Five Ways to Teach or Clean Articulation

It's never safe to assume that students are articulating correctly. Students get by through their beginner year with ways of faking it, and of course we as teachers can only spend so much time on one given thing. It's understandable. Articulation has to be retaught and reinforced every year, throughout the year. Sometimes I forget this, and yet I'm always surprised by how much things clean up after addressing articulation. It's as if the band was slurring it's speech, and suddenly they remember how to enunciate. I'm sure there are a lot of ways to teach it, or word it, but here are a few of the things I've used with some success.

4 Ways to Supplement the Beginner Band Book

Beginning Band students need
supplemental exercises to develop their
playing just like we did to develop ours.

I made a lot of mistakes with my first beginner class. One of the biggest by far was not supplementing their beginner band book. It's not that I didn't want to, or didn't know how to. It was more that I was so busy in my one man gig that it ended up as one of those things that just slipped by. Determined to make the beginners at my next job vastly different, I started working over the summer to create supplements. I've always been told that if you present everything through the book, you're probably in trouble, or that it's all about how you use the book. In some recent conversations on the Yellow Board I've found that some teachers use the book itself as a supplement, and have a large list of other things that are the base. Currently I'm in the school that spends half the class out of the book, and half in the book. The first twenty minutes or so are spent on supplements. I wish I were one of those teachers who had spent years collecting various materials to incorporate into their beginner curriculum. I need more time. Until then, if you're still spending the bulk of your time in the book, hopefully this will give you a few ideas to get started:

Six Tactics to Improve Intonation

Your ear is the final judge, but it
doesn't hurt to have one of these
on the stand.

Greetings!

One of the most illusive pursuits is that of ensemble intonation. There were at least a handful of things that helped us and continue to help us improve in that regard. When the year started, all my band knew about tuning your instrument was that the previous director marked all of the slides etc. where they were supposed to be set, and if you left it there it meant you were in tune. Can you believe that? So we practically started from scratch. I doubt I'll get through everything in one post (entire books are available on the subject), but here are a few key tactics that I think got us on the right track.

5 Ways to Keep Scales Interesting

Simple modifications to scales can
help your band grow by leaps and
bounds!

Good to see you today!

One of the things I like to do in rehearsal is experiment with the warm up time. A while back I blogged about  how to make your warm up time relevant for students, and today's post is closely related to that. There are plenty of ways to structure a good warm up, but I'm a believer that technique building should be included in there somewhere. I also believe scales are a fundamental building block for musicianship, not only for the music literacy and fluency, but for the technical aspects of playing. So we play scales every day. The problem with scales is that they can be very mundane. Fortunately, it can be remedied by adding in some variety. So, submitted for your consideration, here are a few ways to mix up your scales (both basic and advanced) to make them more interesting, fun (hopefully), and more relevant for students.