We've talked about in another video techniques for beginning
a piece so there're one upbeat or two upbeats.
When we're in rehearsal we often find that we need either techniques.
Either because we're starting some place other than the
beginning of the piece so we need a little
more security to get people into that groove or
because we're changing tempos as we're learning a piece.
We might start slowly and then change it to a faster
tempo, and then to a faster tempo so we want to
make sure people feel that groove confidently and we don't have
to start and stop just simply because people aren't in the grove.
We always want to strive for the ideal of just one
upbeat and no oral cue whatsoever because it's the most efficient.
The more extra preparatory beats that we give and the more
vocal cues that we give, we just wind up wasting time.
So, let's say we were going to give one upbeat and
we wanted to give a little more security than just [NOISE].
Although that's pretty clear.
What we can add is an oral cue so, we can say four, one, two.
That's, we're assuming we're in four, four and for the
purpose of these demonstrations let's just assume we're in four, four.
Although really the convention in, in this if you're on
the last beat of of a measure is to say and.
So, even though it's one, two, three, four,
we'd say one, two, three, and one, two.
It's just a convention, you don't have to use it that way.
If we back up, and become a little bit more inefficient, but
give perhaps a little more security, we have the two beat method.
So here we have dead, active!
Or you know, passive, active!
With a breath on the active beat.
Silently is more efficient.
[SOUND]
But if we want to give a little more security, we can add a vocal cue.
So we'd say in, if, if we're in four, four we'd say three, four.
Or, three and.
And we have a little more sense of active in the
way say that last beat, to make sure it's an active beat.
If we go three and.
Or [SOUND].
Then someone's going to play early because we have two active beats.
Okay let's back up to give three preparatory beats
without a vocal cue it would be [SOUND] or [SOUND].
If we want to give, a little bit of, a
little bit more security, we can add the vocal cue.
Two, three, four.
Or, two, three, and.
Whatever happens to be the, defending, depending, which version you prefer.
But notice how we're relatively passive on
the two preparatory beats before beat four?
And I start right on beat two.
Two, three, and then we go on.
Oh, lets back off and do a full measure.
Lot of people use this as their bread and butter technique and I would encourage
you not to always count off four beats when by saying and saying four beats.
It just wastes too much time and over
the course of a year you're going to, that's an
hour or so perhaps of rehearsal time you
could have back if you just didn't do that.
But sometimes we need it.
And so the style of method would be [NOISE].
Silent except for that audible breath to help the active beat.
Notice how I'm starting sort of up and I'm just dropping right to one.
One, two, three, and boom and that would be the vocal the, the oral cue method.
One, two, three and or one, two, three, four.
And then we go that way.
So experiment with these different techniques but
just know that we want to strive
for no vocal cues and as few preparatory beats as possible for maximum efficiency.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Dr. Evan FeldmanAssociate Professor & Wind Ensemble Conductor
