This week’s pattern is a current favourite of mine. The exercise comes from Warm-ups and Studies by James Stamp. The hieroglyphics, fermatas and repeats in Stamp’s exercises can be intimidating. When I was seventeen and first saw the book it looked like a foreign language. But it made more and more sense as I matured, learned about …
Before this week’s challenge, I want to talk for a moment about good practice habits and how they apply to these scale patterns. There are a few basic concepts at work, but it’s important to know the appropriate role for each:
Last time, I described my approach to learning and practicing scale patterns. Summary: learn the pattern, memorize it, and transpose it from memory. As my colleague and former teacher Shawn Spicer once said to me, “You don’t memorize scales, you know scales.” I find it fascinating how this approach is standard practice for jazz musicians but completely outside …
One of the biggest changes in my own practice on the trumpet has been quietly building over the past few years. It started with my Arban’s method, specifically #47 near the beginning of the book: This is a classic Arban articulation study, and as you can see it is very repetitive! First, I “memorized” the study. …
Today I’m offering a trumpet clinic at the OMEA SoundScapes 2014 convention titled: “Upside-down trumpet: counter-intuitive aspects of brass playing.” I’ve included the slides to the presentation in this post, and anyone with follow-up questions is welcome to contact me by email at ahodgson@uwo.ca Hodgson – OMEA Clinic Handout
In my efforts to update our trumpet jury requirements here at Western, I’ve created a repertoire list. These pieces come from a variety of sources, but most heavily I’ve consulted David Hickman’s excellent book Trumpet Pedagogy (hickeys link) as well as a repertoire list posted online by Luis Engelke here. It’s not an exhaustive list …
Here’s another resource I made for trumpet students. Much of this information comes from David Hickman’s excellent book, Trumpet Pedagogy. It would be a lot of fun to turn this into a more interactive online page with some video examples for different brands/types of mutes. Put a mute in it!
Call me crazy, but the start of the school year is one of my favourite times of the year. There is so much excitement in the air, so much promise, and your days are filled with old and new faces. Everyone is recharged and all the bitterness and frustration from previous years is momentarily set …
I can still remember the moment the trumpet picked me. Like many kids in the suburbs, I took piano lessons at a community music school. Every few months they’d have a recital where all the kids would put on their Sunday best and sing “Take me to the church on time” or play Bach’s Minuet …
Last summer, I was a member of Orchestre de la Francophonie, led by Jean-Philippe Tremblay. This was my second year with the group, and I always appreciate the chance to perform with a professional-calibre symphony orchestra. I don’t get to do much of that during my day job as a university professor. Part of OF’s …