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 …
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 …
If you’re a trumpeter and you’ve heard me warming up… or I’ve heard you warming up… or if you’ve talked to me about practice routines for more than two minutes… you might know about my obsession with tone bending. This belief isn’t original, but it is important. My routine changes constantly, but (after breathing) it …
This week’s featured book is a lesson in humility. Robert Nagel was a founding member of the New York Brass Quintet and has held teaching affiliations with Yale, Juilliard, the Manhattan School of Music, and more… His book Speed Studies is a collection of scale exercises designed to go beyond the traditional major/minor scales most of us encounter …
Today only: less talk, more scales! More scales than you can shake a stick at! Plenty more after the jump
What number comes next in this series: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, ? So far so good… How about this one: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ? At this point you’re either enjoying yourself or having terrifying flashbacks to grade-school math. Are you ready for this week’s scale pattern? It’s a musical riddle: …
There are countless approaches to teaching, but in this post I want to share one simple idea that has intrigued me for years. This question has helped me evaluate my own teaching and understand (without judging) the teaching of others. So, here’s the big question:
Back to Stamp this week for another classic pattern: As we did in part four, let’s break this exercise down: