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Dear Tuba Players

I was wondering if you could give an old hack some guidance. I am a community band/orchestra player, by no means anything near a professional musician (who by the way have my greatest admiration). Between my “day jobâ€

Hey Stu,
I'm also interested in hearing other people's answers, and I'll give you mine.
Play Music!
Really.
I'm on the road right now and this is what I do;
I pick a scale, I play it every way I can possibly think of, loud, soft, slurred, short, long, the list goes on. This may go on for a while and then I play music, for me that means playing tunes with melodies. Satin Doll, Body and Soul or whatever, lip slurs have their place, music feeds the soul.
Just my opinion as usual.
Peace.
ASG

Thanks ASG,

Usually on the weekend I just play to have fun. Try to make some etudes sound like music after a warm up just to enjoy. But I am trying to make up for my lack of talent my making what practice time I have as efficient as possible. I try to make all my work as musical as possible when I work at it, but there is so much to do and work on, and so little time.....

The real key is to play. A lot. But I'm limited on the time factor. Sometime I wonder if this is a lost battle.

Thanks

Is it better to spend a day on one objective, or work a little bit each day on all objectives?

I say the latter. You can forget or take a longer time remembering what you accomplished a week ago.

1. volume (playing louder without splatting)

Just make sure you're using a ton of air and it's not under pressure. Use the stomach muscles for sitting up and taking a dump, not for playing the tuba.
The splat is from an explosion of air; try to regulate the expulsion of air in a steadier manner.

3. overall articulations

All articulations will sound better if you use more vowel than consonant. Rex Martin explained it to me as tonal or "TONE-al" articulation. Think tOh (long o sound, emphasis on the vowel)rather than toe, emphasis on the consonant. This should be of some help.

Bravo to you as a community player that puts forth the effort to practice. It shows that you truly have a love for the hobby.

"Routine practice produces routine playing."

http://www.trumpetguild.org/pdf/1999jou ... 05scar.pdf

One key factor to good practice time is taking away the distractions.. my cell phone is never on or in the same room when im practicing. I generally do breathing exercises before practicing because it calms my brain down. Given your time factor, I might only do 5 minutes of breathing stuff, but it will definitely help with your volume production and it will get your brain focused. I can get far more done when I can really focus for a half hour than I can if Im less focused for 2 hours.

is that, practicing is oike eating a fine meal:
Start with the Spinach - the stuff you hate - long tones, lip slurs, etc.
Then move to the soup - Bordogni etudes, Kopprasch and stay focused
Then on the to meat and potatoes - scales and arpeggios
For dessert - do the stuff that is fun.

You can eat this meal in any amount of time and just determine beforehand how much trime you want to (or need) to spend on each "course" of the practice session. You can vary it anyway you like. I usually caution my students to NOT start with dessert because this usually blows your chops and you wind up with nothing left for the other courses.

Another thing I push is from the movie City Slickers - THE ONE THING. Have ONE thing that you focus on improving for that session. Not everything as it overwhelms the concentration, but one thing - one thing that will make a difference in your playing. Or, in staying with the "meal" aspect - small bites.

Just my $0.02.

Peace.
Roger