A pedagogical follow up

For many years now I have had students and colleagues ask about my “warm-up routine”.  For the most part, my “warm-up” is just to make sure my horn is in working condition; Checking valves, slides, etc.  What most people are really asking is “How to you practice?”

While living in New York City, I had to adapt to my surroundings and was forced to practice with a mute.  Of course this isn’t ideal but I had noticed a change. Instead of focusing on my sound and tone production, I was focused on playing with ease and intonation (since the mute changes pitch a bit).

Naturally, after taking the mute out I was playing very relaxed and my tone was just fine. Maybe a side benefit, but the mute turned my focus of attention away from making the perfect sound, to playing with ease and in tune.  The tone seemed to take care of itself.

After thinking of analogies, I realized it is similar to a baseball player swinging a bat with weights on it, to “warm-up” before the moment he had to do his job of hitting the ball.

The added weight (or mute in my case) turned the attention away from a single aspect, and ultimately to a net gain in my overall playing.

After teaching for a few years, I noticed my students would live by long tone studies and various other exercises and don’t really know why.  They just do them because they are told it will help their overall playing.  This “warm-up” routine that I follow is exactly that, a warm-up.  In my mind, it is the equivalent to an athlete warming up their body before an event.  Most athletes don’t sprint right from the beginning; instead they stretch to loosen up.  The more relaxed you are, the more productive the session will be.

The idea of air is controversial, and this is not a routine to analyze how to breathe.  We’ve been breathing since day one, no need to teach that. The goal in these ratio-based exercises is to ease the body into a normal practice session.  By adding on a beat of music incrementally, the body has enough time to get comfortable to the demand that playing music requires.  Again, it isn’t good for the body if the first note played is an 8 beat long tone; that’s the equivalent of waking up first thing in the morning and sprinting as fast as you can out the front door; You can do it, but you won’t make it very far at the same pace.

The beauty in these exercises is that they are not written in stone.  The fundamental idea is for incremental breath to beats of music ratio.  The beats of music you play do not have to be these exact exercises. 

On a final note, this is designed to be a short “warm-up” that precedes any flexibility exercises, scale patterns, or any other “daily maintenance” exercises already in place.  This is just to get the body and the air moving.  At the end of the day, the goal is to make music!

This is not all my own creation, nothing is new anymore, but it is something I endorse.

Feel free to look and try... it's just what I do, doesn't mean you will be like me in any manner... which is a great thing.