. There’s always next year.

Building New Habits

I was having a conversation the other day with some friends about building new habits. Though the conversation was completely unrelated to music, I found myself (as I often do) applying some of our conversation to music. We talked about what was required to build a new habit and how long it takes. Different numbers were thrown around, so I decided to do some research. For many years, exercise gurus, dieticians, doctors, and educators sold the notion that you could create a new habit in 21 days. There have been plenty of articles about that, so I’ll just say that the origin of this magic number actually claims it takes a minimum of 21 days depending on the person and the habit. Here's some interesting and much more recent information on developing habits which claims it takes anywhere from 18-254 days to change a behavior.

So, let’s apply this to breathing while playing a wind instrument. Back in 6th grade, my band director told me to take a big breath and blow. Not realizing that I was basically tensing up my entire body on both the inhalation and the exhalation, that’s how I played for three years until I started taking private lessons, then went to college, etc. The point is that I breathe differently now than I did as a sixth grader and it was not a magical 21-day fix.

I use the words “free, easy, relaxed” when I describe the breath I want to take and I am fairly successful breathing that way in my practice. However, I struggle some days when my body or my mind is tired and I find myself taking less than ideal breaths. So, I must always choose to breathe the way that I know will help me sound best, no matter how difficult or easy the decision is that day.

Test Your Product

So far, I’ve only been talking about my practice sessions, so now let’s take into account the times that I am in various settings with different levels of stress or pressure. Should I breathe differently? No. Do I? Sometimes. I know that I did for a long time and there are still situations where I have to remind myself to be free, easy, and relaxed. When I was in orchestra or brass band or playing as a soloist, I’d be more nervous, and the first thing to go was my breathing. When your breathing goes, you use more muscle. When you actively use too much muscle, fatigue sets in much faster. When fatigue sets in, your brain starts to focus on how tired you are instead of on the music. I needed more opportunities to be in a pressure situation and be able to teach myself how to breathe, think, and relax in that setting. Thank you, Mirari! I perform way more now than I have in the past few years and I plan on keeping it that way.

There is a reason we stress to our students that everyone has to perform for people. You aren’t just getting another performance under your belt, you are teaching yourself how to behave when you are performing. It gives you a chance to get worked up but still breathe and play in the same way you do in your practice. How many times have you heard someone sound amazing in their warm-up and then like a completely different player when they perform? It’s because they are not testing their product. Can you imagine if your job was to build a boat for someone and you never tested to see if it would float before you gave it to the customer? You’ve got to see if it can withstand heat, cold, crashing waves, etc. Can you say “lawsuit”?  

I was fortunate to have Krista Jobson (flute, UT-PA) as a friend while earning my doctorate in Kansas City. I remember having a dress rehearsal for my lecture recital and Krista came to watch because she couldn’t make it to the actual recital (what a kind choice she made to support me, right?). My lecture recital was on unaccompanied trumpet pieces and I was playing some of the most technically challenging music I had ever attempted in my life. Having just one person whose opinion I valued made me ridiculously nervous. I had a pretty big breakdown on the first movement of Henze’s Sonatina. I asked if I could just have some time to work a few things out and she said, “sure, should I leave?” I said, “no, I need to do this while you are here.” She patiently waited as I refocused my brain and got back to playing the trumpet the way that I can. I played again and it was exponentially better than the first time, though it made me wish I had done that months prior. Live and learn. And I have not forgotten that lesson. I play for people as much as I possibly can.

Choose to Choose

One of the important words in the aforementioned study is the word “daily.” Someone in the study decided they wanted to drink a bottle of water with lunch. That means every time they ate lunch they drank a bottle of water. There was no lunch without a bottle of water. Do we really breathe the way we need to every single time we play our instrument? If we don’t, how can we expect that it will ever be a default behavior? That is not to say that if we forget once or twice, we’re screwed, and we’ll never be able to do it, but if we spend more time breathing the way we did in high school than the way we know we should, how will we ever get there?

My thought is that we won’t ever get there. We have a choice to make every time we pick up our instruments. We are choosing to breathe well, choosing to create the best possible tone, and choosing exactly how we want every note and phrase to sound. If we focus on consistently choosing what is best, a very strange thing happens after a while (yes, my ambiguity is intentional)--you get to the point where you can’t play something incorrectly unless you really try.

This new year, I have a new outlook. I believe that we would be more successful affecting change by focusing on the process of creating the habit than on the end result. You know, “oh, I changed my life in three weeks! I am a new person.” That rarely works. Instead, commit yourself everyday to making a choice, and then choosing what is best for you will become your habit.

Cheers and here’s to good choices in 2015!

Matt