This is all coming from my experience, and maybe you are a much more talented musician and trombone player than me. But maybe a period of time in which you can suffer through playing alto exclusively. I don’t mean at concerts or recordings, unless you’re ready. If you have the luxury, put the tenor in a closet for a week and force yourself to play the alto exclusively. Last, let me reiterate that to play the alto well, and not just as a novelty sideline instrument requires dedication. I do it to play certain great music and trombone exercises so that they fall naturally within the upper forth mechanics of the alto. I do not do this as a cheat to learning positions. So I read them in the tenor positions up a fourth. My one case for mental transposition is when practicing exercises like Kopprasch or Bach Cello Suites because much of those exercises go below low A which, without a trigger, cannot be played naturally.(Be careful not to pop off the slide when going for that F. Again, like I wrote above, practice this with some harmonies in the background to nail the pitch of that F. Practice – slowly at first – going from F back to first position Eb. One of the harder notes on an alto is the F below middle C. Like you probably do on tenor, practice intervals.As trombone players we know that intonation isn’t solely about positions, but your face can’t yet compensate if you’re still fishing for the positions, even minutely. One of the things you’ll hear from most guys playing alto is that the intonation isn’t clean because they’re a little unsure of the slide positions. Playing the C scale on alto a capella will help you to learn the positions, but hearing related harmonies along with your playing will help you hone your intonation. Practice with some simple music playing in the background so that you can hear the intonation.Even if you can accomplish the mental gymnastics of that sight transposing, how do you apply that to reading changes playing jazz? Middle C in 4th position, F above that in third, the F an octave below in sixth, and so on. I think learning the alto trombone means learning the new positions of the notes on sight. I hear some players say that they are doing mental transposition up a fourth in order to get the positions, and I recommend against that. When I see the A above the staff, I simply play A440 in second position. I know that the fundamental is Eb, but the tenor’s fundamental is Bb and we still read C music. Learning the alto tromboneįirst, I treat the tenor as a C instrument. Check it out here and download the free preview. One of my best selling books, it takes player from the basics of learning the positions and partials all the way through playing jazz. I would be remise if I didn’t at least mention my book Alto Trombone Savvy. It was a struggle, but I eventually wrestled it to the ground! I just needed to come clean on a little history because I do not think it is easy to learn the alto on the side with the full or greater proficiency many tenor players desire. So like early explorers wishing to remove the fallback of sailing back home once things got difficult, I sold my tenor and forced myself to get it together. I’m not suggesting both can’t be played really well simultaneously, just not by me back then. But I got to the point of sounding bad on both. After all, I had gigs around town, school groups and my trombone studies so I was trying to hang on to my tenor proficiency while learning the alto. That is precisely why I sold my tenor in college shortly after taking up the alto. My sense is that there are a fair amount of alto trombones out there not being used to their fullest because of the difficulty for a tenor player to play both well. I’ve had a surprising number of requests for my thoughts on how tenor players can best learn alto trombone.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |