Trombone lesson: Improve your playing in five minutes!

Doesn’t that sound nice, improving your playing in five minutes? As I have written before, getting the airflow up and running in a relaxed manner really helps you get a good response on the horn. This small warmup and breathing exercise is all about that. This exercise will not actually make you play trombone better, but it will help you get the most out of what you already know. And that’s really useful regardless of how skilled you are.

This is what I want you to do

Play a low F on 6th position and then move the slide real slow up to first position and down to 6th position again, holding on to the low F all the time. Focus on the tone quality and try to match the full sound of the tone in the right position when you move the slide. When you feel comfortable with the exercise, you can try it with other low notes, see the sheet music gallery below.

For all brass player

If you play another brass instrument such as trumpet or tuba, you can use the same exercise. Just play a low note and change fingering as if you played a chromatic scale up while holding on to the same pitch.

Did it make a difference? Let me know!

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Download this exercise here

Printer-friendly version here