| Jason,
First, let me say that you should try to contact Steve for a lesson yourself. He lives in Chicago, and runs a new music ensemble called Fulcrum Point. You can contact him thru that site, and I'm sure he'd be open to arranging a lesson at some point. Meeting him would certainly be more enlightening than any explanations I could give you. Like any good teacher, what he assigns changes from student to student so it's hard to make too many generalizations. Also, hearing him play is a huge factor in his effectiveness.
Regarding warm-ups, Burns didn't seem to prescribe any "routine" per se, but emphasized covering your basics every day. Stamp was certainly gone over, but so were Chicowicz flow studies and some of the Pierre Thibaud tone production things. If you look online for masterclass notes from Hakan Hardenberger, I know he once described the Thibaud stuff in some detail. The idea was just to pay attention to what your sound is doing on a given day to take you in the right direction and avoid forcing anything.
For Arbans', we used the whole book at different times. What was notable was that he could show you different ways to expand or modify the exercises to make for different challenges. Same with Clarke. You can alter the rhythms, do every other measure twice as fast ("flash"), expand the range, etc.
At any rate, there's certainly nothing mysterious about anything Burns asks his students to do - i.e., no "tricks". Just solid hard work on musical goals and efficient tone production. Working with him one on one is the best way to discern what influence he might have on your playing.
Best wishes,
Bob |