Video #7 of 18 in the series: Up Your Mental & Emotional Game (for Trumpet Playing)
English transcript of available on: www.AdamRapa.com
You can watch the full series there, and find lots of other goodies!
Some key take-aways from this video:
"I would make sure that that whole 'well-balanced diet' that I just spoke about was being tended to in those 20 minutes. And that means just picking a few exercises; maybe exercises that primarily target the thing that would suck the most - whatever it is that you're working on...
"...whatever exercises you're playing, make sure that they are based on the fundamental concept of fine-tuning coordination, in a very rudimental way; fine-tuning the coordination of the basic essential building blocks of other more complex things."
"Take that least familiar chord scale, and play all your technical studies in that chord scale."
"...even in 15-20 minutes if you're playing unfamiliar patterns, you can still be gaining more harmonic fluency, even in just that short period of time, but you just gotta narrow it down to just this one scale that you need to make better friends with."
"Make sure that you've got really nice, fat, resonant two-note trills going on, and work your way all through the range in that chord scale so that you become more familiar with that chord scale."
"Play a bunch of scales studies, slur them, articulate them with every type of articulation that you feel like you should have in your toolbox."
"Play super, super quiet and super, super loud, in general if you only have 15 to 20 minutes, then there's no time to waste noodling around in ‘mezzo-mezzo’ land."
"Get to the things that are hardest to accomplish, both physically and regarding coordination - and that would be as soft as humanly possible, and as loud as humanly possible."
"And if you do the majority of your playing near the extremes, anything in the middle is going to feel super easy in comparison."
"...find a way to really exercise your dynamic contrast and that'll keep your chops active in ways that they wouldn't be if you were just hanging out in ‘mezzo-mezzo’ land."
"Also, if it's going to be 15-20 minutes only, keep the horn on your face the entire time. Do not take the trumpet off of your face for the entire 20 minutes."
"Resting is nowhere near as restful, and rejuvenating as playing in the double-pedal register.
"...even if it's an hour, I pretty much never take the horn off my face. I'll just go back and forth between playing my exercises and double-pedals."
"...to recap, for me, I'm getting to all the food groups. I'm gonna slur, and single-tongue, and double-tongue; I'll hit all my chosen types of articulation, I'll make sure to cover my entire range;
"Play in-tune and in-time, which means play along with some kind of practice aid; the apps like iReal Pro, or iTabla, or Drum Genius, or TE Tuner - there's so many out there..."