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Lesson time: (5min 46sec)
A trumpet exercise from Gerard Presencer using perfect 5ths ascending and perfect 4ths descending to build your intervallic control.
This lesson is part of the course Internal Approach to Playing the Trumpet
Watch a preview of the full course below.
Lesson transcript:
In this next exercise, we're going to use the technical and physical approaches that we've been developing in previous lessons on something which is perhaps a little bit more intervallically interesting. This is something maybe I've taken and used in composition or in improvisation.
What I'm going to do is put a series of Fermatas over notes at the bottom. (That's pauses for people in the UK, but fermatas for everyone else.)
What I'm doing here is crescendoing to speed up the air:
As I descend, I'm going to try to:
This is rubato. Anytime I need to:
Important:
What hopefully I've done are a few little splits there.
Now let's use a short staccato that we worked on earlier. Let's say it, then play it like this:
In a way, I tongue faster when I play it on the trumpet, which is quite an optimistic development!
Since we did it legato with labored fermatas to ensure proper breathing:
Let's do that one more time because it felt nice.
Later, we'll look at how short staccato can be placed in music, which is very useful in:
The short eighth notes we practiced were those short notes.
Generally, what happens is when people play those short notes, they sound more like this:
Okay, good luck!
Over the past 25 years Gerard Presencer has carved out a formidable reputation as one of the most respected trumpeters on the European scene. He exploded onto the international scene aged 18, when US3 asked him to play the solo part on Blue Note's Cantaloupe Island (re-imagined as Cantaloop Flip-Fantasia), which became one of the biggest selling jazz records of the 1990s. Since then he has performed with a who's who of international jazz artists, and continues to push himself and his instrument, moving outside his comfort zone in order to develop as a player and writer. In other genres, Gerard has recorded as a session musician with artists such as Sting, Jamiroquai, Zero 7, James Brown, Ray Charles, Joni Mitchell and Jonny Greenwood. Gerard has also been an essential member of Charlie Watts' various jazz groups over the last 25 years, touring the world and releasing several albums with the jazz-loving Stone. As an educator, Gerard was Head of Jazz Studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London from 1999 to 2010, and is currently Head of the Brass Department at the Jazz Institut in Berlin. In this course he shares his internal approach to playing the trumpet - the mental and physical habits behind a great sound - so you can develop tone, control and musicianship from the inside out. read more
