Sunday Scales 20: Abblasen
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.
Sunday Scales 19: À la mode
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 …
Sunday Scales 18: Minor misunderstandings
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. …
Sunday Scales 17: More Plog, more chunks
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:
Sunday Scales 16: Stamp (part 3)
Let’s take a look at another Stamp exercise, this time from the Supplemental Studies: Yowza.
Sunday Scales 15: Divide and conquer the chunks
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 …
Sunday Scales 14: Mr. Gekker
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, …
Sunday Scales 13: Mr. Schlossberg
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 …
Sunday Scales 12: Fifths factory (part two)
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 …
Sunday Scales 11: Fifths factory (part one)
Building on what we saw in Part 5, today we’re going to cook up some more scale patterns. There are plenty of scales out there in trumpet-land, but few follow the circle of fifths (you can see one of my own in Part 8). Today I’m going to lay out some puzzle pieces, and you can …