| Daily Practice:
Normaly I won't do to much of a warm up for just a half hour to an hour of practicing. I start by warming up my mouthpiece by just blowing through it for a minuet or so. Then I push the mouthpiece firmly on my lips and blow though as hard as I can, not a buzz, just air. (my instructors call that 'denting the chops') After that I'll buzz for about 10 seconds just to get the emboucher feeling right. Then to make sure I'm compleatly warmed up I play the C, D, E, F, and G scales one octive all in one breath.
(This usualy takes 3 to 5 minuets total)
Before I even begin to warm up I spend about twenty minuets doing breathing excersizes, I don't really include that in my "practicing" though because I do it at really any time during the day where I have nothing to do for 20 minuets.
Befor a Concert:
I get there about an hour early and just buzz some low pedal tones on my mouthpiece just to loosen up. I spend the next half hour or so just doing some mental excersizes to calm myself down, if I don't do this I get serious stage fright and freak out. Some of the things I do are just go and lay down somewhere quite (practice room, band office, ect), I breath in and out though my nose and visualize the numbers 1 and 2, 1 on the exhale, and 2 on the inhale. I visualize differant colors of numbers and differant colors of backgrounds, after doing this for about 10 minuets I feel compleatly relaxed. Another thing I do is take in a deep breath and imagine that I open up all my blood veins and everything and let the air flow out of my lungs, though my body, and out my fingertips and toes. The last thing I do is go though some of the difficult licks in my head and think about how someone like Wynton Marsalis would play it.
Once I'm ready mentaly I'll pick up the horn and play some nice soft low long tones focusing on finding the center of pitch and everything. Then I'll play the scales that are in each key of the pieces that we will be playing for the concert.
Marching Band:
We always warm up as a brass section for about half an hour. We start with long tones and chord flexibility things. We'll do differant scales and listen to how the differant intervals line up. We do all kinds of lip slurs and articulation patters, and then run though a bit of the tricky parts.
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-David Jacques |