Fundamentals Cheat-Sheet
Throughout my music school experience, the term “fundamentals” has been thrown around pretty much constantly without too much clear explanation. At Northwestern it was expected of us that we practice the studio scale and arpeggio sequence and perform that in our lessons, but we rarely covered much else in the way of specific fundamentals or routine building. The pedagogy in that studio is extremely simple: “Make the most beautiful sound on every note, one note at a time, as easily as possible,” which is exceedingly successful in terms of overall development and progression of those of us who have been a part of it. I did however have many specific questions that, frankly, I should have been more vocal about during my time there. As a result, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking on my own about what to practice, how to practice, and how much to practice.
Occasionally I’ll have group “fundies” sessions with other players wherein we simply share with each other random exercises that we’ve been using in our individual practice, and that has been incredibly helpful for my development as a player - plus it’s always fun to just play with others! As fun and important as these sessions have been for my journey on the horn, they have never really solidified for me what “fundamentals” actually are, why they’re important, or perhaps most importantly, how to work on them.
As a result of all my pondering, I’ve come up with a hopefully straight-forward and simple cheat-sheet for fundamentals. This is more or less how I organize these things in my own mind, so I hope it can be helpful for others as well. I’ve had the pleasure of giving a presentation on this topic for the ASU Trombone Studio using this sheet as my guidelines for demonstration. The topic of fundamentals is, of course, enormous and essentially infinite, so there is no way that I can cover everything on a single sheet of paper. That said, the contents of this sheet have proven to be the most helpful in my own practice, and once again, I hope others find it useful in their own journeys.
