Sonority for Winds:
Tuning, Balancing and Blending Ensemble Harmony
(Winds Vol. 21)

Ideal harmonic balance to strengthen smaller ensembles

Clinician: Yasutaka Kaneda
Percussion Coach: Michiko Kimura

Introduction:
Individual tone quality is essential to creating a good band sound, especially in smaller groups. For the ensemble, good unison playing and blend are the first priority, and second is accurate intonation. This clinic presents methods for understanding and producing correct balance and blend of unison and harmony.

Unison training:
The clarinet section leads long tone scale exercieses while the ensemble identifies and generates essential overtones. With good intonation, voice balance can be altered to affect ideal tonal coloration for ensemble size and instrumentation.

Harmony training:
While band members study and understand chord structure, methods of hearing and identifying overtones are presented. The clinican demonstrates the distinctive character of major, minor, augmented and diminished triads in careful details.

Harmony training applied to music:
Before playing harmony, unisons must be tuned and balanced. An example, melodic lines can be applied to scale study exercises. Well-blended unisons then create ideal harmonies which are analyzed in order to produce correct harmonic balance.

Conclusion:
Analyzing chords and understanding their character gives music performance an entirely new dimension. Basic training and performance must be inter-related to rehearse effectively and achieve correct sound and musicality.

BONUS TRACK - Tuning of Percussions:
Percussion has an important role in changing tone colors. In particular, snare and bass drums add greatly to the ensemble sound when tuned properly. Percussionist Michiko Kimura demonstrates some tuning concepts.