Creating

The process of creating includes the Imagination, Planning and Making, Evaluating and Refining and Presenting phases of Improvisation. 

Students enjoy practicing with built-in jazz improvisation resources from dozens of publishers. They can:

• See improvisation patterns
• Learn to read chord changes
• Practice transcriptions of piano, bass, and drums
• Explore new music from Wynton Marsalis, Peter Erskine, and Jeff Coffin
• Practice exercises
• Learn to play by ear
• Preserve their original ideas through recording
• Share those recordings with an audience

Additionally, MakeMusic Cloud’s Compose tool means that students can create their own compositions and share them with others (including you) via email.

Performing

The artistic process of Performing involves the following phases: Selecting, Analyzing and Interpreting the music; Rehearsing, Evaluating and Refining it; and finally Presenting it. Our extensive library of titles aids the students in the selection process. They can not only see the music on screen, but also hear the accompaniments. MakeMusic Cloud helps vocal and instrumental students of all abilities perform solo repertoire accurately and independently. The aural and visual feedback provided by our assessment feature plus the ability to record each take, the use of practice tools and teacher feedback help students Rehearse, Evaluate, and Refine their performance. Lastly, students present the product of their work demonstrating attention and mastery of technical demands and expressive qualities of the music.

Responding

The combination of recording and visual assessment provides an invaluable evaluation opportunity for students to listen to and reflect on their own performance. Additionally, solo lines can be played independently or with accompaniment so as to allow listeners to analyze relationships between the two.

Teachers can also create custom rubrics, so that students add a written response to their submitted recordings. This approach integrates “Responding” standards with “Performing.”

Connecting

MakeMusic Cloud includes the largest online digital library of music in the world, which includes a wide variety of historical styles, genres, and applications. The ability to work directly with the music on screen, receive feedback and perform for oneself or an audience allows the students to draw connections between the music, its historical and cultural contexts, and their personal lives.

The post Using MakeMusic Cloud to Teach to National Standards appeared first on MakeMusic.

I like to break contest or festival prep into three phases: repertoire selection, addressing style, and final polishes. Below I’ll share some tips in each of those three areas to help you prepare your big band for festival or contest.

Repertoire Selection

There are many resources available on selecting repertoire. While it’s possible the festival or contest will place some limits on you, here are some basic rules to follow.

Don’t play something you know the adjudicators will hear over and over

Look, I agree: classics are classic for a reason. But do you really want to be the eighth performance of “Li’l Darlin’” a contest judge hears that afternoon? You’ll be instantly compared to the other performances. There are ways to access great arrangers without needing to recycle the same tunes as everyone else. Explore the entire Nestico catalog to find the real gem. Look for a lesser-known arranger or composer who might have just the piece you’re looking for.

Play jazz, not pop

“25 or 6 to 4” and “Fantasy” are great tunes with killer horn lines. Don’t play them at a big band festival. If you want a funky big band tune, get something originally written for a big band, preferably by someone with experience in the idiom. Most major jazz composers have plenty of tunes with a straight-eighths feel. More importantly, playing pop tunes doesn’t demonstrate your group’s mastery of big band concepts.

Stay balanced

This one is pretty straightforward. Open and close with up-tempo tunes and create contrast by putting latin, funk, and ballad styles in the middle. Again, be sure to honor any of the festival rules about repertoire when you choose pieces. A ballad can also be a great way to feature one of your strongest players on a standard, playing to your ensemble’s strengths, and exposing students to masterworks at the same time.

Practicing Style

If you’re heading to a festival or contest you likely aren’t worrying about notes and rhythms anymore. However, you’ll still need to devote significant rehearsal time to mastering the appropriate style. In particular, spend time on articulations and cut-offs. These are key moments that show the audience (and adjudicators) that your band has truly mastered the material.

Another place to focus is on the rhythm section and I recommend finding the time for them to have sectionals, too. Again, your players are probably past the basics, so spend time on more advanced concepts that may not have been covered in rehearsal. Mark background figures in the piano and guitar parts so that students can either match them or comp around them during solos. Work out a key fill (or three), write it down, and have the drummer play it the same way every time. The big entrance afterward will be much easier to nail when the horns know what’s happening in the previous bar.

Being stylistically accurate goes beyond the notation on the page. Listen to accurate, iconic recordings not just of the pieces you’re playing, but of related pieces. If you’re performing “Splanky,” listen to other, similar Basie tunes so students can hear the cultural and artistic context, not just how to articulate the shout chorus. Including the culture of jazz is a critical part of the student learning process and of contest prep.

Finally, be as efficient as possible during rehearsals, and “triage” as necessary. Hammering on a particular background figure behind a solo probably isn’t the best use of your time. Instead, work on balance in the sax soli so that ensemble intonation is easier. Try to fix multiple things with each pass — maybe the trombones needed to watch their cut-offs and the trumpets needed to make something short.

Final Polishes

There are many little things you can do to make sure the performance goes well. First, be consistent. If you’ve been conducting the shout chorus a particular way, don’t change it on stage. The more consistent you are, the more comfortable students will feel. The contest isn’t the time to decide you want to leave the stage in the middle of a tune!

Be sure to (with publisher permission) make clean copies of your scores for the judging panel. Most publishers are happy to grant permission for these copies, and judges will appreciate having them properly labeled, with page numbers and measure numbers, and bound (a staple is fine).

Set clear day-of expectations for students regarding dress and scheduling. You don’t want to be the ensemble that the event staff remembers for all the wrong reasons. Then set clear day-of expectations for yourself. Write a script for introducing tunes so that you aren’t wasting time between selections and can project calm confidence for your students. Decide how and when you’ll introduce soloists ahead of time.

Preparing for a jazz festival or contest is, in many ways, just like any other big performance. Choosing great repertoire, taking care of the preparation, and planning ahead to cover the details aren’t new tasks for most directors, but accomplishing them with a big band can still feel different or awkward. I hope these tips help you at your next festival!

Additional Resources

Five Philosophers Consider Jazz Repertoire Selection
5 Ways to Impress Judges at Jazz Festivals

The post Preparing Your Jazz Band for Festival or Contest appeared first on MakeMusic.

Here are five quick fixes you can make to improve the trombone section in your jazz band.

Alternate Positions

The most important thing about alternate positions is to use them. Often, alternate positions are the key to navigating tricky bebop or soli lines that would otherwise border on impossible. Of course, use good slide technique (very little wrist, minimal pressure, only the thumb and one or two fingers on the brace, etc.) but alternate positions go a long way.

Playing more advanced scales provides an excellent opportunity to work with alternate positions. The octatonic scale works well for this. In the example below, the first octatonic scale doesn’t require large slide movements or awkward direction changes. Translating those movements out a position (to move the scale down a half step) maintains the simple slide motions by accessing alternate positions. The second scale would be more difficult if we played Ds and Fs in first position, rather than their alternates.

Be sure to encourage your students to swing the scale – that’s how you get comfortable using it in a solo! Notice that by using alternate positions we also get to take advantage of many natural slurs. This scale can be worked up to pretty extreme tempos without much difficulty. This is because you only need to tongue every other note and the positions stay close together.

A word of warning about alternate positions: as with any instrument, alternate fingerings have different tuning tendencies. In many cases on trombone, alternate positions have opposite tuning tendencies from the typical position. For example, F3 is sharp in first position and must be lowered, but F3 in fourth position is so extremely flat that it’s basically in third-and-a-half position.

Ghost Notes

Ghosting notes is a crucial aspect of playing bebop correctly. It’s also important in swing, but to a lesser extent. Sometimes ghosting is described as “swallowing” the note. However, for trombonists, no swallowing is required – the term doesn’t match what actually happens with the mouth. Instead, it’s more of a note that doesn’t quite speak. This gets easier when the ghosted note is on a different partial than the notes that need accents (and when the line is idiomatic).

Here’s an example:

In the first measure, ghosting the note is simple; the position doesn’t change. But in the second measure of this example, ghosting the note eliminates the need to make an awkward direction change with the slide. Simply false tone an Eb rather than worry about getting the slide all the way in for the F that doesn’t really exist.

By introducing the ghosted notes in a swinging environment and using lip slurs to show that the notes don’t need to speak normally, but aren’t necessarily “swallowed,” young trombonists will learn more quickly.

Tone Production

The simple fix here is not to fix anything at all. 

Good brass tone is good brass tone, and it doesn’t matter if you’re playing Gordon Goodwin or Percy Grainger. I think it’s a common misconception that young brass players need to fix or change their embouchure, air support, or general tone color between concert band and jazz band. While more advanced players (who can access more potential tone colors without sacrificing technique) may strive for more edge in a big band, it’s not necessary for young trombonists to do this in order to be stylistically appropriate.

Indeed, famous jazz trombonists from many eras have deliberately accessed darker, more orchestral tone colors, including Curtis Fuller and Bill Watrous. Jazz style, including the loud, edgy hits common to big band trombone writing, comes from articulation far more than it comes from a change in sound.

Vibrato

Slide vibrato is a very intuitive motion that’s difficult to perform correctly. Students will eagerly start whipping their slide back and forth, blissfully unaware that they sound like Tommy Dorsey having a mariachi nightmare. The most important thing to remember with slide vibrato is style. Both you and your students should listen to reference recordings to figure out what kind of vibrato the piece calls for. Specifically, listen for the following:

• Speed. Is this rhythmic pulsing or more random?
• Width. How far away from the pitch center does the vibrato get?
• Players. Lead player only or whole section?

If your students aren’t getting the slide vibrato you want, the Army Jazz Ambassadors have a great technique video that covers the basics:

Equipment

Trombones are bigger than they were 100 years ago. American orchestras led much of this trend. Today, even the student model trombones that we see in beginning band are significantly larger than the horns commonly used by swing-era big bands, and most jazz tenor trombonists today use smaller equipment than their orchestral counterparts.

Should students intentionally use smaller equipment for jazz band? For the student whose parents recently invested in a large bore, orchestral trombone, it can be a tough question. As a private teacher and former jazz band director, I say no. Many jazzers (myself included) use smaller equipment because it enables firmer attacks and smoothness of playing in the extreme high register. These are nuances that may or may not affect the younger player; however, the real risk is that a student uses an inferior instrument just because it’s smaller and therefore a “jazz horn.” The benefits that come with using a higher-quality instrument outweigh the downsides to using larger equipment.

The same principles apply to mouthpieces. If a student has high-quality equipment that’s smaller, feel free to have them use it. Young students rarely have multiple instruments, so in general, I have them play the better-made, larger equipment in big band. Again, there are great examples of jazz trombonists using large-bore equipment, like Robin Eubanks.

I hope these quick fixes help you get your young jazz trombonists off to a great start in big band!

The post 5 Quick Fixes for Young Jazz Trombonists appeared first on MakeMusic.

When I was teaching middle school band, my philosophy for summer was focused on getting instruments on faces. Of course, I would have preferred beautiful scales, long tones, and endless sight-reading exercises, but I found that it was more productive to encourage practicing in any form. If possible, work with private instructors in your area to help give students feedback. You could ask the private teacher, for example, to focus on high register playing. Many students, however, don’t take lessons over the summer either. Helping these students spend some consistent time practicing over the break pays huge dividends when everyone returns in the fall.

Share Fun Repertoire

One way to keep students engaged over the summer is to help them find repertoire that they want to play. With no all-state audition, ensemble contest, or big concert coming up, this is the time of year where practicing “Star Wars” over and over is acceptable practice (at least it gets them playing!). Here are some helpful resources you can share with students so that they can find new repertoire:

• IMSLP.org. This repository of public domain music is excellent for finding “famous” pieces for students to try. It’s a great place for low brass players to discover that “Ride of the Valkyries” is a tough piece and string players to practice that Vivaldi solo they heard at a summer symphony concert.

• Play by ear. Learning music by ear combines ear training with execution on the instrument, and students can learn any jingle or pop song they hear on the radio.

• The MakeMusic Cloud homepage/carousel. The homepage features music categories designed to inspire students, including movies, songs about pirates, and a new list of repertoire called “Summer Favorites” built based on the most popular SmartMusic titles from summers past.

Make Practicing Social

For many students, the idea of sitting and practicing alone is the problem. For these students, find ways to make summer practicing social:

• Encourage duets (even the unison kind) with friends. Playing together helps gamify practice and improves intonation and listening skills.

• Engage technology to make the boring exercises more fun.

• Tap into your students’ more competitive side with contests. Remind students that intonation, articulation, and musicality are as important as speed and accuracy.

• Find ways for your students to join the community at large. Summer festivals in your community (like Make Music Day) often have events that offer students a way to perform.

Convincing students not to take a vacation from music can be tough, but by helping students discover new repertoire and making practicing fun you can avoid some of the summer rust this year.

The post Help Your Students Practice This Summer appeared first on MakeMusic.

You can find drone tracks on a variety of media (stand-alone audio tracks, YouTube, etc.), or make your own. In general, drone tracks should be simple and l-o-n-g. You want the students to have time to fully internalize what’s going on with their ears and air stream once they make the proper adjustments, something that’s difficult to do if the track (or each individual done note) is too short. No matter where you get your drone, here are three exercises that can help students develop intonation.

1.     Unison Matching

The most basic drone exercise is simple unison matching. Rather than depending on a peer to provide a steady tone (which can be challenging for young players), a student can make adjustments knowing that their “partner” is always right. This is a better option than a tuner because students are forced to use their ears to evaluate their pitch instead of just aiming for the green light.

2.     Interval Training

Once a student can comfortably match pitch with the drones, they can apply a scale to the drone pitch. Playing a (very, very slow) scale does 5 things:

• Improves intonation accuracy when moving step-wise
• Helps students hear intervals
• Teaches pitch tendencies for a student’s instrument
• Teaches pitch tendencies based on scale degree
• Helps students learn the scale!

Students will get to hear what each interval sounds like when tuned correctly by practicing hitting proper intervals against the constant tonic. They can hear that major 3rds should be lowered to sound in tune and that the F partials on low brass run sharp and should be adjusted. This is perhaps the most productive drone exercise.

3.     Theory Practice

Drones can also be used to help with music theory. A drone track could move around the circle of 5ths to help students understand dominant-tonic relationships and more. Ask students working with such a track, “When the drone moves up a 4^th, what happens to the key signature?” This practical application will help to drive some of these concepts home. Similarly, have students switch between major and minor thirds along with a drone track that includes an open 5^th; this kind of exercise can help students make this distinction in audible, hands-on way.

Making Your Own

Like the idea, but can’t find the right drone tracks for your students to use? I’ve built custom drone files for my students using Finale. This gives me another level of flexibility and helps make sure that my exercises fit the backing tracks more closely. I often use organ, cello sections, and the MIDI sound “bottle blow” (a better sound than you’d think!) with many tied whole notes in octaves. These can be saved as audio files and used by anyone.

The post 3 Exercises for Improving Intonation with Drones appeared first on MakeMusic.