Posted by Warm-up Challenged on 11/29/2020, 3:24 pm
Good evening to you!
I hope your Thanksgiving was fantastic - and I hope that you are as eager as I am to get back to work tomorrow!
I have a warm-up question for you, for those that use the Blue Book (Foundations for Superior Performance) as your warm-up material. How do you use it?
What do you do each day? How do you divide it? I would like a progressive series of exercises in various keys and before I go about re-inventing the wheel I wanted to ask if you'd be willing to elaborate on how and what you use.
Just as a piece of information, I've used modified exercises out of the Fussell book as my warm-up in the past, lasting about 20 min of a 65 minute band class. I'm not necessarily wanting a more condensed, but more a more efficient warm-up.
F desc, 1A, 1B, or 1C (only 1, and I'll stick with 1 of them for 2-3 days for continuity)
Warm up Set 1, 2, or 3: I will do 2-3 options usually (I never play all options in a day). It depends on the development of the group. Some days I will have students volunteer to be an example for feedback purposes. Other days I'll have just certain sections play so they can hear what they sound like instead of doing full band on these exercises.
I do not do use the technique part of the book every day. I do spend more time working in Bb, F, Eb, and Ab more than the others though. We will pass off several exercises in those keys in February/March, just before UIL.
1BAC are done daily. These REALLY help build tone. Once students are using consistent air we add having them watch their tuners to learn their own tendencies to be applied in music later. Yes there’s just tuning and equal temperament. We did just tuning. Didn’t do 3a this or last year but these are good, especially for brass, for moving between partials and having their lips and air ready for that, and of course tuning. Then we move on to the Sets. Great for slurring practice that we all know students love to cheat and tongue whenever they want. Sometimes they don’t even notice they’re doing it! Also good for tuning. At first they’ll sound like trash cans, but once they master the notes and movement, time to focus on tone, then intonation between skips and keeping all notes constant and even sounding, especially not “screaming” on the jfkejsr note of the slur. Woodwinds get scale and chromatic practice. In scales we practice the holy keys as previously mentioned. My group learns the major scale, scale and arpeggio for articulations, and scale patterns. I’d they’re doing very well we move on to the chord studies. Then chorales for balance, tuning, bopping to show them they’re not actually moving together. Throughout all of these exercises, tempo changes can be added in once mastered to get students used to WATCHING THE CONDUCTOR.
I use the longs tones daily and I spend a lot of time addressing tone quality, speed of air, making sure the middle note has just as much energy as the surrounding note and then I apply those things to the chorales later on. If we have articulation/rhythm issues on a piece of music, I will play through some of the long tone exercises again (not in place of) with said rhythms/articulations in them. THe warm up sets can be varied with buzzing. For advanced players I have given them a WW book to play some of the scale/chromatic patterns. With the scale pages: the holy SR keys are done regularly and we eventually play through everything back to back to build endurance. I think the important thing is that everything you play has to have a purpose and your students need to understand that purpose. Too many students and teacher just go through the warm up without feedback or assessment. Ask students plenty of listening questions: who sounds different? how? what can they do to improve on that? Hope this helps.
Depending on the age I would use some of the lip slurs with a mixture of playing and buzzing from the brass and woodwinds being pitch centers, (during buzzing). Example - WW played 1235 while the brass buzzed 1 then played 345. If I had younger kids maybe only the first 2.
For more advanced lip slurs those would work in as the year progressed with a similar process to page 6.
We then would vary the exercises in the different keys depending on our goals. Early on we focused on Region scales. Later on we would target Sight-reading keys and the keys our music, (Fall, Christmas, UIL), and we would finish off the year with all of the remaining keys making sure we hit all of them every year.
When I had shorter classes we might do long tones, 1 set of lip slurs, and a few exercises in one key. When I had longer classes I could do more of the lip slurs and 2 or 3 keys worth of exercises.
We start with long tone exercises 1A and 1B almost every day. Earlier in the year when we're rebuilding embouchures from summer, we include F descending, 1C, 1D. Depending on the focus at the time, we might call attention to starting exactly in time, moving together, releasing together, balancing the ensemble, matching pitch, matching tone quality from one note to the next.
I haven't every gotten into the other long tone sets, but if you buy the conductor score it goes into detail about the reasons for the different long tone sets and what to focus on.
We move on from there to the warmup sets. Each one has lip slurs of increasing complexity and difficulty for the brass. Option 2 for woodwinds is an octave or overtone exercise. Option 3 for woodwinds is a chromatic exercise. In a normal year, we would spend a week or two really learning each warmup set, and then rotate through them for the rest of the year. I find that fresh material in the daily warmup keeps the kids from just going through the motions. Lots of opportunities to work on flexibility and range for brass, woodwinds can work on chromatic fingerings, make sure they know their enharmonics. Percussion should rotate between mallets and snare.
I usually do some of the "technical exercises" in at least 2 keys each day. We have a rotation of learning major scales that teaches all 12 major keys in the course of the year, so we do whatever the "key of the week" is, then usually some work in whatever key we're about to rehearse that day. When introducing a new key I'll start with the "mini scale and tonic arpeggio" exercise, then the major scale, then pattern 1. Top band gets into Pattern 2 and 3rds. 2nd band might, usually during contest season the "key of the week" gets dropped to focus on more immediate needs. 3rd band never gets to all 12 keys, honestly if they're really solid in the 4 sight-reading keys we're in good shape. I haven't messed with the chord study things. I've been thinking about incorporating more minor scales in common keys instead of all 12 majors (or maybe a 2 year rotation that hits all 12), but we haven't gotten there yet.
After all of this drill, most days we'll do a chorale of some sort, usually in the key we're going to rehearse. That might be from the Blue Book, or a chorale section of our concert music, the Bach chorale books, or I have some other resources I've picked up over the years. I try to keep the chorales fresh to keep the kids on their toes.
