Making Music with a Metal Allergy

When you have a severe metal allergy, playing certain instruments presents an itchy challenge. While I crave making music, it simply wasn't worth the fluid filled blisters and swelling around my face.

So what's a musician to do? Not play metal instruments? NEVER! 

There are solutions - maybe not conventional looking solutions, but solutions nonetheless. 

Here are the budget friendly solutions I have found when gold and silver didn't make the hypoallergenic list - and they work!

For the brass family, there are these wonderful beauties - Kelly mouthpieces. Fully plastic and fully hypoallergenic.

Stainless Steel mouthpieces are available, but less than budget friendly.

Flutes are more complicated than the brass family - and no, plastic lip plates are not a thing. But Blue Painter's tape is!

By creasing a piece of wide tape around the edges of the lip plate, you can cut a close fitting cover...         

 Depending on how severe the allergy is, more of the head joint can be covered with tape, as well as other points of contact with the hands.

Blue painters tape doesn't leave a residue, and the beautiful part is - the effect on sound is minimal.

I have found that I am more sensitive to different alloys - I don't need to cover this much of the head joint when using solid silver, but nickle causes a reaction with mere proximity... no contact required!

Nuvo and Allora plastic instruments are new options for the metallic challenged musicians. Stainless steel is a highly hypoallergenic alloy, but unfortunately, at a high cost when it comes to instruments.

But the good news is... there are options! A metal allergy need not determine what methods of music making are open to you!

If you have found other solutions, I would love to hear about them! Leave a comment with your blue (or any other color) solutions.

The MYELINATOR

Yes, I made that word up.

This is the single most useful thing to have in a practice room - and not just for my students! As an ADDer, this awkward little contraption helps me stay on track when I'm working sections of a piece - because "SHINY!" happens quite frequently in my practice room.

The Melinator...

You see correctly -
  - two clothes pins
  - one tiny dowel (1/8 inch I believe)
  - 15 large beads
  - and a lot of hot glue
It can clip to a music stand, a book, rest on top of a piano - it's basically a music room abacus.

But what do you do with it?

It counts the number of repetitions done while chunk practicing. The beads slide across to the opposite side of the dowel each time you play a chunk of music - CORRECTLY. Only when the repetition was done correctly does the bead get to move across. This sounds simple, but is incredibly difficult to do 15 times correctly.. and then in a row.

The magic behind FIFTEEN:

There is something about the number 15 that is magical in a practice room - or when you are learning any other skill for that matter. The first five consecutive times you do something will be laborious and painstaking - or just annoying. The second set of five repetitions will go significantly smoother - until you hit number 10. Right around the tenth rep, something snaps. The chunk you have just played successfully 9 times in a row simply will not be played. Just when you thought you had it, your brain disengages, it disappears and you have to slow down again to regain control - and reengage your brain. But it's when you push past that wall to play a third set of five that big learning happens. The battle has been waged, but this time won. When you come back to that section the next day, thes ease with which it comes back into your fingers (or mouth) evokes an involuntary sigh of relief. It stuck!

Don't believe me? Try it! Grab a piece of music (something that furrows your brow, not that piece from three years ago...) and try to play even 11 times - in a row - without crashing. Keep in mind, you won't notice what is going on if you have been practicing already; the wall will be far too subtle. To experience face-planting into the 10 rep wall, use material that is at the far reaches of your ZPD (zone of proximal development). Is this not painful? And sad, how accurate the math can be...

Learning is greatly accelerated when we push past the moment when the brain has shut down and move into intentional learning. This is where having a learning disability has made me keenly aware of the learning process; my brain needs more reps in varied contexts to turn practice into skill. Having the visual of the myelinator became incredibly helpful in giving my brain what it needed to learn.

Somewhere out there is research on why the brain responds this way after 15 repetitions. But that is what google.scholar is for. To quote Dr. Suzuki: "Knowledge is not skill. Knowledge plus ten thousand times is skill." It takes around two years to do something ten thousand times - if you do it 15 times a day. Skill is being able to do something correctly without even thinking about it. With these numbers, the skill becomes part of you - cognition not required. Is it any wonder musicians describe music as being part of who they are? They may not realize what is going on, but the act of music is being woven into the fabric of their brain and becoming part of their being.