The Summerglen Files

Ugh. Today I’ve begun a huge transition in my trombone playing–from focusing on ensemble work to honing my skills as a solo player. For the past few years, I’ve centered my attention on strengthening my sightreading abilities, building my understanding of many different musical styles, and developing solid technique that I can incorporate into any ensemble. But lately, I’ve felt called in a different direction–solo work.

For the past few weeks, I’ve devoted ever-increasing chunks of practice toward working up some of my favorite trombone solos: the David, the DeFaye, the Weber, etc. All this work has given me monster technique across the entire range of my horn, and has boosted my endurance quite a bit. But so far, all this work has taken place in the privacy of my studio, with no audience except for the occasional bunny or cat. Until today.

Learning the notes, rhythms, and style of a solo piece is merely the first step in getting it ready for performance. After these basics are in place, it’s time for step two–to practice performing the piece in front of an audience. This is a field test, so to speak, where you see what happens to your beautiful tone when you play in a different setting, and experience how that insanely difficult lick goes when a roomful of people are listening. Often, the extra pressure of an audience can, er, affect your playing a bit!

This post began with an “ugh”, simply because this step isn’t very much fun–at least at the beginning. And today was the beginning, my first (albeit informal) solo public performance in years. It was pretty wretched. I cracked my fair share of notes, and my grace notes weren’t placed properly, and my endurance was shot because I was using too much mouthpiece pressure. Ugh.

But what’s cool is, the second performance will be better, and the third, still better, and so on, and so on. Just as it took time to learn to blend with various ensembles, it’ll also take time to learn to fill a big, empty stage on my own.

So here’s what I will do to continue my solo trombone training. Each week, I’ll record myself practicing one of my solos–and I’ll post the recording here for your listening pleasure. In addition, I plan to pop into one of the local open mics every couple of weeks, and perform a solo for a roomful of strangers. When spring rolls around, I’ll take my solos to the streets, and perform them on various sidewalks around Downtown Raleigh.

And with every performance and recording, this endeavor of mine will, hopefully, become slightly less terrifying and much better sounding.