Preparing for All State Try Out

[trjeam]

I have 5 days left in school and summer is coming and I want to make this another great productive summer. But this year I want to work towards working on the skills necessary to be in the All State Band. I have dominated the county band for the last 4 years and only tried out once for all state and that was only in the junior division and i missed getting in by 1 point. wich sucked.

I have somewhat of an idea of what I need to work on. Scales, tone,musicality ect.

What really killed me last time was my poor sight reading skills. I have no idea how to improve sight reading.

Anyway the main question is what should I work on to get ready for a All State Audition?? I want to take my playing up to another level.
By the way the state is Maryland.

Any suggestions/ideas/tips whatever would help.
_________________
Jorge Ayala Jr: Trumpeter/Producer
http://www.facebook.com/JorgeAyalaJr
http://www.twitter.com/JorgeAyalaMusic

[_bugleboy]

George,

In his book about success ( in the business world) Jim Rohn writes, "To be successful, you don't have to do extraordinary things. Just do ordinary things extraordinarily well."

Apply this to the trumpet and you have your key to preparing for all state or any other audition. Good luck!

[Pat]

Sight reading is the part of all-state that trips up alot of students who are otherwise very good players. And you can't cram for it the last few weeks before the audition like you can the prepared pieces and scales. Its a skill developed over time.---You need to get alot of music and sight read something every day. It would be even better if you could sight read duets with someone since this forces you to keep going. ---There is a book called "Develop Sight Reading" edited by Roger Voisin. Of course once you are through it you are not sight reading it anymore, but the etudes it contains at least makes you play in many different keys, time signatures and rhythms.

[maynardwannabe]

Sight read EVERYTHING you can. That's really the only way. Play it over and over again until you get it right, then flip to another page and do it again.

I found Arban's has really helped my sight reading a lot, even though its starting to get hard to find new songs in there. Be sure to read the tough stuff--If you practice sight reading harder music than you get at tryouts, then it'll make the tryout a whole lot easier.

To make sight reading a little more enjoyable, invest in a book that has a style of music you enjoy. I got a couple of jazz books to fill in the gap left with all the classical stuff I have, and its fun to pick a swing piece and fly with them now and then.

Piano music is also a great thing to sight read, which I'm sure you have an abundance of if you have a piano in your house.

[_bugleboy]

Sight reading is all about reading rhythms. You can practice that without the horn.

You need to be able to see groups of notes and know what the timing (rhythm) is. For example, two dotted quarters followed by a quarter can look a little weird, but is an easy rhythm to play. An eighth rest follwed by three quarters and another eighth rest is another example. Easy to play. Sometimes looks a little weird. Dotted quarter followed by a quarter and three eighth notes can throw you unless you know exactly what it sounds like when you see it in a measure. When you know where the notes go in the the time, you're better than half way to being able to play them, IMO.

A good book for learning rhythms and how notes get grouped is "Rhythms" by Bugs Bower.

The Charlier book is a little expensive, but it has some good etudes. Tough keys to play in.

[SHS_Trumpet]

Aside from the music is a very important mental game. You must be mentaly prepared to make the all state band. If you have the mental game you have the advantage. Good Luck!

[trjeam]

I am 100% ready to be in a All State Band mentally. There is no doubt in my mind that I have the chops.

You guys talk about sight read everything that I have and all of that. I sight read all the time. I sight read new hymns that I've never heard of. I even transpose them in different keys. I even sight read stuff out of the arbans all the time. But my biggest problem is that I can't read certain rhythyms correctly or sometimes I get lost with the timing and the enitre piece becomes a mess. And when i try go back and figure out what I did wrong it either takes me a long time or either i never figure out how a certain rhythym goes.

And where can I get the book
"Rhythyms" and are their any other books that can help?

And this probelm hasn't just been with All State or auditions it's also a school problem. sometimes we will sight read a piece of music from the 19 century or something and it is so embarassing to have everyone else being able to read it and I have troubles. And I don't want to get the reputation of beign this good trumpeter that can't sight read a piece of music.
_________________
Jorge Ayala Jr: Trumpeter/Producer
http://www.facebook.com/JorgeAyalaJr
http://www.twitter.com/JorgeAyalaMusic

[_Don Herman]

This are all suggestions from a guy who's a decent but not great sightreader, and a CP as well! YMMV.

(1) Slow down -- waaay down! Try to get things as right as possible, then worry about speed (and everything else). Train your mind so that you see a note and hear/play the pitch without having to think about it. Sight singing helps, as does any pitch sort of work.

(2) Subdivide to get the rhythmic figures (more) correct. Use a metronome if you need to work on some figures, setting it for whatever will get you the rhythm (e.g., if it's soemthing with a sixteenth note, make one tic be a 16th note).

(3) Don't stop! It's a bad habit I've had to work hard to break, and I still mess up in my lessons when sightreading duets with my teacher. I tend to stop and fix it immediately in practice, as I was orginally trained, then go on. While it made sense at the time, in practice (no pun intended!) it teaches you (me) to stop at every mistake. In a band rehearsal, or performance, ya' gotta' be able to mess up and go on without losing place. (Well, I don't mean quite that -- [b]if[i/][b/] you mess up, [i]then you must be able to jump right back in! )

(4) If you fluff, go back later and work on just that part. Start with e.g. just that measure, slow and proper, get it right at least two or three times, take a little faster, then add the one before, then the phrase, then the piece. I realize in your tryouts going back is not an option, usually, but in your practice sessions you want to work out the things causing you problems. Next time the same figure comes along, you'll have a better idea what to do with it.

(5) Look over the whole piece when you get it, noting not just parts with tricky notes or rhythyms, but also long phrases and good places to breathe. One of my biggest problems when sight reading is that I fail to breathe often enough, leading to missed/dropped notes and sore chops just because I didn't take a breath.

(6) In a performance, tempo is set for you. In a trial situation (e.g., contest tryouts) you can probably set the tempo yourself and take just a little slower than indicated to give yourself some breathing room. One of the hardest tryouts I had was when the judges set a metronome at the start, giving one more thing to stew about. Even worse, in one session they didn't turn it off! I didn't (and don't now) often play with a metronome, and the added clicking was distracting --especially when I slowed down a bit to figure out something and got off the bloody beat. I got flustered and blew it completely. At least they let me try again; that time, I just missed the "bad" figure but stayed on tempo and didn't lose my place. I figured if that's what they wanted, I'd better do it!

Gradually you should improve and be able to speed everything up. But initially, I'd slow down and learn to concentrate on recognizing (and playing) the rhythyms at home, building your recognition and ability to play them.

HTH! - Don
_________________
Don Herman/Monument, CO
"After silence, that which best expresses the inexpressible, is music." - Aldous Huxley

[ This Message was edited by: Don Herman on 2002-06-04 09:28 ]

[Blue Devil]

What helped me for All-State (Illinois) or any other audition that involved sight reading was to "play" the entire selection in my head, mentally counting the piece, while I played the fingerings off of my horn (i.e. I played the entire selection on "air trumpet"). That way you already have gone through the selection at least once, noting any trouble spots, before you pick up the horn and play. I'm sure a lot of players work on technical passages in some form similar to this while away from the horn. You'd be surprised how much practice you can get in while reading a piece and playing the fingerings on your thumb, when picking up your horn isn't very convenient.

I also found out from my experiences that most judges won't expect you to sightread something completely up to tempo in these types of auditions (obviously you should find out if this is true for you or not before the audition - this was generally true for me). When I did finally pick up the horn to play the selection, I would take it as close to the written temo marking that I felt comfortable with.

All of the suggestions here have been good ones. Good luck both while preparing and at the audition.

Mike Trzesniak

[_bugleboy]

On playjazz.com go to this page http://www.playjazz.com/WNE106.html

No credit is given to Bugs Bower in the title but the original Bugs Bower publisher was Charles Colin. Also the title is identical to the original book. My guess is this is the same book, perhaps with Bugs no longer a royalties
recipient.