Our Way of Practicing

The most important feature of Left Coast Horn Playing is that we work on our breathing every day. Not just an occasional taking of a deep breath or blowing into a machine but real work with real improvement.

1) Work on your breathing every day! Don’t assume you have figured it out. Work on it to improve it every day before you practice or play. Do it all the time!

2) We practice with a written plan on our stand and we follow the plan every day that we practice.

The plan may take ten minutes to execute for a young player or beginner or for a player who is so advanced they can accomplish something valuable in ten minutes, or twenty minutes for an intermediate student to an hour for an ambitious player doing a heavy workout.

Having a written plan that you work from every day means that you build upon your skills every day. A well designed practice plan makes your practice efficient and effective, not scattered, haphazard and inefficient.

3) After our breathing work every day we practice three things

• Careful drills that are the same every single day
• Drills and exercises that increase your technique (higher, lower low, faster trills, cleaner slurs, etc.)
• Reading music to increase fluency

These are in addition to etudes, solos and concert preparation.

The drills focus on controlling the air and reducing manipulation of the embouchure. We use exaggerated hard tonguing, sffz, glissandi and other exercises to learn how to shape and control the air.

20 minutes of this kind of focused practice will be of more benefit than hours of noodling.

4) We are always working to expand our technique. We want to be practicing to higher, lower, louder, softer, etc. every day. If you play only what is as difficult as you played yesterday you get stuck in yesterday.


Focus on Your Breathing All the Time

OK, maybe not all the time. But frequently.  'All the time' is only a slight exaggeration. This is the crux of Left Coast playing. Focus a lot of attention on where you are putting the air in your body, which muscles are doing the work and how it is shaped when it comes out.


Focus on What Works and Attack Your Enemies

Focus on what works, don’t focus on what’s going wrong. If you need to improve your tonguing, don’t think I am bad at tonguing instead tell yourself Now I am going to sit up straight and take a deep low breath and work on improving my tonguing.

No matter what your enemies are, go on the attack!

When you want to improve something set aside time to focus on fixing it. At the same time make sure you are doing what works - good posture, correct breathing, clean tonguing, etc.

Then try to figure out what is actually happening that is causing the problem. Be curious, be aware of what parts of your body are doing what and have patience.

No Negativity!

We are trying to train ourselves to be comfortable reliable players and that is tough to do if you are berating yourself constantly. When something goes wrong try to figure out what caused it and how to change it.

The difference between a genius and a schizophrenic is that the genius tells the voices in his head what to say.

You can convince yourself of anything. If you tell yourself that you have a tonguing problem, or a weak high range or any other problem you won't get better by reinforcing in your mind that there is a problem. Simply think of it as a problem to be solved over time and you'll have success.

Exaggerate Exaggerate Exaggerate

If the exercises say FF or SFFZ we really mean it. If your neighbors call the police when you practice these then you are doing it right? If the dog whines, your teeth self clean and your canned food pops open then you are doing it right.

Hit the SFFZ notes really hard. Blast those puppies! Don't worry about tone color or musicality. Exaggerate!


The purpose of these exercises is to develop breath control and strength.

Make it Your Goal to Get Better Every Day

Even if you have off days you will be on a steady path of improvement.

Lastly

Find ways to really enjoy playing. How often do you take your horn out of the case and admire it. Imagine the knowledge and skill that went into producing the metals, the shape, the case, everything. Read about the great composers. Listen to a style of music you have never heard of before.

Your audience can tell if you are having a good time whether you're playing bluegrass with your family or the most serious opera.  


OK, Really Lastly

A valid criticism of Left Coast Horn Playing is that we do not address musicality in any way on this site. Of course we care a lot about musicality and that's why we are willing to spend the time doing structured practice to be our best at it.

But we feel that musicality is best learned beside a qualified teacher. It is the most human part of music.

Slow to Fast Practice - a Powerful Technique

Slow to Fast is a learning technique that helps us acquire new skills quickly. It helps to make patterns or skills repeatable.

Use this technique to

• Teach our brains to remember skills we want to last a long time
• Learn complicated skills quickly and reliably

When we learn a new skill our brains aren’t sure if it should be stored where it keeps important memories like how to walk, or things it needed once a long time ago like getting off a chair you sat in once a year ago. The Slow to Fast technique described below signals the brain to move it where you can get it quickly.

If you want to learn something and have it be part of your permanent skill set this helps greatly. It works great for scales and trills and all sorts of exercises or complicated passages.

If you ever get called at the last minute to sight read a concert you will appreciate this technique. When I get to the hall I look for complicated rhythms or technical passages, I do them slow to fast once or twice and I am almost always ready to play them in the show.

If you want to learn a long complicated passage, learn bits of it and then string them together. For example if you have a long passage of scales that are hard to play, start by playing just the first measure Slow to Fast. When you can play it comfortably add the next measure. Keep going until you have mastered the passage.

Some people like to learn the end of a passage and work backwards.

To practice Slow to Fast

• Play the bit very slowly. Start painfully like ‘when are you going to play the next note?’ slowly.
• Keep repeating it gradually increasing the speed.
• If something goes wrong then play then next time play it slower. It is more important to get it right than to just get through it.
• Continue accelerating until you can’t get it to go any faster.  Then go faster. You always want to drive PAST the point where it doesn’t work any more.  At the end it should be falling apart. If it still sounds good then go faster!
• Then relax for a second, take the biggest breath you possibly can and play the passage as many times as you can in that breath.

That’s it. A very quick and powerful technique! Use it every day and your improvement will skyrocket!

How to Play Left Coast Exercises

Left Coast exercises are meant to be concentrated and leveraged. They are short so we can really focus on what we are trying to accomplish. They are designed to be flexible and extensible.

Always play them with a steady rhythm and start slowly!

In all the exercises have these goals in mind

If you don’t take a deep low breath, controlling the air from Place #6 then none of this matters. While playing these exercises always take a deep, relaxed breath, controlling the air from as low in your body as possible.

When the exercises advise you to keep the same tone color throughout, we are looking for brightness. Some of our exercises ask you to decrescendo without changing tone color. You can only do this if you control the air from below Place #5, halfway between your rib cage and your belly button.

We use these decrescendo exercises not only to learn to make beautiful decrescendos and control the ends of the notes but to train ourselves to control the air from as low as possible.

Some of our exercises have sffz on them. These are to be played loudly and with as much air as is possible to push through the horn. Play them loud all the way through with no decrescendo or softening at all. Be tasteless and wild! If your neighbors call the police you are doing it right!

If the exercise says to play Slow to Fast, then start really really slow. The slower the better. You can increase the tempo right away but start out really slowly.

For Slow to Fast exercises go faster and faster until you reach the point it falls apart. Never play as fast as you can then quit. Go faster! Always push!

In all technical exercises every day try to go higher, lower, faster, slower, louder, quieter! Always push yourself!

While these exercises can be done occasionally you will improve very fast if you do them every day. Ten minutes a day doing these drills will help you improve much faster than doing them for once for an hour each week.

The First and Last Notes

When you play focus on making good first and last notes on each phrase or exercise.

If your first note is air starved or choked then your whole System is out of position for the rest of your phrase or exercise.

If the last note is weak then you will tend to let the support sag.

These two problems are a major source of clams. Not having your System in the right shape makes it tough to play well on the rest of the phrase. Letting your System sag on the last note makes the next notes much harder.

Make sure when you play our exercises that the first notes are cleanly tongued and full of air.

Make sure that the last notes are not flat or thin sounding. If you play again immediately try to keep your system in the same shape while you are taking a breath. The more you have to re-form the system the more things will go wrong.