state of the practice

So, recently I started using the Alessi Warm-up. It is kind of kicking my ass, just a little bit. This is to be expected, as pretty much anything with Alessi's name on it is designed to kick your ass.

First of all, calling it a "warm-up" is a bit inaccurate. It takes me somewhere between 45 minutes to an hour to get through. It does not take me that long to be warmed up. I would say that the first 15 minutes or so is an actual warm-up, followed by fundamentals work.¹

At any rate, I'm going to keep it up for a bit, and see if it is actually beneficial or not. One school of thought would argue that as long as it is, in fact, kicking my ass, that it must be beneficial. The other school of thought might argue back that wearing yourself out during the first hour of practice isn't really all that helpful. We shall see.

Second session is still devoted to Rochut and scale work. I've been doing the scale routines from the Masters section of the Milt Stevens book, and I am woefully behind and still slightly under tempo.

Third session has been given to the Bourgeois, because apparently I really like to make myself suffer. I kind of suck at it right now. Especially the third movement:

I'm not quite half that speed right now, but it is damned close.²

I will note also that the third movement is by far the most prominent on Youtube, because apparently we only care about the flashy stuff. And to be fair, maybe we should focus on that, since trombonists suck at musicality.

Session four... doesn't always happen. It depends on many things. Whether I've left myself time for it, whether or not I was clearly already exhausted during session three. Session four is a combination of Schlossberg-related long tone exercises and some Arban's work. I am somewhat conflicted about my priorities here, because while I would normally argue that fundamentals-based practice should take precedence over solo work, I also know that if I don't play some actual music every day that mind-numbing despair will probably kick in.

When I am going full-bore, there's usually another session in there that consists of excerpt work. However, I have no auditions on the horizon, and so I am currently taking it easy for a bit. I haven't yet decided when I'll go back.

Anyway, that is more or less my current routine. Feel free to tell me about how I am doing it horribly, horribly wrong. Perhaps in the future I will actually have something interesting to say about music, but for now this'll have to do.

1. Perhaps the word 'routine' would be more appropriate?[↩]


2. Yes, I probably could take it faster, but I want precision, damn it.[↩]