Cera Foote

Lesson #1 Summary
Dr. Palmer
28 February 2016
Lesson #1 Summary
I took a lesson from James Davis, who has played trombone for
seven years. He is planning on majoring in Jazz Trombone Performance
this coming Fall. He is very knowledgeable about trombone as well
music in general, so I learned a lot during my lesson. The first and
biggest thing that he taught me is to take a much bigger breath. This is
fairly common sense idea, but I do not need as much air when I am
playing my instrument, which is trumpet. I need way more air while
playing trombone, and that helped me to get through scales and
exercise much better.
James and I spent the first couple minutes of my lesson
reviewing B flat scale, as well as the positions for C scale. C scale was
a new scale for me, so it took a couple of minutes. It was during this
scale that he noticed some of my tuning tendencies, as well as some of
my bad habits of placing the correct positions. For instance, later in the
lesson he noticed that I needed to relax on my low B flats. I was very
sharp because of a tight air stream (similar to trumpet). I need to relax.
Next, I learned some of tendencies that I am already building
when playing trombone. When I play second position, I tend to bring

my slide too far in, pushing the pitch sharp. I worked on pulling my
slide farther out when playing second position. I also learned that I do
not go all the way in for first position when playing notes like B flat and
F. James said that as a player gets more advanced, he/she would learn
the exact tuning tendencies and slightly adjust some notes. But for my
own beginning purposes, I need to make sure that my first position
goes all the way in.
I also learned about the general motion of the trombone slide as I
move, for instance, up a scale. Typically the slide will go to the farthest
position at the beginning and lowest part of the scale. Then as I move
farther up the scale, the slide moves back out and in in shorter
intervals each time. The distance between positions gets smaller and
smaller the higher up the scale I go. To clarify, the positions obviously
do not change places. But instead of going all the way out to sixth
position, I will just go out to fourth position, and then third position.
Next, James worked through some of the exercises with me from
the textbook. We spent the time working on legato tonguing, which is
difficult for trombone players. Because of the slide movement, the
player has to tongue lightly in order to separate the notes. Otherwise,
the player would end up with a glissando. To start, we just did some lip
slurs all on first position to check that I was hitting the correct partials.
This was an extremely effective lesson. I learned a lot about
trombone as well as my own tendencies while I play. Having played

trumpet for over ten years helps me to better understand how to form
a brass embouchure. However, playing a smaller brass instrument
hindered me playing trombone with enough air. But this lesson helped
me more with the whole idea of more, deeper air.