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Thanks for posting, Luca! I take it that eventually the video did go through? I’ll have to look into this some more and see if there’s something going on with the video posting settings if this wasn’t the video you were having trouble with…
In the meantime, a couple observations:
1. I know I said to be wary of doing too many repetitions in a previous comment, but at least from this video, it seems like there were a couple times when you moved on to add a new note pretty quickly, without having established a comfort level with the previously added note. If say, you find it takes about 5 reps after adding a new note to the existing group to get to an accurate level of performance, do you have a set number of “overlearning” reps in mind to lock it in? Like another 3-5-7 or so reps beyond the first successful repetition?
2. Maybe you’ve already mentioned this, but have you experimented with reverse chaining? Where instead of doing Bflat, Bflat+Bflat, Bflat+Bflat+A, you would start at say the C#, then the Bnatural+C#, then C#+Bnatural+C#, etc. It can be a little more challenging for wind players, because you have to think about where in your breath you’ll be, but I wonder if reverse chaining might actually be more helpful in this passage than forward chaining.
3. Take this with a grain of salt, because I know nothing about the bassoon, but it sounds a bit to me like you might be more focused on note precision and evenness than phrasing in your chaining. Is that possible? I wonder if it would help to think about phrase direction and which notes you mean to emphasize – like are you thinking about emphasizing the Bflat, E, and C# and driving to each of those notes, like 123, 223, 323. Or are you thinking more about bringing out the 2nd note in each group, like Bflat, G, E – like 123, 223, 323? Or both? Or are you thinking about clipping the 8th notes a little and making it a little like a string player retaking the bow between 1 and 2 vs. how you’d play it if the slurs went across each group of 3 instead of crossing over into the next group of 3? Playing around with how you think of the direction of the phrase and note groupings may also help to organize the fluidity/coordination of your physical movements.
4. Keep in mind too that there’s always going to be a gap between what you can do technically at the present, and the ideal that you hear in your mind. What you hear in your head and aspire to is always going to be a few steps ahead of what you can currently do, so as helpful as chaining can be, it’s also not going to get you all the way to “perfect.” If you can get to a pretty fluid and “pretty good” version of playing through chaining, there are going to be some sticking points that you may need to work out in your deliberate practice phase. And some things that may just need some additional time and seasoning to be able to execute at the level you want as well. In the same way that you can undoubtedly do some things now that you couldn’t 6 months or a year or two ago, that may have frustrated you or perhaps didn’t even cross your radar back then.
