What’s the ability or skill you’d most like to improve?

Steve Brecker That's a great point! I might think about asking someone to demonstrate some plunger technique over a live stream in the future. 

tonebase_user Big time! There are a number of techniques that might be interesting...

- Practicing attacks on your own or with the Shuebruk book is a great place to start. Chris Gekker demonstrates this in his Dynamics course!

- Visualization/hearing the note first in your inner ear is really important. 

- Thinking about synchronization of the elements that make a sound: chops, tongue, air, fingers. 

- Remembering that the note doesn't begin at the beginning of the "tu" but actually the note starts when the tongue releases. 

Hope some of that helps! 

Aidan Griffith That sounds quite normal! One approach could be to develop a warm-up routine that simultaneously works the fundamentals you want to practice. Dan Rosenboom shot a course with us that's coming out in July that will cover this approach!!

It's important not to get into a downward spiral, where your chops feel progressively worse each day. If this happens, you're playing too hard with not enough rest. Sometimes, the best thing to do is to just put the horn down. Practicing while tired can cause us to compromise form, building the habit of the compromised form! 

Hope some of that is helpful. Ryan Darke also discusses Endurance in his Troubleshooting Common Problems course. 

Dee I hear ya! Practicing with a lot of rest is a double edged sword... we feel fresher but we get less done. And it can be frustrating when we just want to improve.

I'm a fan of the pyramid idea... The base of the pyramid is easy slow, low fundamentals that don't tax you... and the very tip are the difficult things. When you have this sort of foundation, you have the strength to do more difficult things and you can gradually push your endurance. If you do too many of these difficult things without the foundation, your playing suffers and you can get tired very quickly. It's a hard balance to find... but consider tracking your practice sessions with a journal and using timers. Allen Vizzutti has also mentioned that sometimes we don't need to spend as much time on the hard stuff as we think. The better our basic fundamentals are working, the less time we have to spend hammering away at the more virtuosic/extreme stuff... our fundamentals are stronger, so the hard stuff works with fewer attempts. 

I'm sure there are lots of other ways to think about this topic, too. Anyone else have some ideas?