Yesterday we held our annual Brass Day at Western, where I teach trumpet. Every year I offer a clinic, and this year my class was called “The Power of Scales.” Basically I attempted to summarize this series of articles over the course of an hour. No small feat! Here is a copy of the handout …
Sunday Scales, special supplement: Brass Day clinic Read More »
Today’s exercise has it all: a living history, virtuosity combined with artistry and even a little detective-work thrown into the mix. We’re talking about the famous Abblasen call by Gottfried Reiche.
Last week, we discussed translating major exercises to minor. Now we’ll go a step further and look at some exercises in the other modes. To me, modes were just a bunch of Greek names I memorized during undergraduate music theory. I never practiced them and I never played them (as far as I knew). But modes …
This week we’re going to talk about minor – I’m sure you know it’s important, but do you actually practice it? In my case, I never practiced it much for two reasons: first, most exercises and etudes are in major keys; and second, the three minor modes make it confusing to translate exercises to minor. …
Building on our efforts of two weeks ago, we’re back with more Plog (see below) and another attempt at memorization by chunking. This time, we’ll look at an exercise from volume three, built around the major second (M2) interval:
Let’s take a look at another Stamp exercise, this time from the Supplemental Studies: Yowza.
Anthony Plog’s “fingering exercises and etudes” from his Method for Trumpet (see below) make for fun practicing. This week we’ll take a look at Vol. 2, Ex. 7: At sixteen measures, this is on the longer side for a scale pattern. How are we going to memorize it? With two techniques. The first is already in …
Chris Gekker is one of my favourite trumpeters, for his many recordings as a soloist and with the American Brass Quintet (1 2 3), for his writings (see: one of my favourite articles about practicing trumpet) and for his book Articulation Studies. Even though, as the title suggests, the book is intended to assist articulation, …
Max Schlossberg is primarily known to brass players today as the “author” of the book Daily Drills and Technical Exercises. This book contains exercises by Schlossberg, however it was only put together after his death by his son-in-law Harry Freistadt, and it can be a bit confusing to work through. In his day, though, Schlossberg was a …
Last week, I showed how we could start generating scale patterns built around the circle of fifths. As promised, we’re going to up the stakes this week. As you might recall, we created two kinds of exercises: “templates” (large patterns for navigating the circle of fifths) and “cells” (little patterns to play on each note …