TromboneChat

Hello everyone:

How is it that playing notes in glissando in your warmups, helps to have a good sound. I have heard this from many trombonists like Alessi and others.

Thanks for your answers.

I find that if you can gliss a partial while maintaining the same, easy sound, then you're doing things in a healthy way.

Glissando is one of the barest, simplest things you can do on the horn. Because of that, it can quickly reveal problems that may be covered by things like tonguing or melody. It's a challenge to glissando ever higher and stay in the partial. It's a challenge to go up and to go down. It's a challenge to go up one partial and down an adjacent one. It's a challenge to gliss from the bottom of your horn to the top and reverse. All of these can reveal things you may never have thought about. I try to gliss every day, and very frequently something new shows up.

I don't know, but i would guess if/when it does work there are a couple things involved.

One is that a gliss requires steady air and reveals pretty quickly when you're not doing it. Unsteady air and articulating with air are common problems.

Another might be that good tone requires your lip buzzing at the same frequency the slide is set for, and glissing helps you find it.