Clef studies!

Lunchtime practice:

Very methodical warmup, without the tuner, just listening to myself. I became suddenly aware of how much weight I am typically putting on the right hand (slide hand) with my modified grip, holding the horn with my ring finger rather than my middle finger of my left hand. I switched to my middle finger, after padding it first with my homemade padding arrangement, but I know already that too much pain lies there. I need to be very attentive to this. I cannot keep putting weight on the slide as 1) that just slows my action down and 2) is probably a bad thing for the slide long term.

I worked on alto clef in my Ralph Sauer clef studies book and that was quite productive. Mr. Sauer says in his introduction that his idea is to give people new things to play, that are musical, as they learn clefs, so the student (that would be me, in this case) does not fall into patterns and not actually learn to read the clef. Sort of like the difference between speaking Spanish rapidly and knowing how to count to one hundred in Spanish.

I also worked on one of the Beeler scale etudes, this one in the key of Ab. I am discovering that I don't have a good sense of what Db should sound like. I did this today without the tuner at all and I kept being pretty fuzzy and out of tune on the Db. Quite interesting. 5th position! There's just so much room there!