Practice regimen

[Roger]

My apologies for the length of my post. As an amateur, I'm always looking for tweaks/enhancements to my practice regimen. When our community band is active, I always have a folder of music for the bulk of my practice. But in the off season, it's daily routines, working through a combination of David Vining's books, Arban, the Brass Gym, and exercises of my own development. After a thorough warm up, I vary the order of exercises so that I'm working the different aspects of playing either early, mid, or late in my practice. My question is do any of you find it most effective to vary the work on each aspect of your playing? For example, working on flexibility sometimes early, sometimes in the middle and sometimes late in your workout. I find that anything worked on toward the end of my practice before my final cool-down suffers somewhat just due to fatigue. So I'll move things around so that no aspect of my playing is always worked early, mid or late. Do most of you vary the order of drills/exercises within each practice session? Hopefully, my question is clear.

[Richard III]

There is a world of solos out there. Why not assemble a large collection that is not only music, but demanding of all the skills you need? I've never understood maintaining a boring schedule of exercises.

[John Morgan]

Roger,

I have the luxury of being retired, and I have my euphonium and tenor and bass trombones sitting in their stands in my music room, always "at the ready". So, the first playing I do on any day is a warmup routine. Long tones, slurs, scales and the like. If I am working on a solo or a gnarly piece of music, I go to that after warming up. Later in the day, I will usually come back to my horn(s), do a brief re-warmup, then work on some aspect of my playing I want to improve, increase, develop, etc. If I am not working on any particular piece of music, I will go to this directly after my first warmup routine.

I have found that it is best to tackle the most difficult piece you are working on early in a practice session, rather than saving it for last when you might be getting tired. In working on just exercises and drills, I think this is also true. There is a sweet spot in my practice routine where I probably sound the best and am technically sharpest. For me, this happens after I am fully, fully warmed up and have been working on a piece of music or an exercise. It is usually 30 minutes or so from when I first pick up my horn. At this sweet spot I will play my toughest piece or most technical exercise.

I don't necessarily vary the order of exercises each day, but rather focus on the harder things early or the things that I really, really want to improve on. I also don't wait until the very end of a session to work on my upper range. I am careful how I do upper range stuff in any session or on any given day in that I don't want to trash or wear out my chops before I get done with all the particular things I want to work on.

If there is a very particular exercise or technique that I am working on, for instance, triple tonguing, I will put this early in any practice session, then probably repeat it later in the session. In fact, I am right now working on something where I want my triple tonguing to be as fast as possible, so I do exercises for this multiple times throughout my practice session. If I were to spend the whole session doing the tonguing, then after a while it would be, how do they say it on Star Trek, futile! Your tongue would just start shutting down. So, using the tonguing as an example, it seems you cannot spend a whole session in one area. Playing chromatic scales is another example. I play those every day at some point, and I will spend a few minutes doing various chromatic exercises. But when I play those very fast for a while, my fingers get tired and a little painful actually. So, I can only do those for so long. This is another example of where I might do some aspect multiple times in a session for a short time each occurrence.

When I stop and really think about how I approach playing and practice over time, I am probably not as regimented as the above might suggest. I sometimes just do whatever the heck I feel like at any given moment on any given day. But if I am trying to be very serious about my practice time, then I do try to put some order and regimentation into my practice sessions.

[Roger]

Both responses are appreciated and helpful, thanks Richard and John. I understand one size doesn't fit all, so I need to work on what improves my playing and increases my enjoyment of this very special avocation of making beautiful sounds.

[ann reid]

Go to bandmusicpdf and pick out a few Sousa Marches or overtures or anything by Holst, Grainger, Vaughan Williams et al, print out the euphonium parts or the baritone parts and give ‘em a go!

GUARANTEED to last through the winter and longer!

[Richard III]

I should have asked this before. If you read treble clef, there is a huge amount of turn of the century cornet music free.

[Shinn]

Go to bandmusicpdf and pick out a few Sousa Marches or overtures or anything by Holst, Grainger, Vaughan Williams et al, print out the euphonium parts or the baritone parts and give ‘em a go!

GUARANTEED to last through the winter and longer!

I purchased some recordings of Sousa marches and now have them on my iPhone. The free sheet music is in the same key as the recordings so I can ‘virtually’ be in a band while listening to the songs on a pair of speakers connected to my iPhone via Bluetooth. This helped to add a lot of fun to my daily practices when the pandemic kept our concert band from rehearsing together!

[franz]

I purchased some recordings of Sousa marches and now have them on my iPhone. The free sheet music is in the same key as the recordings so I can ‘virtually’ be in a band while listening to the songs on a pair of speakers connected to my iPhone via Bluetooth. This helped to add a lot of fun to my daily practices when the pandemic kept our concert band from rehearsing together!

From this link you can download for free the parts and audio of all the Sousa's marches: good practice and guaranteed fun.

https://www.marineband.marines.mil/P...-27-092217-827

[BDeisinger]

A good etude book that I use for practice is 40 Progressive Studies for Trombone (bass clef) by H.W. Terrell. Don't know if it's still in print but my euphonium teacher in college had me buy it. (It was $1.25 then). I got back to using it when I bought a compensator and had to rethink the 4th valve with the left hand. It's been over 50 years that I've had the book and there are still a few that I'm working on that I never played. As you said, the community bands aren't rehearsing now due to COVID so I guess we have to find motivation and material to practice.

[dsurkin]

A good etude book that I use for practice is 40 Progressive Studies for Trombone (bass clef) by H.W. Terrell. Don't know if it's still in print but my euphonium teacher in college had me buy it. (It was $1.25 then). I got back to using it when I bought a compensator and had to rethink the 4th valve with the left hand. It's been over 50 years that I've had the book and there are still a few that I'm working on that I never played. As you said, the community bands aren't rehearsing now due to COVID so I guess we have to find motivation and material to practice.

The Tyrell book is still in print. My teacher had me start working on it just this past year. https://www.amazon.com/progressive-s.../dp/B0007IXI72

[aroberts781]

It is a little funny to see the Tyrell book come up. I don't currently use it a lot, but I have a copy from when I was in high school because a lot of our All State audition etudes came out of there. Every now and then I will play some of the ones that are particularly etched into my brain. Perhaps I should use it more often!

In an unrelated note on All State etudes, every now and then I watch people playing examples of All State etudes that they post on YouTube, and I feel like they are way harder than the ones I was playing 20 years ago! I could be wrong but that is my perception anyways. Kudos to any high schoolers working those up!