BUILDING UP ON SPEED AND STRENGTH

Doodle tonguing is the perfect weapon for jazz trombone players who want to play fast and smooth melody lines. It is a technique for legato playing with built in swing phrasing!

Once you have the basics in place, and feel comfortable playing with doodle tongue, it is time to work on speed and strength. I use these exercises a lot, both to improving and maintaining my doodle skills. They are very useful, regardless if you just have begun mastering doodle tongue, or if you have been using the technique for centuries.

Use a metronome, and pick a tempo where you can play the exercises with great control and precision, and increase the tempo as you improve. Don´t to set the tempo too high! That might make you feel cool in the practice room, but you will sound bad on stage…

Playing these exercises is actually quite hard, and you will read more »

Digitaltrombone.com wishes You all a merry Christmas with 60% food and beverages, 30% sleep, 9% family fights and 1% trombone practicing.

Enjoy this mix of Christmas songs, performed with love and good intentions on various trombones and other brass instruments! read more »

DOODLE TONGUING – BASIC EXERCISES
This is the second part of a series of articles about doodle tonguing, and this time I want to share a few basic exercises to improve both speed and precision when using doodle tongue.

I recommend that you take a few lessons with a doodling trombone player if you are new in this field to ensure that you get it right from the beginning. As usual, it is a lot easier to learn something the right way right away, rather than changing bad habits later!

The main use of doodle tongue is when you play fast legato lines, but to get there you should make sure that you can play it slow as well. The following exercises are all basic, and are designed to allow you to focus on getting the attacks perfect. read more »

INTRODUCTION TO DOODLE TONGUING

If you are a trombone player with some interest in jazz, chances are great that you heard about doodle tonguing. It is a technique that enables you to play fast lines much smoother than with double tongue (this is NOT double tongue for brass players!).

Playing fast lines on the trombone is actually more a question about articulation than being able to move slide fast enough. Since trombones don´t have keys or valves, we have to articulate different than other wind players, tonguing all the notes, possibly combined with natural legato where possible. read more »

This exercise is intended to help you expand your range with full control of the embouchure. It is designed to let you start in a comfortable mid range, and work your way both up and down, making sure that your lips are prepared to play in any register at all times. I like the idea of expanding the range both up and down in the same exercise, as it helps you keep the embouchure in place, as well as you “warm down” a little between the high range pats of the exercises.

Your focus should be to keep the same lip position on the mouthpiece, regardless of the register you play in. The only change should be read more »

I just wanted to share a few tracks from a live concert in Copenhagen in June 2010. It´s with my quintet, featuring the amazing trumpet player Gerard Presencer. He decided to move to Copenhagen in 2009 to play with the Danish Radio Big Band, thank you for that, Gerard! Check out his solo in Coltrane´s 26-2, it is absolutely unnecessarily good…

The rest of the band consists of some of the best Danish jazz musicians, Henrik Gunde on piano, Thomas Fonnesbech on bass and Karsten Bagge on drums.

[mp3player width=400 height=80 config=player-in-post.xml playlist=alq-feat-presencer-live.xml]
read more »

If you are into big band music, you probably know Thad Jones. He is one of the all time greatest arrangers and composers in that genre if you ask me. His work includes great tunes as The Second Race, Groove Merchant, Backbone, Little Pumpkin, The Farewell, Fingers, Us and many others. read more »

As far as I know, this is the first edition of Bach´s Cello Suites IN ALL KEYS! Now you can get Suite no 1 and Suite no 2 edited for brass in all keys, available in PDF format. With 120-152 pages each, there should be enough music to keep you busy for the rest of the week…and the next few years!

There are two versions available of each suite: high brass (treble clef) and low brass (bass clef). Since all keys are represented, it doesn´t matter how your instrument is tuned, there will always be plenty of well suited etudes for your instrument – trumpet, trombone, euphonium, tenor horn, alto horn, french horn or tuba. read more »

There isn´t much more to say about this, just sit back and enjoy. And there is actually some great music in there, played by real musicians! I especially like the clip wit Cat Anderson in the middle of the video – great music, great musicians and world class lead playing. You might want to stop when Maynard Ferguson starts, he has done a lot of great music. This example does not fall into that category…

And now, back to business.
Catch you later!

Have you ever tried to play Bach´s Cello Suites on trombone? Chances are great that you have, they sound fantastic and are quite well suited for trombone.

I use them a lot; for legato playing, intonation, building up chops and especially for pure pleasure! As a jazz player, my goal is not to make concert hall versions, and be 100% true to the original. I try to catch the flow good cello players have when they play the etudes, but otherwise, I just try to make them sound good on my horn. If they are new to you, find the download link at the end of this page, and enjoy Bach´s maybe most famous suite, no. 2 in D minor. read more »