How to use a drone?

[dbwhitaker]

I'm interested in tips about how to use a drone, such as what kind of tone to use, as well as what kind of equipment to play it through. Tips on what kind of practice to do is welcome, too.

I've tried cello drones and "electronic" tones but those tones don't seem to "blend" enough with my trombone sound to be very helpful. The cello sound is "rough" and the electronic tones (e.g. from TE Tuner) is "thin". Sound from an iPhone/iPad is pretty weak. Using a portable bluetooth speaker is an improvement but not great. Am I doing this wrong?

[AtomicClock]

I have the same questions, especially with regard to a phone not being loud enough. (I still use an electromechanical metronome because it's very loud.) The best solution I've found so far is to use a single wireless earbud. I'd almost prefer a standalone tone generator box with real knobs and switches, if such a thing exists.

[Kdanielsen]

Careful with earbuds. You can damage your hearing.

[Burgerbob]

I have to use my serious stereo setup, and I have to have it playing pretty loud to actually work.

[tbdana]

I have a more basic question: what is a drone and what's it supposed to do? Is it just a note that is played on and on, and you use it to tune to? Sorry for the ignorance, but if you don't ask stupid questions you don't learn.

[Kbiggs]

I have a more basic question: what is a drone and what's it supposed to do? Is it just a note that is played on and on, and you use it to tune to? Sorry for the ignorance, but if you don't ask stupid questions you don't learn.

Yes. Playing scales, arpeggios, licks, etc., against a drone isolates your part in an interval. It's a pedagogical and practice tool.

When people don't know how to play in tune, it takes a good teacher to show them and get them to hear and feel what playing in tune is like. Once the teacher has shown them, then they can use a drone to do the same thing in the practice room.

Example: if a student doesn't know what a major third in a major chord sounds like, it takes someone like a teacher to point it out. Teacher plays a C, student plays and E, student fishes around until the "Ah ha!" moment.

Then the teacher should say, "Now let's try it with a drone." Enter a drone CD, an app, a site on the interwebs, etc. It "feels" different, like Aidan said, but it's a matter of listening. Then it's on to P5, P4, M3 at the top of a minor chord, m3, then on to chords.

[dbwhitaker]

I have to use my serious stereo setup, and I have to have it playing pretty loud to actually work.

That makes sense. What do you like to use as a source of the tones?

[dbwhitaker]

I have a more basic question: what is a drone and what's it supposed to do? Is it just a note that is played on and on, and you use it to tune to? Sorry for the ignorance, but if you don't ask stupid questions you don't learn.

One of my teacher's suggested using this to practice with (also available on Spotify):


A different teacher told me they personally use this:

[AtomicClock]

what is a drone and what's it supposed to do?

You fly them over New Jersey to scare people.

[Burgerbob]

I have to use my serious stereo setup, and I have to have it playing pretty loud to actually work.

That makes sense. What do you like to use as a source of the tones?

I use those Spotify cello drones myself. Sometimes as the root, sometimes as the fifth.

[AndrewMeronek]

I have a more basic question: what is a drone and what's it supposed to do? Is it just a note that is played on and on, and you use it to tune to? Sorry for the ignorance, but if you don't ask stupid questions you don't learn.

Drones are awesome, and there's actually a whole lot that you can dive into with drone practice. But yes, to start - just playing scales or melodies to a drone gets you going well.

Playing with drones is ear-based practice instead of sight-based (i.e., using tuners). You technically *could* use a drone in combination with a tuner, but if you do so, focus on the standard adjustments to pitch to be "in tune" compared to equal temperament. If you have a good drone with proper harmonic overtones, the colors should pop out. Example tuning tendencies (in cents) with C major:

C: 0
D: +4
E: -14
F: -2
G: +2
A: -16
B: -12

If you want a more detailed explanation of where those numbers come from, there are many resources around the internet. I think that Kyle Gann has a really nice writeup here:

https://www.kylegann.com/tuning.html

The ultimate goal here is to get your ears tuned up to be able to play in an ensemble and recognize the color of these intervals almost instantly, and adjust. It's not about rigid adherence to just intonation, but using that context to improve your tuning flexibility in many circumstances.

[muschem]

I start every day with drone work, using lip slurs and intervals of 4ths/5ths throughout my usable range. I use an iPad for music, and there are a lot of apps with drone functionality built in (many of which have already been mentioned). I like and use an iOS app called drone tuner (http://www.drone-tuner.com/). It uses recorded samples from actual instruments, rather than electronic synth, and it includes a trombone option. That app also has a really interesting visual feedback system, that I find helpful as an additional point of reference. The combination of both auditory and visual feedback has been very useful for me. I think the app cost around $10, but the value proposition (for me) has been very positive.

[2bobone]

I have never had occasion to interact with "drones" and find it hard to understand what possible value they add to a good musical experience. If it is a matter of good intonation, it should be pointed out that in a lot of modern music, dissonance is not considered to be a flaw but is lauded as a feature and has no connection to absolute intonation. Is this a comparative issue of learning to paint a perfect representation of a subject before you can become an abstract artist ? Any piano tuner can attest to the fact that compromise is the issue with which they need to be concerned. The "Well Tempered Clavier" was a musical document meant to showcase compromise and succeeded in excellent fashion . I am totally serious when I ask for the reasons to practice with drones. Can anyone enlighten me ? What am I missing ?

[AndrewMeronek]

If it is a matter of good intonation, it should be pointed out that in a lot of modern music, dissonance is not considered to be a flaw but is lauded as a feature and has no connection to absolute intonation.

Dissonance is a surprisingly complex topic. Yes, controlling dissonance in some sense is one possible interpretation of doing drone practice. But, you can practice controlling extremely crunchy intervals with drone practice, just like you can practice controlling the "sweet" intervals.

I will disagree that there is no connection. I think that there are many. For starters, 12ET is a thing in the first place because it does a somewhat surprisingly good job of approximating perfect fourths and fifths.

Is this a comparative issue of learning to paint a perfect representation of a subject before you can become an abstract artist ?

This is a reasonable way of looking at it.

[timothy42b]

I have never had occasion to interact with "drones" and find it hard to understand what possible value they add to a good musical experience.

If you always play with high level people, who have good pitch and good tone, then you can interact with them.

We amateurs don't always have that available.

[Matt K]

The only one I've had success with - and I would consider it to be a pretty resounding success - is the Tuning CD:

It's available for purchase from Richard Schwartz on the typical places (spotify, apple music, etc.).

I pretty much only use them with a beefy set of speakers or soundbar. If you don't have good bass / fundamental, it doesn't work all that well. Although I have used them with my iPhone speakers in a pinch and it's fine it's, to your point, not particularly satisfying.

I do the typical things people do for warmups and exercises aginst them: "long-tones" (I do a diatonic type exercise such as Bb -> A -> Ab; Bb -> A -> G; Bb -> Ab -> G; Bb -> Ab -> Gb or the inverse. In this case over a Bb drone that will give you a large assortment of the possible intervals you will play), flexibilities (e.g. remington flexibility stuff), high range (arpeggios from altissimo Bb down to around pedal Eb), and melodies (basic stuff from the rochut, or just whatever I have in my ear in all 12 keys).

Melodies include dissonances. YOu can play a dissonance out of tune. If anything, those dissonances are going to be the most likely thing to play out of tune. Most people don't practice how a minor second, b13, #9 etc. sound.

[2bobone]

"If you always play with high level people, who have good pitch and good tone, then you can interact with them. We amateurs don't always have that available."

I never thought of it as a pro versus amateur issue. I thought it might be a newly realized approach to intonation issues that confront us all. I wonder if there are musicians among us who never had to deal with such issues simply because they possessed that certain "something" that made them exceptional with no effort involved on their part ?
We all know someone who has "perfect pitch" and I always wondered how different my perception of the world of music would have been had I had that trait to rely on. I knew a wonderful trumpet player who would drive his car by the pitch that was emitted by his tires humming on the tarmac, totally relying on his gift of perfect pitch. I guess it could drive you crazy if you had to play in a group that tuned to A=443 or something equally opposed to the agreed A=440 tuning. I did have good "relative pitch" which would allow me to use any pitch as a starting point and I could easily build around that starting point. It has always been very useful. I've known VERY successful professionals who couldn't improvise a single note and whatever they played had to be written on the page. So it appears that some of us have "something" and some of us have less than "something" and require different aids to get to the same place. Any thoughts ?

[2bobone]

"I will disagree that there is no connection. I think that there are many. For starters, 12ET is a thing in the first place because it does a somewhat surprisingly good job of approximating perfect fourths and fifths."

I worked in the Music Division Laboratory of The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. for several years. One of the many interesting instruments that I worked on was a harpsichord with an unusual keyboard. It looked normal expect for the fact that the "black" keys [as we would relate to a modern piano] were divided into an upper and lower portion. Depending on what musical key the music was written in, a different portion of the key was utilized supposedly to achieve perfect intonation in every key ! I can't imagine how frustrating it was for a tuner to parse these minute differences. Obviously, the idea never caught on and eventually "Equal Temperament" seized the crown. It's a compromise, as we all know but thankfully we have reached an agreement as to where home base is located. Or have we ?

[AndrewMeronek]

Obviously, the idea never caught on and eventually "Equal Temperament" seized the crown. It's a compromise, as we all know but thankfully we have reached an agreement as to where home base is located. Or have we ?

In music of the Western European tradition, yes. I think it's mostly because the piano became such a dominant instrument.

BTW, the idea did stick for a couple of centuries - up until about the middle of the Baroque when distant key changes were becoming more common.

[robcat2075]

For drone tones I liked using "Chromatia Tuner" on my PC, which can produced any pitch in nearly any of 40+ temperaments and in "just" tuning also. It is a rock solid pitch I could compare myself to. It is just electronic sine, square, or sawtooth waves but i didn't find those bothersome.

When playing cello I have found it extremely interesting and instructive to set the pitch to any step of a just scale and then play each note of the scale against that. It is fascinating to experience that there is a right place for even a tri-tone or a half step.

Of course this is but one atom of the skill of playing in tune in an ensemble.

I've had trouble transferring this experience to trombone. Being in or out of tune seems much more obvious on the cello. Perhaps it has something to do with the less-direct way we experience trombone sound versus that of a cello.

BTW, I also like "The Intonation Repair Tool" for the way it guides you to play play in tune in scales and chords.

I have never had occasion to interact with "drones" and find it hard to understand what possible value they add to a good musical experience.

I've never had any experience with archery targets and I find it hard to understand what possible value they add to shooting an arrow.

If it is a matter of good intonation, it should be pointed out that in a lot of modern music, dissonance is not considered to be a flaw but is lauded as a feature and has no connection to absolute intonation.

I will point out that a lot of modern music makes up a very tiny percentage of what musicians are tasked with playing in real world circumstances.

I played lots of modern atonal music in college, we even did a world premiere of a major work by the world's foremost 12-tone composer. Since then, no ensemble I've ever been in has bothered with it. It has a prominence in the academic environment that is completely out of step with the realities of music.

A-list orchestras will maybe do one a year, probably a new commission, and i suspect there's some sort of composer-donor-patron situation that causes this to persist. The audiences are not asking for it and the new work is immediately forgotten.

I would be far better off today if all the time spent analyzing those terribly clever permutations of 12-tone rows had been spent on cultivating solid intonation.

[DaveAshley]

I use Tonal Energy tone generator and AirPods (without the rubber ends) for practicing drones, always setting the volume on my iPhone/iPad at least one or two clicks below max.

My favorite melody to use is "In A Silent Way"
https://musescore.com/user/28153047/scores/8405750

[LeTromboniste]

I worked in the Music Division Laboratory of The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. for several years. One of the many interesting instruments that I worked on was a harpsichord with an unusual keyboard. It looked normal expect for the fact that the "black" keys [as we would relate to a modern piano] were divided into an upper and lower portion. Depending on what musical key the music was written in, a different portion of the key was utilized supposedly to achieve perfect intonation in every key ! I can't imagine how frustrating it was for a tuner to parse these minute differences. Obviously, the idea never caught on and eventually "Equal Temperament" seized the crown.

The idea very much did catch on: meantone was the dominant tuning system for 200+ years, and keyboards with at least one, most typically two and sometimes more split keys (with 13, 14 or more notes per octave) were not at all uncommon in the 16th to early 18th centuries. Enharmonic instruments like the archicembalo and archiorgano, featuring 19+ keys per octave, were more rare, but not completely unique either. The latter do take a long time to tune just because of the huge number of strings or pipes, but the more common layout with 2 extra keys per octave would not be frustrating to tune. In fact, without a modern electronic tuner, it's much easier to tune a good-sounding quarter-comma meantone, with all those pure thirds, than trying to achieve a perfectly equal 12TET where not a single interval is pure. i.e. Tuning the D# string so that it's a pure major third over B, and the Eb so it's a pure major third below G, is really easy, and faster despite the extra string involved than tuning an Eb/D# that is almost but not quite exactly a pure fifth to both Bb and Ab, and far from a pure anything to any other note, and making sure that everything around the octave is equally bad (because if anything is better, it means something else is worse, and potential unusable).

On the other hand, equal temperament didn't catch on in Europe for the first 250+ years. It was described and used for certain specific contexts, but the things it's good at were not particularly desirable for the musical language of the time, and it's awfully bad at the things that were. Equal temparement has only been the main tuning system in Western classical music for less than half the time since first described in the West.

Going back on topic, equal temperament has very little relevance to trombone-playing. I can't think of a single playing situation in my life where I've played strictly in equal temperament. Even in the most equal-oriented situations, where you might need to match the piano or the rhythm section, there's almost always at least a small amount of compromising towards pure intervals, otherwise section chords never ring. Playing with drones is great for discovering where each note needs to be in specific harmonic contexts and for training your ear and your slide arm to be flexible with how much deviation can be needed from what one might think is the "default" placement of notes on the slide, and just getting used to the feel and colour of pure intervals.

On the other hand, there's a big caveat that's not mentioned often enough, and it's that because they are harmonically static, drones won't help you develop the anticipation to be able make adjustments on the fly when the harmonic context changes, which IMO is at least as important as the previous element. Drones are useful tool but shouldn't be the only one you use. They're not a panacea. I know people who practice with drones a ton but are nonetheless much less in tune when playing in ensembles than they think they are...who might be very good at fishing for the right intonation and finding it quickly, but not necessarily at reliably landing on the right spot right away in the first place.

[AndrewMeronek]

On the other hand, there's a big caveat that's not mentioned often enough, and it's that because they are harmonically static, drones won't help you develop the anticipation to be able make adjustments on the fly when the harmonic context changes, which IMO is at least as important as the previous element.

This is a big reason why I threw together these:



so people can play along and get this different context.

In hindsight, I now know there are some things that I'd want to do differently if I had the time to rework the idea.

[LeTromboniste]

On the other hand, there's a big caveat that's not mentioned often enough, and it's that because they are harmonically static, drones won't help you develop the anticipation to be able make adjustments on the fly when the harmonic context changes, which IMO is at least as important as the previous element.

This is a big reason why I threw together these:



so people can play along and get this different context.

In hindsight, I now know there are some things that I'd want to do differently if I had the time to rework the idea.

Yes! This is exactly the type of tools I mean!

[Matt K]

The Michael Davis warm-up has a selection of very similar exercises with Michael Davis playing the "accompaniment" part. That's another excellent resource. There's one, for example, that has you doing a IV -> V7 -> I type pattern in all 12 keys.

[robcat2075]

Tuning in the string world...

-There's a notable old Russian violin method (Otakar Ševčík) that strives to teach both pure and equal tempered tuning from the outset by playing fingered notes against neighboring open strings. Comparing a fingered E on the D string when it is a major sixth above the G string versus when it is a perfect fourth below the A string is an early example. The book implies a heavy time commitment from a teacher to make this work.

- I recall a prominent cellist interview in which he said his teacher told him, "[Just] tuning... that's for Bach. Everything else, we do in equal temperament."

- One of my facebook friends got into the Cleveland Orchestra cello section at a young age. After he had been there for several weeks of rehearsals and concerts one of the string players came over from the other side of the orchestra and said, "Billy, in this orchestra, we play in... a tempered scale."



Tuning in the brass world...

In my trombone life, from beginner band through the graduate level, I've had nine different teachers that I took weekly private lessons from for at least one academic term. Intonation was mentioned once. A trombone method book might have a position chart that noted some pitches needed to be # or b but it never came up in lessons.

In ensembles over those years, a conductor might admonish the players, "you must learn to use your ear". That is more of a slogan than actual pedagogy but that is about all the thinking about intonation that I did. It wasn't until i began playing cello that I started wondering about precise placement.

Too late to really master it, but it reveals to me how deficient the trombone instruction was.

[Savio]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai0V6n4vJec

I put this link because it's my most unpopular performance ever. It still has something to do with drones. The playback is both a kind of a drone and a metronome put together. And some more factor's to add is the possibility to make phrasing, make music, understand a style. I love old pop music from my younger days and this one is an old hit from Barbra Streisand!

Of course it's just a tool, can't be compared to play with real musicians. Both drones, metronomes or playbacks is tools but each of them can be useful. Drones to separate intonation, metronom to make it in time. Playback to try everything. Musicality is in the end with other people we play with. Either its our school band, big band or Chicago Symphony. Intonation can be trained like anything else.

Leif

[johntarr]

Brad Edwards has a whole book devoted to tuning drone melodies.

[dbwhitaker]

Brad Edwards has a whole book devoted to tuning drone melodies.

Thanks for pointing that out. The free sample on his web site even contains an intro section that answers some of my questions in the original post. (I think I overlooked this book because I already have so many Brad Edward’s books in my library.)