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  6 Steps for First Year Players! Ed Dumas When I first began teaching in 1984 (yikes!), I quickly became worried that the students that I was seeing coming to me were increasingly less able to sing on pitch. Now, one could debate the idea of whether they ever could, but I was already beginning to see a trend that most experienced music teachers today would say is true. That is, there has been an ever-increasing drop in music skills in our students upon reaching the age of the beginning band. Keep in mind that the trend that I saw back then was not something found in EVERY student. Yet overall, it seemed that more students each year had trouble with finding a pitch. In any case, with an ever-lowering commitment to elementary general music education in BC, the drop in skills was inevitable. Though our elementary music education teachers have tried valiantly, they have been fighting an uphill battle for decades with little time and fewer resources. When I worried about a loss of the ability to sing on pitch, I had no idea how far this trend would go. Today, it seems I was so naïve to be worried about an ability to sing on the pitch when later we faced so many more even bigger issues. Soon afterwards, I noticed students generally could no longer read in bass clef before entering the band. Later, students could not read half notes and quarter notes, though they still seemed to generally be able to identify treble pitches on a staff. Still, soon pitch names in treble clef were gone. Later near the end of my career in 2018, I thought I had reached the bottom of the drop when most students seemed to have significant trouble clapping back a basic rhythm presented to them. Little did I know that the next drop was a sense of time. Then it seemed that a majority of students were unable to just keep a steady sense of time by clapping a regular pulse together with the teacher. I am now utterly unsure if we have yet reached the bottom of the musical skill drop. While this steady drop in basic skills seemed so distressing in so many ways, it did provide me with an insight into priorities in students’ music learning. That is, the last skill lost was also the most basic to learning, and therefore the most critical to teach first when building skills back up in your band students! Now, over the years that I was distressing about how students’ skills in music were being lost, I was also seeing another problem that I thought was unrelated. The problem, as I saw it, was that many students did not have an understanding of how to solve a musical challenge when they were trying to learn a new piece of music. I would often see students start playing the new piece of music at the beginning, and when they reached the hard part and realized that they “messed up,” the students would just stop. They would then return to the beginning and attempt the passage once again but did nothing to address the actual technical challenge in the piece of music.  I often found myself watching kind of dumbfounded when students would try this tactic multiple times with no change in strategy as to how to correct the actual error. My usual response would be something along the lines of “When you go back to the beginning and start again, what is it that you are actually ‘practicing?’” The answer for experienced musicians of course would be “The Beginning!” So, when students showed me that they do not have a strategy to tackle the hard parts, I became concerned that I was going to have to create for students a strategy to fall back on at home, particularly in the first year. The first-year students are truly wonderful to teach in many ways. They are usually so excited about playing the band instruments that they would be practice diligently at home every day. Every improvement found in a beginning student would also be met with great excitement by that same student. That is a true blessing! The trouble is, those beginning band students usually do not know HOW to practice yet, and therefore a lot of that time at home was not very productive. So, with those competing issues in my head, over the years, I formulated a plan which has been very successful in giving the new band students some strategies in learning new music (and their instrument) at home, the place where I had the least control. I called this system the “Six Steps To Success!” Step 1 Clap and Count Use the music in question and clap and count the rhythm using the following rules: Rule 1 – Put your hands together in a clap at the beginning of every note. Rule 2 – Keep your hands together and ‘pulse’ the hands up and down in time on notes that are longer than one count. ie a whole note would be ‘clap – pulse – pulse – pulse’ Rule 3 – You MUST speak all of the counts, regardless if you are clapping or if you are silently pulsing with hands together. Rule 4 – Say the &’s only when there are eighth notes (for now).  Rule 5 – You MUST count out loud for everyone else to hear. Here are a few learning suggestions for you. In the beginning, new band students will struggle to do all of those things at once on the first try, so break it up for them at first! Have them do the clapping alone, and then the counting alone, and then put it back together. Make sure they speak it out loud, as this is very important before you go on! Students that just mouth along with everyone else doing it are opting out, and that is unacceptable. Step 2 – Name The Notes Have the band do this in three sections, grouped by their transposition key. Clarinets, trumpets, tenor saxes, and euphonium treble clef players all in the key of Bb would go together. Flutes, trombones, euphonium bass clef, tuba, and percussion in the key of C would name notes together. The last group is the alto and baritone saxes in the key of Eb. Make sure that all the students are doing this out loud before you go on. If they are just “lip-syncing” to others naming the notes, they will not yet have success with the next steps! Step 3 – Move the fingers Here you would have the students put their instrument up in playing position, and “air band” the keys/valves while you play. In the first-year group of players, you could probably memorize on your instrument their little 8 measure passage and play it for them while you watch their fingers. You will quickly get an idea of who knows where the fingers go. Again, make sure they are doing it in a way that shows YOU they know what they are doing. Step 4 – Name the notes and move the fingers together This is an important step, as it locks into the brain that a “C” on their instrument is played “this way,” while a “G” is played “this way.” I have seen students who could name the notes but could not identify what the fingers were to play the notes. This helps solve that problem. A good strategy is again for the teacher to play on their wind instrument while the students name the notes and move the fingers together. By doing this, you keep everyone in the same place, as they are forced to follow the time lengths of the given notes such as half notes, whole notes, etc. You can play and follow along either by transposition key or in a whole group for an extra challenge. Step 5 – Sing it This is an important step as it kind of puts the song back into the students’ heads after tearing it all apart. You can use a common syllable such as “La” or “Da”, and also teach the students the words too. Singing it ahead of time also teaches the students about phrasing and duration of note values which you have not even talked about! Step 6 – Play it! By now, if your students have done all of the previous steps, they should be able to play it almost flawlessly on the first go. Students would sometimes suggest to me that we need not go through all of the steps and that we should just “play it straight through.” The obvious response which students might not understand is that by not using the steps, you are encouraging students to get lost and frustrated when a piece of music or a passage is beyond their skill. On the other hand, by going through the steps, new band students are learning success on a band instrument and excitement in playing due to that success, while they also learn a strategy for mastering the difficult passages! Which way would you rather have it? Now, I would not use these steps on every piece of music that we learned in a first-year band class. That is certainly excessive. But anytime that we would come across something that needed to be worked out within the first few months of playing, this was a quick way to solve the problems. Trombone Extra Steps Here are three extra steps just for trombone players, who also have their own particular set of problems with the slide. Place these steps just for trombones between steps 4 and 5 in the Six-Step plan. Step 4A – Trombones Name the Slide Positions Trombone players are the only players that can speak the slide position numbers that they play on their instrument. In the first year, trombone players often get themselves lost even if they have memorized the note names. Usually, it is because they have not memorized the slide position numbers. So, have them speak these out loud, and you can join in to help them along. Do it enough times that they are comfortable with these positions before going on. Step 4B – Trombones Move the Slide Positions Have your trombone players move their trombone slide into positions as you play the piece of music on your instrument. Make sure that each player is participating, and do it enough times to give them practice at it. If some are lost while doing this, go back to step 4A and review it again. While they are doing this exercise, watch for the trombone right-hand position so that they are not playing with a full fist on the slide brace. This causes the bicep to flex, the wrist to lock, and the slide to slow down. Instead, make sure they grip the slide brace with a thumb and two fingers ONLY so that their wrist will bend and they will develop some speed. (This also tells you who has a lubed slide!) Step 4C – Trombones Say Slide Positions & Move Slides Together By now you probably can see the pattern and how this works. This step locks together moving the slide into position and the slide numbers in the students’ minds in a way that makes it impossible to come apart. When trombone players are using this strategy, make sure they are speaking the slide numbers out loud so that they are not just faking it.    One more thought in the Six Steps Plan. You can integrate the trombone extra steps one at a time by breaking them up, and inserting them after steps 2, 3, & 4. In effect then, steps 4A, 4B, & 4C become steps 2A, 3A, & 4A. Either way is good, but breaking them up sometimes is a little less onerous on the trombone players if they are feeling a little uncomfortable about being singled out. A Final 6 Steps Teaching Strategy  It is a really good idea for students to not just know how to play their musical instrument, but to know how to teach themselves how to play their musical instrument. In other words, I wanted my first-year students to know how to solve the frustrating problem of learning to read and play music at home when I am not there to solve their problems for them. Therefore, I would have my first-year students memorize the Six Steps to Success. They would together have to say out loud to me several times each class this order, “Clap & Count, Name The Notes, Move the Fingers, Name the Notes & Move the Fingers Together, Sing It, Play It!” If they could say that order and memorize it, they could solve some of the frustrating parts of home practicing and feel good about themselves. (You can provide a written copy of the Six Steps too, by putting it on their practice record!) I have seen students who have floundered in the band getting nowhere for months in their first year. After taking them aside (again!) and finally convincing them to use the Six Steps For Success at home for two weeks, they would suddenly flourish and come back all excited to play. Some students need to understand that the Six Steps is not “For Always and For Life” but rather “For whenever you need it, but heavily for the next two weeks.” By getting them to commit to a short time frame with it, they would then begin to see the results and were able to break the deadlock. Then, you would win again, because they still had learned that strategy that they could fall back on at any time in the future if a passage became a problem. Despite all of that prep, there will still be days when beginning band students are so frustrated they feel like pitching the flute through the window! They need to know that they should not do this, as it is not good for flutes, and it is not good for windows! A good strategy at that point is to put the instrument down, even pack it away, and leave it alone for a while. Go have a snack, read something, watch a show, and then come back to it later when you are not feeling stressed anymore. THEN, try it once again SLOWLY, using the Six Steps To Success! Having a strategy like this for home practice can save a fair number of students from dropping out when it starts getting harder. Without a doubt, flute player stress in the first year is well above everyone else. That is because they are having to learn all that everyone else is learning, plus they have to do it with 9 digits (fingers) at once! Everyone else is maxed at three digits, and trombones even have only 1 hand in use in the beginning. Giving them all an organized strategy to turn stress into success, can save a lot of flute tears, and a lot of windows. Once they have solved some issues on their own at home, they will be hooked, and will be yours forever!   Ed Dumas, B.Ed., M.A.Ed.   -->

Set - Exhale - Inhale - Play One of the things that Universities do well is to teach how musical instruments should be properly played. Unfortunately, one of the things that universities maybe teach less well, is how to diagnose problems in performance on musical instruments and how to correct those problems, or better yet, how to avoid those problems altogether. The best solution to a problem is one in which you completely avoid the problem altogether and your students never even know what the potential problem could be! Yet, the position often taken by music teachers or universities is that students who are suffering problems with their musical instruments may need to see a private tutor for correction. In my career as a secondary band teacher in Maple Ridge, private tutors for band students were rarely an option that parents would or could consider. I suspect today that is probably true in many more areas of our province. This leaves the band teacher in the unenviable position of being the only expert that students likely will see throughout their time in a music program.  Facing this reality, I found myself often asking the question, “Why this student, and not that one?” For example, “Why did this student develop a habit of playing trumpet with a closed throat, and that one did not?” If you are not sure what I mean by closed throat on trumpet, you have at least likely heard the sound. It is a tight raspy sound that is small and very stressed. The player usually has a very limited range (can’t play high), often off the pitch, has a very poor tone as well as poor articulation. It is a very unpleasant sound, and often makes the listener feel like the trumpet player’s head is going to blow off his shoulders! After literally many hundreds of trumpet players and thousands of wind musicians, I saw a trend. The students that developed that closed throat sound while playing trumpet were often the same ones that were breathing in at the same time as they were bringing the trumpet up to their embouchure. Despite my objections, they just seemed unable to separate the “breathing in” function with the “raising of the horn to face” function. It seemed to me that there was a natural connection with raising the trumpet to the face and taking a breath in at the same time. This seemed critical to me. Students that breathe in early as they raise the trumpet to the face actually MUST close off their throat to wait while the embouchure gets set to play. The only way to stop the instant release of all air before the mouthpiece becomes set is to close off the throat. This is also known as a glottal stop and is deadly in playing trumpet, as well as many other high-pressure wind instruments. Closing the throat while playing, then, becomes an unintended outcome in learning due to incorrect mechanics of breathing in. It is important, then, even critical, that you teach your music students that the breath comes AFTER raising the horn to embouchure, and not during. When I would see students falling back into that bad habit, I would stop them mid-downbeat. They must learn that this must NEVER be done again. Each episode of breathing while raising a horn to face reinforces the unintended outcome of a closed throat, and must not be allowed to continue. Still, I found that there was a small subset of those “throat players” that were incredibly persistent in breathing in while lifting the horn up. It probably has something to do with the actual lifting of arms is kind of akin to breathing in, and therefore triggered that response. In any case, I needed to find a way to reprogram their brain, so that in time a new routine becomes the norm. So, I had the trumpet players learn the routine Set – Exhale – Inhale – Play. This routine allows the trumpet players to re-open the glottal (larynx) BEFORE attempting to make a sound on the instrument. When they learned this routine well, it seemed to help break the bad routine of breathing in while raising the trumpet to the face, which would almost always result in a closed larynx. So, let’s have a closer look at each of the 4 steps in more detail: SET – In this step, the mouthpiece of the instrument must be set in place, ready to play. The term I used is “Locked.” When the mouthpiece is locked in place, if the mouthpiece were to be moved slightly, it would also move the lip with it. For the brass players, the lip to move would be the top lip. For the woodwind players, it would move the bottom lip. WARNING – DO NOT allow students to touch each others’ instruments in any way. If you attempt to move a mouthpiece, be VERY gentle, as students can get dental damage from instruments fairly easily! Now, the reason I have learned to ask for a mouthpiece locked in place, is that trumpet players will sometimes just place the mouthpiece in front of their lips, but not contact the lips until AFTER the breath is taken. Students that do this must then close off the throat once again before setting the embouchure properly in place. This is no better! The mouthpiece needs to be locked in place. Insist on it. EXHALE – This is an important step, as breathing out with no resistance is what opens a closed throat. Students are often directed to breathe in as the conductor begins the upbeat, but they will not be able to breathe in if their throat is already closed and their lungs are full! They must exhale first. Now another warning. Some students will try to exhale through the mouthpiece, and therefore through the horn. Explain to them that the exhale here needs to be around the mouthpiece and not through it. The student should drop the lower jaw slightly, open the corners of the embouchure, and exhale out around the mouthpiece while keeping the locked lip in place. The reeds (clarinets and saxes) will likely still have the upper teeth on the mouthpiece as well as the lower lip locked. INHALE – If the first two steps were done correctly, the students now should get a much more successful breath in WITHOUT closing off the throat. I have usually stressed to students to breathe in long and slow, filling from the bottom up with the expanding rib cage done at the end, not at the beginning. Move directly into beginning the sound on the instrument so that there is no delay and therefore no opportunity to close the throat. Warning to teachers – Try to avoid any delays between breath in and play. Those unintentional delays, though, usually come later, well after the students’ first year of playing. In these later grades while in the “heat of the battle” trying to learn a piece of music, be careful to not change your mind after the upbeat. This will encourage your experienced players to go back to closing their throat while they wait for you to give that downbeat. No extra delay outside of the in-tempo upbeat, please! PLAY – If the first three steps were learned well, students should have much less trouble creating that first sound at the beginning of a musical line. The sound should come out more relaxed, free, with a nicer tone, and better in tune. Don’t be surprised, though, that you might have to work at Set – Exhale – Inhale – Play many times to get it completely internalized in your students. My next evolution in teaching/learning kind of went like this. I wanted the trumpet players in the first-year band to internalize these 4 steps so that they could completely avoid the whole problem of the closed throat. To help the trumpeters do this, I then started asking all of the students in the band class to practice the four steps along with them. It seemed so much easier if we all slowly learned each step, rather than having the majority of the class sit it out. Those sitting out from an activity are far more likely to be disruptive, and therefore cause you and the trumpet players to just “peddle harder” to overcome the distractions. So, have everyone do this! What I discovered when we all did this together was some pretty profound changes in sound with the entire band. The flutes often lost the closed throat if they were doing it. (Flutes will sometimes learn to play with a closed throat for a slightly different reason. For them, this often begins with a loose undeveloped embouchure creating the need to “throttle” the air back. Instead, get them to firm up the corners of their mouth to create the resistance at the embouchure instead of in the larynx.) Other great benefits to the entire band class learning to do the 4 steps together include flutes playing less sharp, clarinets playing less flat (first-year players!), saxes playing less sharp, better-tuned harmonics in the brass, better tone across the band, cleaner starts together, and better articulation for everyone! What is not to love about this? If you are in doubt about the four steps, try teaching this to a more experienced group of musicians. I would sincerely doubt that you would not hear at least SOME of the changes that I listed above. You will likely hear enough to convince you that this should be actively taught to first-year musicians until it is fully internalized, and then reinforced frequently in later years. One Final Thought – By examining, understanding, and teaching the mechanics of beginning a tone on a wind instrument, I have found that senior players that have internalized this skill can deal with the “conductor vagaries” of the downbeat. You know, sometimes we don’t count them in, which is their chance to exhale before they inhale. Or, sometimes we are about to give that upbeat before the downbeat, and then realize that something else needs to change, so we stop the whole process. For young players this can screw up the 4 steps, so please try to avoid doing that with them. I would teach the beginners to exhale on prep counts 1-2-3 and inhale on 4. A longer slow exhale does a better job of relaxing the upper body and the larynx. Later you will need to move them into the idea of an exhale followed by just a quick inhale on the upbeat without a count-in before play.  But, experienced players can go one step further to help deal with erratic conductors! For experienced players, once the horn comes up to the face and the embouchure is set & locked, they can then begin the exhale to get ready for the upbeat. If a conductor delays slightly before the upbeat, they will not need to panic, as their training will now have them ready to pause at the BOTTOM of their breath cycle. I have usually found that pausing here does not create the closed throat syndrome, as there is no pressure created which then needs to be held back. Avoid any delays before the upbeat as much as possible anyway, as your students will learn to not trust you if it is done too often. But, if it does happen, your senior students will be able to handle it if they have internalized the 4 steps well. As a rule, though, NEVER delay a downbeat after the upbeat. Consider it sacrilege to do this. Let them play, and then stop the band later on if you must fix something else.  If you are new to teaching band, try the 4 steps for yourself on your instrument. Then try teaching it to see if it helps your first-year players. If you are already doing this, I commend you. If you haven’t yet tried it, I would be surprised if you don’t see huge growth in your players very quickly. The trick, though, will be in being persistent with it, especially over years when students return for more advanced classes.      Ed Dumas, B.Ed., M.A.Ed.   -->

Welcome to the Music ED Blog! You have found your way to Tapestry’s Music ED Blog. I am delighted to host this blog as part of Tapestry Music’s ongoing commitment to quality music education. My name is Ed Dumas, and I am a retired band teacher from SD42 (Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows) where I worked for my entire full time career years. My wife, Laurie, and I are now living in Parksville, BC, and enjoying all the wonderful aspects of a small town on the ocean! This Music ED Blog will cover many topics and ideas that I have learned or outright stolen from others over the years. I figure that you might have heard of some the ideas that will be presented here, but hopefully some others will be of value to you. Or, maybe you will find even just a refresher of ideas that you once knew but have forgotten that will help rekindle something new in your classroom. Feel free to use any ideas in this blog with my full permission, in the hopes that it will help further advance music education in BC, or wherever you may live. If you find any ideas in this blog that contradict your own ideas or practise, please do not feel obligated to use them. Still, maybe they will just spark an idea for change, and that could be good. My experience as a band teacher is quite extensive, having taught full time concert band and jazz band for most of my entire career, with a few other classes once in a while. But, I will limit my input in this blog to only those topics that I am comfortable with and leave discussion of topics in the worlds of choir, guitar, elementary music, and others to people who have much more knowledge in those fields than me. So, you may see some guest writers from time to time, and that is likely a good thing, too! Finally, if you have a suggestion for a topic that you would like discussed, Send us an email!. We look forward to hearing from you!   Ed Dumas, B.Ed., M.A.Ed.   -->