Hello and welcome to Playing Well! I’m Randall Kertz, a chiropractor, acupuncturist, and bassist in private practice in suburban Chicago, and I specialize in injury prevention, treatment, and management for musicians, a topic I write and lecture about extensively. It is a pleasure to be writing/editing this monthly series, and I look forward to our journey in learning more about playing well.
What playing well means to me and what I would like to get across is that many times our enjoyment of playing music can be lessened or stopped altogether by pain or injury due to factors that, if understood properly, can be controlled or avoided. These include things like posture, technique, length of playing time, not warming up properly, playing through pain, and many other factors that can impede our progress. Many times, by identifying these potential problems in their early stages, we can avoid or manage them in such a way that they don’t become major issues and we can go about making music. Usually, this doesn’t involve a major overhaul of a player’s style or technique, but instead suggests small changes that the player many times won’t even notice except that their problem is gone or can be controlled by them.
Examining and promoting awareness of these issues in the player is the goal of this column, and will take the form of videos, sometimes text and photos, sometimes both. I invite you to take part in this, your column, whether a beginner, advanced, professional, young, old, no matter what instrument or instrument family, there’s a lot to learn together, so if you have some ideas of things you’d like to address, please feel free to reach out to myself or Making Music, and we can all enjoy playing well.
See you next month!
