What Makes a Good Practice Session?
The Warm up.
All good practice session always starts with a thorough warm up which encompasses all aspects of playing your instrument. It is very important not to start too quickly as you need time for the blood flow to your lips.
I always start with low long notes; this gets the lips vibrating slowly and allows the blood to flow into the lips easily. I use the long note exercises from the Allen Vizzutti books, when playing these with a metronome it only takes around 5 mins to complete each exercise. I would recommend playing through at least the first one but playing all of the first 4 exercises is no bad thing. The highest note you play throughout is only a C on the stave and in doing this you are not putting any unnecessary strain on your lips. The second and most important reason to start with long notes is to relax your breathing and make sure you are breathing and using your air correctly. Again the Allen Vizzutti exercises mentioned above are a great way of steadying your breathing and controlling the airflow through the instrument as well as gently warming up your lips. By now your lips should be nicely warm and your breathing relaxed.
The next set of exercise I would recommend are some lip flexibilities, any exercise is good but the Charles Collins Lip Flexibility Book is all you will ever need. These exercises improve lip responsiveness as well as range and stamina. The best element of these exercises is that they improve sound dramatically. Having the correct tongue position for each harmonic ensures that you always produce the best tone possible. Practicing these flexibility exercises slowly and concentrating on sound and clarity really will improve your playing overall. During the warm up however you should take things slowly as not to tire your lips. Again I would recommend not playing above a C on the stave and concentrating on sound rather than speed of slurring.
The last element of a good warm up is articulation. Getting the tongue warmed up is important as it plays a vital role in playing clearly and crisply. Simple scales with repeated notes are excellent but again do not stretch the range much above a C on the stave. Another good exercise to do is moving the valves when articulating, for example, playing between G and F is good to get the tongue coordinated with the valves. When tonguing concentrate on a clear Ta or T sound but do not forget to keep the air pushing through the instrument as that is a very common problem and causes the sound to pecked and drastically increases the chance of splitting the note.
