On the 2nd and 3rd Partials
It seems to me that the most flexible trombonists out there have a casual or perhaps innate understanding of, and confidence with, the connection between the 2nd and 3rd partials. Of course I don’t know to what extent that comes naturally to some/most/all of them, but I do think it’s fair to expect that it’s not a black and white issue, and that at some point in their career they have put some mental effort into understanding that specific connection. I have absolutely no survey data to support this, but I have had a few instances of conversation with trombonists where somebody mentions that they struggle with these two partials specifically. Given that this topic has rarely gone much further than, “huh, that’s weird”, my brain decided to investigate pro bono, so here we are.
Before moving on, I do want to be very clear on which partials I am referring to. I understand there may be some confusion in the numbering of partials in the harmonic series; some people refer to the lowest partial as the Fundamental, and the next partial up as the 1st partial. Colloquially, I have always heard “1st partial” as another term for the Fundamental, so that is what I am basing this numbering off of. My apologies to anyone who subscribes to the former definition.
2nd partial is this range:
3rd partial is this range:
Over the last several months, I have been devoting a decent amount of my practice time into understanding and massaging out the connection between 2nd and 3rd partial. I was struggling more than usual with sound quality and ease, perhaps not objectively but more than likely my ears had progressed further than my playing - a transition period, or “lobstering” as a friend calls it. I felt as if I was at a crossroads with my technique; I need this register to be unquestionable, easy, resonant, confident, etc., and since I was not born the Simone Biles of trombone (I wish!), I could either start working on it now, or regret not taking action at a later date.
So I started in, building a 20-30 minute lip slur routine that focused primarily on those two partials, making sure to give the connection between them the most careful attention. After about two months of working on that routine, gradually adjusting and adding to it, I decided I needed to move on from only working on “straight up and down” slurs (staying in the same slide position), and have now been using my warm up time (~10-12mins) in order to loosen up this register. I do this through Brad Edwards’ “Five Notes Down” warm up exercise (found in his “First Habits”), simple two note slurs, glissandos, and a surprising amount of free buzzing. (I still practice lip slurs every day, but now I work on one slow and one fast set of slurs from Brad Edwards’ Lip Slurs)
The free buzzing/mouthpiece buzzing topic is something I had never really come into contact with until recently. Like anything else, I understand there is some amount of controversy surrounding this, but please bear with me for a moment. My catalyst for trying free buzzing was Peter Steiner’s warm up, in which he free buzzes scales for several minutes every day. Brian Hecht’s relationship with buzzing interested me as well, where he essentially only buzzes using some sort of extension, either a piece of rubber tubing or a leadpipe, and does this for about 20 minutes as his warm up. These two people and their routines opened the gates to let me try these tools out (there’s a conversation about mental roadblocks we have, why they exist, and who opens them for us), because they had found success through perhaps less-than-typical buzzing means.
Curiously, my mouthpiece buzzing has been stiff and brittle for a while now - about a year - especially in this 2nd-3rd partial register, and only through the above mentioned type of work has it begun to loosen up and become supple again. I have been using the mouthpiece buzzing only as my canary in the coal mine, not as a practice tool. For practicing connections, free buzzing and buzzing with a rubber tube or leadpipe on the mouthpiece have been far more beneficial to me. To be clear, I am not against mouthpiece buzzing, I still do it and recommend it, it simply does not work for me as a primary practice tool at this time.
These alternative buzzing practices constitute one of those things that I don’t think I would necessarily prescribe right off the bat to an ailing student, but what I can advise is to keep an open mind about the various tools, tips, techniques, routines, etc. that are freely available for you to use in your practice at any time. Make a conscious effort to not let somebody else’s dogmatism on a practice tool prevent you from successfully implementing it into your own practice.
I think at this point I should mention that I have a long way to go on this work and that I really don’t have any earth shattering answers. It is not something I see myself looking away from for a long time, and I am fully prepared to keep this as a main pillar of my fundamental focus on the trombone. Deep down of course I hope that will no longer be necessary at some point and I can simply just play without worry, but Rome wasn’t built in a day, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, etc. etc.
My long term goal for this particular aspect of my playing is to be able to easily trill between these lower partials, without any hesitation or fear of splitting or overshooting a partial. That is a very long road to walk, and I’ve got my hiking shoes on and muddied!
As for these blog posts, I don’t see them as academic articles or even much in the way of advice. I’m simply using this as a space to lay down my thoughts on selected topics that live in my head rent-free. If you get something out of this then I would be elated, if you don’t then I’m glad you’ve tagged along for the ride! So thank you for reading, I am forever grateful for your attention and interest!
