Welcome back, brass nation! In my last #RiseAndRoutine post, we talked about what a routine is for brass players in a general sense, and why it’s important. Now, let’s get to the meat of the issue: what goes into a daily routine? What should it look like? How do I know if I’m doing it “right” or not? Generally, it should break down into the following sections:
Your routine should never last more than an hour, and for beginning players should only last about 30 minutes at first. You should time each section out within that 30-60 minutes based on what you feel you need to focus on for a given day, but it is important that you spend at least a little bit of time on ALL these sections every day. Consistentcy is key! In the future, I will go more in-depth on each of the sections of the routine and give specific exercises for each. This post is just meant to give you a starting structure to work off of. A Few Important Rules Before We Start
Now that those things are out of the way, let’s get started! Stretch and FocusRemember that the routine should be the first thing we do each day when playing our horns. As such, one of its primary purposes is to get us ready for the day ahead with whatever we might be performing and practicing. Our bodies are going to be a bit cold and stiff, so it is important to get stretched out. Stretching at the beginning of your routine should never take more than 3-5 minutes. Your stretches should focus on your core area - a.k.a. the muscles surrounding your lungs and diaphragm - as well as your neck, shoulders, and arms. Stretching these areas will allow you to take full, comfortable breaths, and remain relaxed while playing (which is crucial - tension kills tone!) Making sure you are mentally prepared for the routine is also very important. I like to practice mindfulness - which is a very basic form of meditation - for just 2-3 minutes before I put the horn on my face. To practice mindfullness, you can find a lot of great resources online, but here is a very basic and quick exercise to get you started: Sit comfortably on a chair, piano bench, the floor, or whatever is available in your practice space. Make sure you are sitting up tall, with good posture. Set a timer for two or three minutes (unless you are using a timed, guided meditation). Close your eyes. Breath in slowly and steadily through your nose. Take a full breath, feeling the expansion of your lungs strech our your abdominal cavity. Exhale slowly and steadily through your mouth. Continue doing this for the duration of your timer. As you breath, try to focus purely on what you are feeling, hearing, and experiencing as you sit and breath. Try not to let outside thoughts be your main focus. Once your timer goes off, slowly open your eyes and move to your prefered practice position to begin playing. I have found that practicing mindfullness helps get my lungs moving, lowers my heart rate, and helps my mind be clear as I start working on anything in the practice room. If you already have a preferred focus activity that works for you, use it! BreathingEven though mindfullness places a big focus on full and even breathing, it is always a good idea to practice breathing specifically in the context of playing your instrument. Spend about 3-5 minutes at the beginning of your routine each day practicing good breathing technique so that you breathe properly whenever you play. A quick breathing warmup should focus on the following principles:
The easiest way to practice is to turn on your metronome to a nice, medium tempo, and inahle and exhale in different combinations of counts (in for 4 out for 4, in for 6 out for 4, in for 1 out for 9, and so on) while focusing on the above principles. Use the feeling of air on your hand as you exhale to monitor how constant and even the air is. For more detailed exercises addressing a wide variety of breathing fundamentals, I reccomend the book The Breathing Gym by Sam Pilafian. ToneNow that you’re loose, focused, and breathing well, we can put the horn on our face! I know this sounds like a lot, but if you go back and look, all this pre-playing preparation stuff only takes about 10 minutes at the start of your routine. You’ve got another 50 minutes left to make music, and you’ll be better off for it! The very first thing you should focus on when you make your first sounds for the day is producing a round, beautiful tone quality. And that can mean only one thing: long tones. Yes, that thing your band director has probably been hounding your band about for years. There’s a reason for that! Playing long tones allows you to focus on making sure each note has that good quality sound to it that you want to carry with you for the rest of the day. If you start a note and it doesn’t have that good tone quality, stop. Take the horn off your face. Try again. I like to start with just holding out a plain concert F for 4-8 counts at a time. Once I am consistently getting that F out with good tone, I move on to playing an F Remmington series, show here: I can’t say it enough: Consistency. Is. Key. Don’t let yourself go on if you play with bad tone. Take the horn off your face and start again from the same place, but with a quality sound! Once I can play it through at whole notes with good tone, I like to go back and play it a few more times through, making the notes shorter and shorter each time until I’m at 16th notes. FlowTone is the quality of each note. Flow is the quality of what happens in-between each note. Flow is one of the biggest things that sets apart a good player from a great player. Some priniciples of good flow include:
There are many great exercises out there for practicing flow, and this is something that I will go into much greater detail in on a later post. Some reccomended flow books include:
Combine practice of any of these exercises with the above principles, and use the same tactics as when practicing tone: don’t move on until you can hear good flow in the section you’re playing! Articulation and ScalesArticulation and scales might be two different skillsets, but combining practice of them into one exercise allows you to be efficient with your time and make sure you hit more fundamentals every day. It’s really quite easy: as you practice your scale exercises, play them with different articulations. Start slurring, then move onto a single tonguing style (I reccommend mastering legato first, then staccatto, then marcato). Once you’ve spent some time on single tonguing, hit double and triple tonguing as well. Beginning players should start out by learning all 12 major scales, one octave, around the circle of fifths. After you have all the scales memorized this way, a great second step is pentascale patterns, like so: I play each pentascale through once slurred, and then again with a single-tonguing articulation of choice. Other great resources for scale and articulation exercises include:
Or just invent your own patterns using any major or minor scale. The more pattern and articulation combinations you are comfortable with, the easier you will be able to tackle a wide variety of solo and ensemble repretoire! Strength and Range BuildingStrength (aka endurance) and range building should always come LAST in your routine, because it is similar to “burning out” in a workout - it will tire your muscles out for a bit. The whole point is to take your muscle endurance beyond its normal limits so that it grows stronger a little at a time. The easiest way to start with strength building is pitch bending by half steps. Start on a concert F, and while leaving all the valves up, bend down to a concert E, then back up the the concert F. Then bend from E to Eb, Eb to D, and so on, as low as you can go. Once you feel you have this down, you can find many more challenging pitch bending exercises in the book 15 Advanced Embouchure Studies by David Hickman. For range building, there is a similar exercise that goes up from concert F. Play a concert F, but then press the fingering for concert F# while trying to stay on the concert F, then come back to the real fingering. Go up like this from half steps as high as you can go until your lips get tingly or you can’t keep form chaging pitches when your valves move anymore. Your comfortable range cieling is whichever pitch you can still play with an alternate fingering. Repeat this each day, trying to get just one half-step higher at a time. It may take a few days at a time to go up by just one, so be patient! In Conclusion...My hope is that this article will give you a solid outline for building a solid daily routine as a brass player. As I mentioned a few times, there are a lot more details for various exercises that I will go into in later posts - including video tutorials! But for now, just start your commitment to #RiseAndRoutine by getting yourself in a practice room to do a fundamentals routine every day. Share your routine with us by tagging @connorpackmusic on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter and using #RiseAndRoutine! Don’t forget that private lessons remain the best way to learn and improve. Learn more about my private lesson program by visiting the Lessons page!
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What makes a great brass performer? Consistency.
Consistency in breath, sound, articulation, and ability to create expressive music across the entire range of the horn. How does one achieve this? Consistency. Consistency in daily practice and a concept known as routine. The daily routine is another, perhaps better name for what a lot of people probably call a “warm-up.” So why routine? A routine signifies something that is done in a similar way on a regular basis, each and every day. And it’s about a lot more than just warming up the lips, lungs, and face muscles. Having a daily routine means that you as a brass player are making a plan and working through specific exercises to meet your goals in the areas of breathing, flow, articulation, range building, enudrance, and more. As part of my mission to help create a community of brass performers online, I am introducing my first community campaign, #RiseAndRoutine. The idea of Rise and Routine is to create a mindset where every day we have a desire to wake up and get into a routine to become our best selves both as people and performers. Get organized, set goals, choose exercises and activities to accomplish those goals, practice, perform, and asses. If we all can commit to do these things regularly, put in consistent effort, and take the opportunities given to us, we can all achieve great things! I will be creating a lot more content in the coming weeks to go into greater detail on how you can build your own daily routine both in and out of the practice room. For now, start with writing down goals that you want to accomplish, both daily, weekly, and long-term. A good method for this is to remember SMART goals:
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