Transcript Summary
One word of advice, right off the top, don't be a ditto master teacher.
Okay? I mean, I'm going to show you some routines, how to put them together,
but just don't go crank these things out.
Teaching in university, I get all kinds of newsletters and stuff.
There's one teacher down in Miami.
I won't tell you what university, but he mailed out all this stuff,
and by God, it's got it laid out there.
If you're a freshman, you will play. They'll follow the routine, and that's it, no matter what.
It gives the students these things, you know?
And it's absolutely ridiculous.
Yeah, yeah, ditto master, ditto crank it out, here we go.
Must be a great way to teach in Miami.
But anyway, so don't say, well, you've got to do this.
You've got to identify where your students at, period.
Okay? So let's start off. Ready? Pencils, all right? Here we go.
Now, we're going to do two different types of routine.
Okay?
When I was with Claude, I was in a lot of plane, okay?
And I couldn't afford to have, I couldn't afford to have that one hour break.
I had to get warmed up, go through some routines, get things going, go to work.
Okay? So we have two different types of setups for routines.
Okay? So here we go.
If you're going to do your one hour break, for example here, you want an hour break,
this is the type of routine you want to do.
Okay? First of all, A, you want to do some type of a warming up process.
Okay? And it should be like a flexibility idea or a scale idea, that type of thing.
Okay? So A would be, for example, flexibility and things like irons,
like one girl irons, 27 groups of exercises.
Okay? You guys have heard of it called girl irons, 27 groups of exercises.
And you might have, you might do one through 14.
Or any of Charles Poland books, the lighter ones, like in volumes one, two, and three.
Okay? Now, part one, then, is a down routine.
Okay, where do you get down routines? From Claude's books.
Okay? And in this, right here, you can do any of the part ones in systematic approach.
The part ones in systematic approach.
Or daily routines.
Any of the down routines.
The down routines.
Okay?
Second section.
Yeah, who's got a daily routine sitting right here?
Thanks, we're all getting a page on this.
Okay? The down routines and daily routines would start on page number 32,
and they continue through the rest of the book.
Page 32 at all.
Okay?
That's about, oh, five years of work right there.
Okay?
Really is.
Alright?
That's also where your long hold goes.
Okay?
So you've got down routines, and you've got that long hold.
Right?
The accordion squeeze method.
Okay?
Then, your up routine.
Up routine.
Okay?
Now, where do you find your up routines?
Systematic approach.
Starting with lesson two.
And it's been a week to ten days on each part two.
Now, that's one year right there.
This is about five years.
You do every single model in daily routine,
or you go through all of the part ones of systematic approach.
Now, you might say, well, how do these match up here?
For example, if you're doing, say, systematic approach lesson 48,
and maybe your daily routine's doing page 36, that's okay.
They don't have to match up in the books, per se.
Okay?
As a matter of fact, when I was with Clyde,
we got the lesson 18, part one, and systematic approach,
and we stopped those part ones and went right into daily routines.
They don't have to match up.
Or what you don't have to do, lesson two, lesson two, lesson three, lesson three.
One of these routines like this.
Now, you go all the way through daily routines,
and do every model, and it says about four to five years of the work.
All right.
Now, so now you've got an up routine,
so you go all the way through systematic approach.
Part two to 52.
Every part two.
Awesome.
After you've gone all the way through that,
you get Clyde's Velocity Study.
Okay.
Thank you.
All right?
If you do every single model and every single exercise,
that's about three years worth of register studies.
So now that's about four years worth of work.
Okay?
After you've gone through all this,
you go right back and go through this book again.
And you can go back and forth there.
You know, you won't repeat a study except for every four years.
Okay?
You will not get bored.
All right?
So you have your idea of warming up, flexibility studies,
some type of flexibility book, light flexibility,
then a down routine with that long, long up routine.
As far as you go, and one note further,
then a one-hour break.
You relax your lift here.
C-G-E, C-G-E.
Pedal seat three, four, five times.
You feel comfortable.
Put the horn away for at least an hour.
Now, here's the problem.
Let's say you're in high school
and you've got an 8 o'clock marching band practice,
or you've got an 8 o'clock concert band.
Well, you have to get up at 6 o'clock in the morning
to start this thing, okay?
And mom and dad may not dig that too much.
So now, let's say you have to work during the day
in that situation.
You take this whole section here
and you move it down here.
Down, up.
At the end of the day.
Okay?
All this does is it gets this out of the way of your gig
and puts it at the end of the day.
The last thing you do.
That's what I did with Claude.
It worked great for me.
I know some of you guys,
hearing how you prepped for today,
some of you are going,
they're down and up for teams at the end of your team.
Some guys will say,
well, won't this make me work faster?
How's this?
You'll get the same results.
If you're practicing correctly,
you won't be tired when you get here.
Okay?
All right, and I'll show you how this works out.
Now, part three, after your long break,
is technique.
All right?
Okay, so now technique.
You have basically two books each day of technique.
All right?
So let's talk about Clark Technical Studies first.
Okay?
So write down Clark Technical Studies.
All right?
First time to the book.
Okay?
First time to the book.
You go and you go one week, single tongue,
the next week, slur.
So that's the first study, two weeks.
Next two weeks, second study, tongue and slur.
Next week, Thursday.
So you're going to spend two weeks on each study.
If you've never done Clark before,
leave out the eight-twos first time through.
You're probably not ready for them anymore.
Okay?
So now you go all the way through,
you do all eight studies.
Don't worry about the nights.
All eight studies, tongue for a week, slur for a week.
So there's what?
16 weeks, right?
Four months.
Bam, right now.
Okay?
Now, you go back to the beginning of the book.
And now you spend, first study, one week, single tongue,
one week, K tongue.
Well, that's not K modified.
That's not the Clark tongue.
And that's...
That's like K tongue,
like the back side of double or triple tongue.
One week of K tongue.
Then, in the first study,
you spent one week of double tongue,
one week of triple tongue,
one week, slur,
so now you spent five week on the first study.
And all five weeks,
You're doing the first A-tube as written.
Okay?
Now, you go to the second study, and you play the second study and the A-tube, single tongue
for a week, K-tongue for a week, double tongue for a week, now triple tongue won't fit obviously,
and you do it slurred for a week.
There's four more ways.
You do the third study the same way.
You do the fourth study the same way.
You do the fifth study the same way.
You do the sixth study the same way.
Single, K, double, as written, one week each, including the A-tube.
Now you've gotten to the seventh and eighth study, and those are triplets.
Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, right?
Okay?
So what do you do there?
Very logical.
Single tongue for a week, K-tongue for a week, triple tongue for a week, and as written
Okay?
Seventh study, eighth study, and an eighth.
Now what do you do?
You've just spent eight months and a week in Clark.
You've just taken care of a year.
There's one full year in Clark.
All right?
Okay.
Now, that's how you do the Clark book the first and second time through.
Meanwhile, so you've got technical studies, Clark, and now you've got Arvinds.
All right.
Now, Arvinds.
I'm going to put on Arvinds for a second.
One of the guys has been here before.
Arvinds.
Arvinds.
Arvinds.
Arvinds.
Thank you, sir.
Okay.
Arvinds.
Ready?
Here we go.
Arvinds, you start on page 76.
Now, 76 is where all the chromatic scale studies start.
Okay?
Now, you spent a week on each exercise, pages 76 through page number 86.
All right?
And here's what you do.
On each study you spend a week.
And each week you go single tongue, K tongue, double tongue, or triple tongue, and slurp.
Whatever fits the exercise.
Now, it's not a week each month.
You're going to do all those models each day.
So if you're doing the first exercise, I should have brought my horn in.
You do the first exercise, you're going to go...
And then you go back to the K tongue, go right back to the double tongue, go right back to the triple tongue, go right back to the slurp.
So what are you working on?
You're working on models, right?
Just like a violinist does.
Okay?
A violinist will work on exercise down bow, up bow, go back to the standing up bow, down bow, at the frog, in the middle, at the tip.
We'll do a bouncing bow, you know, everything you need to think of on every exercise.
We need to do the standing up front.
So you're studying that.
At the same time you're doing that, you go to also, when you're done with that, go back to page 59.
You do two, that's the scale, the major scale studies.
And you do two to three exercises per week.
So you're going to do all those major exercises all the way through page number 75.
Two to three exercises per week.
Then, this is all one day, right?
Okay?
Then you turn to page 155 and begin working on a triple tongue exercise.
Same thing, two or three of those each day for a week.
You still have to do one a day so you don't swell by.
You've got to get this thing working automatically.
Then you turn to page number 175, double tongue exercise.
Two or three a day, spend an entire week on it.
Remember, you're jumping around in the book and you're just spending one day and you go on, one day, you go on.
You're not training the brain to work automatically.
You've got to drill, you've got to drill, you've got to drill, stay on one exercise for a week.
So it becomes automatic.
Someone will say, well, I'm not really reading it, it's not hard anymore.
Good.
You're trying to get your brain to react, not think.
When you're performing, you don't have time to think.
You have to react.
Okay?
Then you turn to page number 26.
These are the rhythm studies.
And you do two each week with the metronome for absolute perfect rhythm.
And that goes from page 26 through page 36.
How many a day a week?
Two a week.
Each day, yeah.
In other words, what I'm giving you right now is a daily practice.
You're going to do all of that.
So in other words, if I have a student working out of arm-ins, my assignment would be to do exercise one on page 76,
singletongue, k-tongue, doubletongue, tripletongue, slurred.
Then turn to page 59, you're going to do scales.
Then turn to page number 60, you're going to do tripletongue.
Turn to page 176, you're going to do doubletongue.
Turn to the rhythm studies.
In other words, you get those things when you're working out the sections of the assignment.
Okay?
So now you've done your clarks, you've done your arm-ins.
Anybody with me on that?
Okay.
All right.
Then you work on your literature.
Literature.
Etudes.
We talked about the singlet hearing books, the Bront books, all that stuff I talked about.
And that's where you work on literature.
What type of literature?
Transition.
Etudes, solos, jazz.
This is wild.
This can be 15 minutes a day.
It can be eight hours a day.
So whatever you want to do.
Getting ready for your senior recital.
Getting ready for an audition.
You want to work on your Gini Emersal records.
Whatever it is you want to do, that's where it goes.
Right there, literature.
Okay?
Again, more flexibility studies.
I call it advanced flex.
That's where you're really going to be working on moving around the horn a lot.
That would be places where the advanced tongue level studies of quad would go.
Where you would maybe work harder on the irons, like more of the advanced things.
The Charley-Colin being one of the advanced flexibility studies.
Where you're going to be stretching yourself out.
The Colin books go from A.
You can get the irons book with up to Gs.
Tongue levels go all over the place.
You're going to be working on harder and more advanced flexibility studies here.
Now, there's a daily routine right there.
I'll show you how that's going to work.
Now, let's go over here and show how this works.
We're not going through our range first.
Part A would stay the same.
Part B, a pedal routine.
With a long hold.
Then, part one would be your technical studies.
Sorry, this is what type of routine?
This is a routine with a range at the end of the day.
Now, hang on.
This would take you about maybe 35 to 40 minutes.
If you've got an 8 o'clock class, or you're running off to a gig.
At that point, go out and do your stuff.
I used to warm up my dad's car.
I don't know if you wanted to get in the rug.
You'd get real upset.
I used to go out in the garage, sit in my dad's car.
Because they wanted to wake up the neighborhood.
Because I had marching band practice at 730 at the football field.
I'd go out and sit down in my dad's car.
Push the seat all the way back to the passenger side.
And warm up.
Go through this type of a part one.
Get warmed up.
The last one up a few times.
And go off to school.
Now, then what you would do after this would then be your literature.
Part three would be your advanced flexibilities.
Then you take a long break.
Then you come back.
And you do down routine, up routine, and relaxing lifts.
Do the whole thing.
Yeah, do the whole thing on the down.
Because it's been a long time.
If you're working a lot, this is going to happen somewhere around 9, 10 o'clock at night.
So you've got two pedal studies.
Sure.
Like a part two, a very light pedal routine.
Yeah, because you've got to get that thing going.
That's important.
That's got to be somewhere up in here.
Hang on, I'll hang on.
Now, okay.
Now it's very important to relax your lips.
After you've done any up routine, you must do your pedals.
You're warmed down at the end of the day.
The beginning of tomorrow's warm up.
Any good after.
You work out hard.
I used to run cross country in track.
You know, in Maya.
And it was like, the worst thing you could do if you have a heavy workout and then sit down and have a Coca-Cola.
Your legs just go, you know, like that.
I used to play in a rock band.
We'd be packing stuff up.
I'd be at the corner right now.
Woman all the way down.
So my lips just felt tingly and wonderful.
The next morning I wake up and I go, they're a little bit messed up playing rock music.
You know, high and loud and going for greatness.
You know?
Cheating for reals.
But it's like, you know, at least they weren't totally screwed up and stiff.
Okay?
So you must warm down.
Even at the end of a heavy gig.
Go on and warm down.
Don't just say, wow!
Yeah, let's go party!
You know?
The next day you're just neat.
I mean, it's over.
You wake up and go, oh man, what did I do?
You didn't take care of business.
Warm down.
End of a football show.
Band rehearsals.
So what if you make English class?
Screw it!
You know?
Warm down.
Yeah!
Tell your band to put it before lunch.
You know?
You go party.
Okay?
But you've got to warm down after every hard workout.
You have to warm down.
Okay?
Now, the most dangerous part of this routine is not this.
It's not this.
The most dangerous part of this routine is right here.
Right there.
That is the most dangerous part.
You can clog just a rag on me, throw things at me, beat me up.
I mean, all kinds of things.
Because I'm one of those guys who piles 17 concertos, 75, 82 books, and then puts a rag over the cloth and just goes to the greatness.
And you sit there for hours and hours just blowing tunes.
And you never take a thing off your face.
Ever.
You just sit there and crank, and crank, and crank, and crank, and crank, and you're breaking every rule in the book.
If you look at any solo, I don't care if it's the Haydn or the Hummel or the Hymn or the Artinian, funny things happen.
They put rests in there.
There's a reason for that.
You're not a violin player.
You're not a piano player.
82 books are online.
You look at a Charlier exercise, it's got two pages of nonstop impossibility.
If you walk on a gig and saw that print, you'd go, oh my god, where's fourth chair?
You never see that in a gig.
Ever.
You don't see two solid pages of oh my god.
You just don't.
So you go...
One.
Two.
Three.
Put a rest there.
And do it.
You can put up a big phrase in there.
Put a rest there.
Get that thing off your face.
Rest as much as you play.
And this is where you can get goofed up.
Right there.
You can sit in your room and pound on literature all day long.
And you come out with a lip on this baseball and up.
Just stiff as an ass.
Claude got so mad at me, honest to god, he made me hang my watch on his hand.
Watch that thing play around.
He just got to get furious with me, you know?
He's probably one of the worst students ever.
Okay?
And I finally got the hit.
You know?
And what finally happened, and I'll tell you how I felt about it.
When I went to Claude, I said to myself, I'm going to be working on high notes.
Oh boy, screaming the jazz in the valley, right?
And I said to myself, man, the minute he screws my chops up, I'm out of here.
Okay?
So I went in there and I thought that what I felt good was when my lip felt real strong.
Now I feel like I had some meat and potatoes there, right?
You know?
And that was stiffness.
One morning I woke up, you know, and it was like somebody had taken a very sharp surgical knife
and cut the upper lip off and the lower lip off.
Because there was nothing there.
It was like, okay, never touch the top of the floor of my wall.
And I went, all right, that's it, call up Claude and quit right now, you know?
I went to my horror, picked it up and went, this is going to sound horrible.
Boom, the best I've ever gotten in my life.
I finally learned to rest as much as I played and all the swelling had gone down.
Totally.
I was no longer playing on a size seven reed.
I got it down to something like a gamble, you know?
And my lips felt great.
It's when you don't rest, when you sit there and pound and pound and pound and pound and pound,
is when you get the stiffness.
And all my students and all Claude's students eventually say,
oh, you know, it feels real thin and supple.
That's when you get that nice sound.
You can go all over the floor, all that blood splatter.
Okay?
You're not muscle-balanced.
All right?
So here we have how to put these routines together.
Okay?
Now, where you're at physically, obviously you don't have to take a beginner
and put them on Irons 1 through 14.
Obviously, you're not going to take a beginning,
so you don't put them on daily routines, diminished chords, three octaves.
Obviously, you're not going to take a beginner and put him on Lesson 52.
Obviously, you're not going to take a beginner and put him on Clark 8 Study,
Tom and Kate coming.
Okay?
You can't be a ditto master teacher.
You've got to identify where the kid's at, physically, mentally, where he's at,
and do the thing.
My beginning students have this type of routine.
Okay?
They've got a little mini down routine, a physical approach to elementary brass players.
That's another great book for beginners.
It's exactly what Kwon says even.
Okay?
Physical approach to elementary brass players.
So a little kid comes in, and he's got a down routine.
And it might just be,
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.
Everything we want the kid to do.
Down to maybe low G.
Yeah.
Then he has this up to D.
And it goes to D, fourth to that.
Fourth one.
Fourth one.
Okay.
And then he's got that D that sounds good.
He's working.
Oh, boy.
So, okay, relax your lip.
He's not ready for kettles.
He's a little dinky kid about to stall, you know?
And he's like, he'll go like, C, G, E, C, G, C.
And then we go on to Band Builder Book 1, you know, or something like that.
And maybe a little, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.
And he's a happy camper.
He's out the door.
He's working.
You know?
Now, the next kid walks in.
And he's like, you know, 28 years old.
He's this monster's lead player.
Well, his routine is laid out the same way.
You know?
A little Johnny can sit outside and go, Ooh, he's doing a down routine.
You know?
He can play lower than me.
Ooh, he can play higher than me.
You know?
And boy, I don't recognize those students.
I'm developing Band Builder, you know?
And what you've got is the same type of shape of routine.
Okay?
And I want you guys to study with Claude.
I'm sure you recognize this.
Somewhere, we have seen this before.
Right, gang?
Right.
Okay.
What you've got here now is what the practice, when the practice, and how the practice.
There they are.
You can take the artist's book and play it in the classroom.
You won't get better unless you know how to do it.
You can take Claude's books and have it in the classroom.
If you do it wrong, you're ready to go down.
You can work on literature forever.
You'll be so stiff you can't play.
Okay?
You've got to do it this way, systematically, resting as much as you play, sensibly.
Okay?
Questions?
Yeah?
You've heard some of these fellows refer to how you practice for teaching.
This is it.
Oh, learning at A2.
Going back from the end of the eighth grade.
Oh, okay, yeah.
Well, yeah, we can get into incredible amounts of detail.
We're going to be here until Christmas.
Yeah, how you practice is a technique of learning A2s.
I really should get my corn.
Reese, I'm not going to have you get it.
I know what kind of student you want to be getting back.
Oh, yeah, he brought that puppy.
That's cool.
Who's got a clog book real quick?
All right, characteristic.
Yeah, let's do it.
I'll put it on A1.
Yeah, that's all right.
All right.
Now, okay, you guys are new.
How you practice is a term that Claude uses, and it's a great way to do it.
I do this with bands, orchestras, my own students, whatever, groups at school.
And when it is, you'll turn to A2 number two.
Okay?
Now, Claude told me that this was the way that the dads worked out all those incredible
technical solos.
All right?
Now, you stop and think.
If you're playing something that's very difficult technically, you get going into the thing,
and all of a sudden your brain starts overloading like a computer, and you're looking ahead,
and now you're starting to miss.
Now you're getting up tight.
You're trying to look ahead.
It's just a wreck.
Okay?
Wouldn't it be better to work it out from the back to the front so that your mind is
always aware of what's coming up?
So here's what we mean by how you practice.
Find A2 to look at the last five notes.
What you would do if you do this.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four times perfectly.
Now you back up the next logical four notes plus the downbeat of the notes you just played.
So you have a connection.
So you go.
Four.
Five.
Six.
Seven.
Eight.
Nine.
Ten.
Ten.
Ten.
Ten.
Ten.
Ten.
Ten.
Ten.
Ten.
Ten.
Ten.
Ten.
Ten.
Ten.
Four times perfectly.
Then you put it together.
Four times perfectly.
Back up the next four notes.
Put it together.
And then your fingers just go out of any cloud.
Back up the next four.
And put that whole measure together.
Four times.
That single kind of level.
Okay?
And you just put that together.
Now you've come to the next level.
Now you've come to the next level.
Okay?
And you just put that together.
Now you've come to a bar line.
So all the bets are off.
Back up four notes.
Start all over again.
Back up four.
Work that measure out the same way we just did that one.
Right?
Put that whole line together four times perfectly.
That's it for the day.
The next day starts the next line up.
Work it out the same way.
Put those two lines together four times perfectly.
Next day, work out the next line up.
You work the whole etude out backwards.
Using that technique.
It'll blow your mind.
Because by the time you get four days on that thing,
working it out that way,
that etude's locked in forever.
Just, bam, it's there.
You work out all your hard technical passages that way.
Okay?
You ought to see me at a gig the first time I have to sit down.
I find something.
I'll go through it and I'll go.
Oh my God.
And inevitably that conductor's got that licked circle
probably to score it and nail the trumpet section.
And that has saved me many times to look up and go,
yeah, tell us.
Three measures after A.
Let me hear that lick.
Well, I've already done it.
How do you practice?
I accept.
I work it out backwards with my fingers, my mind,
my coordination, my tongue.
And I'll go.
I'll go.
And I'll nail it.
And the guys go.
And the conductor go.
Yeah, let's try to just play that for a little bit.
Do it again.
And the guys go.
It must be nice to have all that natural talent.
Yeah, but you can do this on a gig.
Just look at those hard licks.
Work it out backwards.
That's what we mean by how you practice.
Okay?
Take out all the etudes and characteristic studies.
Take the technically hard things and Charlie A.
Ron.
Anything that's hard technically.
How you practice.
Work it out backwards.
Okay?
Good question.
How can I do a distraught better?
I don't know.
All right.
Any other questions about this?
Yes?
Yeah.
On your down routine, do you do the same thing seven to ten days?
Yeah.
You do seven to ten days each one.
No matter how low or high you get.
Yeah.
Right.
Oh yeah.
Let's see.
It's 1987.
You'll be out of the book in 1991.
All right.
This is that long.
Yeah.
Now why?
Okay.
Now this is important.
Listen.
This is really important because what you're looking at here is you plug in the exercises
you're doing for a week to ten days.
I mean, if you're going.
And you got that thing.
You'll just play that.
Perfect.
And you turn the page.
You really haven't plugged things in.
I know when Claude did that.
I mean, I was like 22 years old and I was playing professionally and Claude said, let's turn
the page 76 and harder.
All right.
Well, I don't know.
I was that tall, right?
Let me hear it, right?
I played it and it was pretty doggone good.
I thought, nah, he's not going to have you pregnant.
I just nailed it.
It was good.
It's been a week now.
Right?
And I could understand that for a long time.
I've had a baby that I haven't had in a while.
And I could understand that for a long time, but you train your mind to react.
I spent a week on that, and man, after a while, I went, boy, try to play that perfect every
day.
K-Tongue was hard.
Man, that was hard.
Or do it double-tongued.
Perfect every day.
Or do it double-tongued.
Perfect every day.
That was very difficult.
I went back to next week and he gave me number two for a week.
I said, I can do that.
Just one more note.
Well, yeah.
But it was a little different taste.
80 G sharp.
And you lock that in.
What are you trying to do?
You're trying to program this up here.
You get past this silly hunk of two so you can make the music.
Not make high notes, not make fast notes, not make slow notes, not make low notes, not make all that.
You're worried about getting the music out of this tube.
Now, if you're sitting there going, you're still trying to figure out how to blow the thing, you're dead.
Somebody said to me, what's a good sight reading book?
There's no such thing as a good sight reading book.
Because once you've played it once, there's no longer a sight reading book.
Think about that for a minute.
I am working a week on this sight reading exercise.
How do you sight read?
Your mind is free to look at the music.
That's sight reading.
I mean, I just tell my students, drop the word sight.
You're going to read a piece.
Can you imagine going to an English class and the teacher says,
I'm going to do this bar out of intensity.
And they pass out a book to each student.
It says, today boys and girls, sight reading gone with the wind.
Ooh, duh.
That's stupid.
Can you imagine?
So why do you make a big deal out of sight reading on a trumpet?
Oh, the note thing.
You know?
It's really stupid.
If you've got control of your trumpet, if you've got control of all these aspects,
you're going to read music.
Too much analysis causes paralysis.
Play your instrument.
You know?
And that's why you've got to do this.
Okay?
And that's why, stop and think.
Have you missed anything?
You're playing the whole instrument every day, every aspect of the instrument.
Every day.
And that's what Claude's about.
That's one of the real geniuses.
He was the first teacher.
I have studied with some of the greatest teachers in the world.
Claude was the first teacher who wrote it down.
I got my first book.
It's like the Holy Grail.
I mean, you know, I'm teaching a student.
He's got a problem.
I'm sitting there going, man, I never done that.
What?
I go back to my lesson book.
Ha.
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah.
That page.
Yeah, I'll get it.
I'll get it.
All right?
Claude was the first person I ever met that did that.
You go to something, all the rest of the teachers in LA, they go, yeah, work on this, this, this,
and you go back home after a couple days.
You go, what am I supposed to do here?
You know, and you start the curriculum.
Claude wrote it down, and I got him to do it.
And it makes such logical sense.
You're playing the whole morning of the day in a logical way.
Now you can sight read.
Now you can work.
Now you can pay your rent.
OK?
And you're a happy camper.
Now that's how it works.
All right?
Any other questions?
Fire away.
Let's go.
This is like pretty important stuff.
What about resting like this?
I mean, you're always like taking a break.
What?
Rest as much as you can play.
I mean, rest in the routine.
I mean, if you're doing Clark Technical Studies, and if you're going to go...
You rest.
Very interesting about Clark.
See, a lot of these guys never let anything down.
If you look at your Clark Technical Study book, there's fermatas on every exercise.
They're not on a note.
They're on the double bar.
Rest.
Do you ever think about that?
Randomly, just close your eyes.
Look at any page of Clark, and there's a fermata on every double bar.
What's he mean?
Rest.
Rest as much as you can play.
You know?
I think Clark Party classical players were a lot smarter than what we are.
I always thought that was a mispronounce.
Come on.
We're going to mispronounce.
Oh, we're going to mispronounce.
So it's like it's on the double bar.
You rest as much as you can play.
Yeah, all the way through.
Yes?
Yeah, how long do you keep a student, a beginning student, on your physical approach book?
You both feel good about it.
I put you in this two or three times a day.
You don't get to the end of the book and say, well, stupid, we're going back to the beginning.
You know?
You've got to be the most positive teacher you can be.
You go, great.
You got to the book.
That's neat.
Man, you're hitting a high B flat.
That's great.
All right.
Now, let's go back.
And now we're going to work a little lower or a little higher.
I've had students go all the way through that book.
Like especially armature changes and advanced student and armature change.
We'll eventually get physical approach to elementary breast pain after maybe a high
D, high B flat, high F.
I asked Clark when he published that book, I fought him on that title.
I said, you know, you're going to sell a lot more books if you don't call it physical
approach to elementary breast pain.
I'll call it physical approach to fundamental breast pain.
And I said, everybody and their mother will buy that book.
You know?
They'll go, well, that's an elementary book they won't buy.
He said, well, it's elementary.
We need the basic idea.
He says, yeah, but breast players want something more hip.
I mean, if your music staff got elementary out of it, they'd go, oh, you're a lizard.
You know?
You know?
You buy the Ellen Vizzulli book and put it up and everybody goes, ooh.
And you've got the other book buried somewhere behind.
But it's like, you know.
But I said, no, call it fundamental.
But what the heck, you know?
Claude's as bad as me.
He's got a mind of his own.
OK?
So, you know, so you call it elementary.
But it's a fundamental book.
You can go through that thing 15 times.
OK?
Yes?
If you're practicing in a club, you're going to end up with a little bit more of that before
the end of the year in a scene.
I mean, you stop.
Yeah.
Well, you have to kind of pick.
Well, you have to, look, you have to mix.
You start here and you grow.
My routines with Claude at the Verdi game didn't take more than about 35 to 40 minutes a day.
And then as I got stronger, as I became a better player, as I began to understand what he was
talking about, they're just going to open up.
You know, as fast as possible to the slaughter door.
Bing!
OK?
All right?
Right now, you're just in slow motion.
And a flower's going to take forever to open up.
And after a year or two, if you look back at the very first routine you go, you know,
that was as hard to play as this one is now.
OK?
Yeah.
Oh, and that means you're out.
You get to a point where if you're practicing right, you can play all day long.
It's a great feeling.
But you rest as much as you play.
I'm telling that to you because you have to.
You know, you're not a violin player.
You know, your parents say, go in your room and practice for an hour.
You know, you're sitting there resting, your dad's like, I said practice!
Come on over.
Right?
Yeah?
Oh, my dad hated me like practice.
I'd be sitting there going...
Play a song!
You know?
Yeah, parents won't play and say, what you doing?
What are you doing?
What are the tunes?
You know?
You know?
So, a little kid, that's important.
You've got to put some tunes in there.
I mean, you know, a little kid goes home, he's got to go...
Ah, I'm a happy camper.
You know, you've got to get some tunes happening.
So, you've got to get some songs.
But with older students, you know, we know we're trying to handle, we're trying to get
the physical stuff under control.
OK?
Yeah?
Yeah?
Yeah, the first part.
But the easier tongue level studies where you're just starting to try to get things
working, that would be up in this area here.
The front part of the routines are all tongue level things.
Those are working marvelously right here too.
Yeah, yeah, those ones are good.
Those ones like that.
Yeah, right up in this area here.
Now as they get harder, we put them down in here sometimes.
I mean, you know...
You wouldn't want to warm up with it, OK?
You have liver for a challenge.
All right.
You've got to be sensible.
You know, you don't warm up behind us.
OK?
Yeah, any other questions?
I'd go back to basics.
Honestly, guys, I went to class.
Look, I had played associate principal in the San Diego Symphony.
I played in the San Diego Opera as a principal in the San Diego Breast and Teeth.
I played in the College of the Bull.
I had done recording jobs with Crystal Records, Tommy Stevens,
all the boys and girls, you know, the whole bit.
And I went to quad.
And the first thing he had me do was read exercises.
He said, OK, Dave, turn to the systematic approach.
Lesson two, part two.
And I went...
You know, the cows came up.
I started to write that.
I said, good.
We got Clark.
We started right at the beginning, right to the front.
You start, you know...
You just start, man.
Plant the seed and let it grow.
It's better to start a little too easy than it is to start too hard.
OK?
It really is.
Just kind of evaluate where you are.
Be a good teacher and kind of evaluate where you are
if you can cite those parameters like this.
Look, if here's where you're at, if that's where you're at,
and here's where your gig is, you're in big trouble.
OK?
The ideal situation is here's what you could play.
And here's the hardest thing you'll ever have to perform.
Now you've got to push it.
Here's the worst position, though.
Here's your gig.
And here's your ability.
Oh, you don't sleep nights.
Because if there's good days, you go, I can play it.
If there's bad days, you can't.
And you're right on that edge.
That's when you just start going, oh, baby.
You've got to get everything out here.
And the hardest thing after play is in here.
And, man, you feel great.
You get in your car and go, lay it on me.
I'm ready.
You know?
You don't have any fear.
You just go and play.
You know?
I mean, I've known Carl Leach for 10 years.
Every guy has got any fear in his body anywhere.
You know?
If you've ever gotten a brawl, I want Carl on my side.
OK?
So I mean, you've got to get that fear out.
So don't, at the very beginning, say, oh, I'm
going to work in a double seat for a week.
Just whatever you've got going, you're working on.
OK?
Thank you.
No, my pleasure.
Questions?
Fire away.
Let's go.
We've got about two or three more minutes.
Yeah.
One minute.
OK?
All right?
Now, we're in for a real treat.
Dominic Spera, our guest artist, has an awesome lecture ready for you guys.
And I think that's great.
So Mr. Dominic Spera.
Right here.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.