TubeNet

Twice in the last month, this has happened to me. I play in two orchestras (they will remain nameless). Both of them have very poor pre-concert facilities so warming up is difficult. In both cases, the conductors gather us on stage, before the audience is allowed in and they run through parts of a couple of pieces to allow us to adjust to the venue and get somewhat warm. Each conductor has done the following: Start a piece, run through the first 50 or so bars and then stop. In one case the piece was Fantasy on the Hallelujah Hymn and in the other case Dvorák Carnival Overture . In neither case did they get to the tuba part and, in the first instance, they did not even get to the low brass entrance, at all.

What does one do? Remember, neither situation had any facility for individual warm up. About all we got to do before the concert started was play A and pray. I continually pushed warm air through my horn until the first entrance but the uncertainty of the thing was rather daunting.

a great example of the value of learning to buzz mouthpiece, with a purpose. It wouldn't help the horn, but your chops would have been fine.

There's always outside...

I thought I remember hearing about someone who would go with his brass playing buddies out to the lobby and play some
lively tunes for the crowd as they were coming in, gets everyone's juices flowing
Call it a stealth warmup in plain view

.

I remember playing 1st Trombone in the off-stage brass for Mahler 8. There was a pre concert lecture so no playing backstage for 45 minute prior to the downbeat. An hour waiting (and watching the score since I was in the maestro's conducting class) and then climb the scaffolding for the first note in two hours. It is a high "C". A little stressing on that one.

You might want to invest in a practice mute (Yamaha Silent Brass, etc.). The brass coach in my orchestra uses one when he plays with us and starts out cold. He just sticks the mute in the bell and runs through scales. I sit right next to him and I can barely hear him. You could just do that during the pre-concert partial run-through.

Are you sure it is not possible to even "warm-up" for 5 minutes before a concert AT ALL? There has to be at least 5 minutes somewhere in the day before a concert. Before some concerts and gigs, I have a VERY limited amount of time to get some face time on the horn. In these times, I find that I will be reasonably "warm" with slurring arpeggiated chords from "C" in the staff down to the fundamental. Once that is done, I turn around and start doing octave jumps all the way up until I get to about an octave above the highest note in the concert. If I have ANY time left, I will noodle some stuff for the sake of flexibility or start hitting random notes throughout the register in case one of the pieces has an "odd note" to start. All of that, if done right, takes me no more than five minutes.

Just to deal with a little of the confusion, here, I warm up at home and have to drive a quite a distance to get to these gigs. It seemed reasonable to me that there would be a practice room in the second gig but once we had gone on stage and done the silliness of counting rests, we are confined to that area and the sound separation of where we wait is not good enough to actually blow anything without it being heard on stage and in the audience. In the other case, same distance to drive, different venue, a chapel and a religious service going on all the time so blowing or even moving much is out of the question so I can come to this conclusion: No, there isn't anything we can do about it except laugh and do our best. Next favorite idea we came up with was ask the conductor to either start farther in to the piece or be sure to do the finale of it.

Carrying another piece of equipment is not within the scope of my abilities; practice mutes are wonderful unless you have to carry them. However, if the people suggesting this want to do that for me, I will provide a list of gigs for the coming season Really we are caught in a problem of conductor insecurity. This is difficult to deal with, isn't it?

You can learn to do without a warmup for most situations. I try to make my first note of the day a good one, whether it is at home or on stage. Unless I am performing something very challenging, I like to be able to go into first rehearsal or a concert or a country club gig and sit quietly while everyone else is noodling, so nobody knows if I can play at all until it's time to perform. If I do my practicing at home there is rarely a need to do it in public.

Just a thought. I recently played a season with a small community orchestra that had either none or one string bass. At the first rehearsal of the season after seeing how incredibly sparse the tuba parts were I asked if I could double on the string bass parts. This lead to me playing all the string bass parts for the rest of the season, sometimes with one bass and sometimes alone.

As to your predicament I would wonder if it might be possible to ask the conductor if you could double some of the string bass parts during these short warm-ups. This would probably at least allow you to blow some notes, and it shouldn't interfere with anything(in my opinion).

Perhaps this might help.

Good luck,
Rob