Tone exercises? What's that?

 I realize that, at the above title, most of you are probably thinking of something drastically different than I am. 

   You're probably thinking about a gym workout. About muscle tone. The sort of exercise that makes you stronger.

   Sorry. The kind of tone we're talking about here has nothing to do with how your arms look. It has everything to do with what your ears hear. This is more along the lines of "tone of voice," only it's "tone of playing" instead. So what does good tone on the piano sound like? I turn to Edwin Gnandt's book, The Soul of the Music (which I've previously reviewed here), for our definition.

   "Singing tone is a sound that is rich and ringing, yet velvet and warm at the same time. It is never harsh or strident and certainly never forced.... However, singing tone ultimately comes from the pianist, not the piano: even if the piano has the capability for singing tone, only the touch of a sensitive pianist can produce such sound. Thus, good singing tone relies both on the instrument and -- even more importantly -- on the pianist's ability to extract and project beautiful sound, to bring the richest and warmest sounds out of the instrument." Pages 1-2

   I was a banger growing up. My teachers and Festival adjudicators were always admonishing me not to bang so much. I simply thought they meant I was being too loud. I was, but for years I didn't understand that my volume wasn't the main problem. The main problem was that I had a knack for pulling the harsh, clanging tones out of my instrument rather than the warm, majestic ones. (Someday I'll have to write about how that caused some confusion in my teenage brain when I started lessons with Mr. B.) 

   It wasn't till I was working on my Grade 10 exams that I came to a teacher who taught me to listen to the tone I was producing. And how to produce good tone with full volume. But, as you can imagine, that's still a struggle for me. 

   Thankfully, like all great teachers, he didn't just say, "Here's what you should sound like, go do it." Instead, he taught me kinesthetically, making me play different ways, making me listen, listen, listen. So when I say I'm practicing tone exercises, that's what I'm doing. I'm doing all over again the things my teacher made me do. Playing long notes, making my notes all exactly the same volume, playing the same note until I get the tone I want. It's hard to do when you just want to play a song. But in order to achieve that velvet touch, it's 100% necessary for me to slow down, to not look at the forest, but to study the tree (to turn the old metaphor on its head). That's why practicing my tone is one of the things on my practice list this summer.

   Tone exercises aren't about making your fingers strong. Tone exercises are about making your ear strong and your touch warm.