Glenn,
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So, I'm still unsure if I want to be a princess, or if I found Princes Street, but I think I hear Derek singing a few bars in his blue genie costume for me...
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Ha! That made my day!
There’s this great quote from John Hagstrom that I really related to when I was targeting finding more resonance in my sound. He wrote:
- "Progress is the result of new awareness in balance with repeated experience. The first step is to be aware of what improvements you are looking for and having the intensity of concentration to sustain that conception as you make repeated attempts. When you are successful and are able to recreate your success over and over again, new habits begin to form, but they are crude at first. It generally takes a year to take yourself from crudity to mastery when forming a new habit. Mastery is what is needed to be professionally competent and competitive. It is when you can perform a given task consistently well under pressure – without having a second chance."
This is what I wrote at the time to describe what I was doing to target resonance in my sound:
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To move from understanding the concept to "knowing" the concept of playing to the center of the instrument so well that it is deeply ingrained in my playing, I have chosen to use the James Thompson Buzzing Basics exercises on a daily basis. These exercises are extremely well conceived and allow me to rely on someone else to provide "the intensity of concentration to sustain that conception". For about 20 minutes everyday (after the Adam and Caruso exercises), I spend time finding the center of the horn via the Buzzing Basics exercises. By doing this, I have essentially made a commitment to myself that this concept is vitally important to the way that I want to approach the instrument so I must spend about a year to move from "crudity to mastery". In the 7 months that I have focused my mental efforts on this aspect of my playing I have found that playing to the center eventually leads to enhanced vibrancy that is nothing short of magical!
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Based on the "busyness" of life, getting everyone ready to head out the door, and driving my boys to school every morning, I’ve had to forego my morning "centering" practice session. I usually get in a Wednesday evening and Saturday morning session of Buzzing Basic, so twice a week is better than nothing. I can really feel it in my playing when I miss those two sessions in a week!
Just an FYI on what I did to address this area in my own playing.