A quick reminder that no lessons will be running next week because of TFS’s November break. Have a great week off!

Anthony

Could you pick up a duotang or binder for our homework sheets for next lesson?

  1. Longtones. Take turns starting with one or another of these exercises:
    • Continue fading-in longtones: Your throat should be open like a yawn and the front of your tongue should be high in your mouth (eeh voicing), shooting the air faster through the instrument. Playing like this with smaller amounts of air will allow you to make a note sound at very low volumes.
    • Opposite octave exercise: add your octave key to F, but keep it from jumping up the octave by opening your throat (like a yawn) and relaxing the muscles in your embouchure. It might help to take a little more mouthpiece in your mouth than usual. Once you get it on the F, repeat the exercise working down on E, D, C, then up on G, A, B, C.
  2. G major scale: G to high D. This is the same key as Frosty The Snowman. Remember your F#’s and B naturals!
  3. Take a look at the 8th notes in Frosty the Snowman. We’ll play it together with a metronome next week.
  4. Blue Bells of Scotland: Elementary Method Lesson 9 #3.
  5. All Blues – listen to it here. Practice with a metronome and try to imitate the swing feeling from the recording. We’ll spend more time on this next week.

Jackson

I hope you had a great week! Here’s the post from last week:

Keep track of your days of practice this week. Daily/regular practice, even for just a few minutes, is much more fruitful than cramming.

  1. Register Switch Exercise: low G to middle D. Practice switching with the witch chin and strong air, then putting down your RH pinky C key. Use this note to play the circled 4 bars of Rudolph.
  2. Technique: #12 and #14 in Galper Book
  3. Repertoire: #15 in Galper

Ryan

This week, take a listen to this great album: But Beautiful – Bill Evans and Stan Getz. Listen to Stan’s sound – so uniform, full and dark in all registers.

  1. Longtones. Take turns practicing:
    • Continue voicing exercise, adding overtone/fingered tone matching on C.
    • Opposite octave exercise: add your octave key to F, but keep it from jumping up the octave by opening your throat (like a yawn) and relaxing the muscles in your embouchure. It might help to take a little more mouthpiece in your mouth than usual. Once you get it on the F, repeat on E, D, C, Bb, then G, A, B, C.
    • Use the circled bit on the second page of the Voxman etude as a longtone warmup, playing the G’s as an overtone from your low C and the F# as an overtone from your low B.
  2. Continue chromatic scale – aim to get to 115-120 bpm this week, going from low Bb to high F#. We’ll take this up next week.
  3. Eb major full range. This week aim for 190 bpm.
  4. Continue Voxman etude:
    • Try it with the breath marks I added in, and continue by adding in you own on the second page.
    • Use bis Bb for G minor arpeggios and side Bb for scale passages
    • Other than the ritardandos that we added in (and the one that’s written), make sure to play with a consistent tempo, taking special care not to slow down when switching to an 8th-note melody.
    • Exaggerate the written dynamics.