Week Two: Exercises for daily practice and monitoring progress
This week we are working on having a daily practice of scales and recording ourselves to track our progress (and to share with the group, hint hint! 馃ぉ). Having a practice diary is really useful, so considering using the forum as your practice diary this week. What are you celebrating? What are you struggling with?
Week Two:
Assignment Three:
Your "inner" assignment - you can describe for us how things are going for you in the forum, I'd love to know! But this it the time for you to try to develop a daily practice of working on your scale - even if that's only for 10 minutes a day!
Assignment Four:
Share your progress after two weeks! In the video I talk a lot about recording yourself in short, 30 second snippets, maybe you can share one of those in the middle of the intensive, and one at the end? This could just be the scale or scale pattern you're working on, maybe you've got the metronome on, maybe you're trying one of the rhythmic exercises that I describe in the video.
16 replies
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Hey all,
I'm continuing my work on getting all major scales up to 124bpm in straight 8ths. Here's a clip of B major, which is pretty unfamiliar to me.
I've also been working on alternating between tongued and slurred scales, and on continuing the scale down to the bottom of the horn and back up to the tonic.
I'm still working on playing scales daily - I find that if I've done a lot of playing one day, I tend to want to skip the day after. But a slow scale for ten minutes is better than nothing, so I'm going to play every day for the next week and see if the habit builds.
Looking forward to hearing everyone's progress!
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Hi.
Sounds good Luke. I鈥檓 working on all the major scales and the E chromatic scale, in the PDF you provided from Jarrod, Heather. Still learning which left hand/right hand keys are right for each scale - there are a few (e.g. G#) that look to only have a single option, so that was interesting to discover 馃榾 So, this affects which key (lh/rh) to start on (for scales that follow A#/Bb or F# with the G#. For example, E major from low E has to start with rh E fingering (or the B major Luke has posted above has to have the F# with lh fingering so the rh can play the G#). Is this correct (or I may be missing something in these early stages).
Thanks all,
Andy -
Great, thanks for the confirmation Heather -the pinky management course sounds good, looking forward to that 馃榾
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One of my challenges was working on a 1 octive chromatic scale and trying to increase speed with tongue and finger coordination.
Last week in the video the metronome was quarter note equal 84. This video is me trying it at 103.
I think the tonguing is too heavy.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j2m5CvIFmtuIGlkwrd8CkFKyQU18ZbvS/view?usp=drivesdk
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Again my fingers are twisted but I'm a little bit better than when I recorded it a few weeks ago. I cut out my ramblings and big mistakes :P Those minor scales are finger-twisters for certain, especially when you are trying to get the three patterns in your fingers. But this is also helping me with my proficiency in the major scales so I'll continue to plow through these the best I can. BTW, If you haven't already checked out Robert Spring's design a warmup course, it's great and incorporates the scales :)
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Hi everyone! Since we're coming to the end of our TWI I thought I'd pop in the hopes of encouraging you to post one last progress video. I hope you've enjoyed your time on this challenge and stay tuned for our next one - on improving your intonation! - coming up in two weeks.
I also thought I'd share a little video of the scale work that I've been engaged in lately which might be of interest to you :)
https://youtu.be/i1y3mM5iSHg -
One of my challenges was to see if I could play other scales as fast as I could play C major. The answer is no.
Here is me practicing at eighth note triplet = 96.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1k6-THD0JQWge2X8G-TOHA013J8IhPXpe/view?usp=drivesdk
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Tried the Chromatic scale I was working at quarter note = 120, just for fun. I can't put all together yet, but I think it's possible.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1juKgQrXYwgo76one5JwuegTER0KswwVk/view?usp=drivesdk