Sustaining notes and finger independence
When we sing, we use our lungs to activate our vocal chords, and when we play a trumpet we also blow air out from our lungs. If there is no air, there is no [...]
Thumb and Fingers – Basic Arpeggios
Now that we have worked on playing notes together as a chord, lets break them up! Arpeggios are broken chords, with the notes of any given chord being played one at a time. In this [...]
Thumb and fingers: Block Chords
Its time to get the thumb and fingers working together, but they may not play along with each other just yet… At this stage in your development you may not have control over each digit, [...]
Thumb Stroke
There are three main strokes we can do with the thumb and in this lesson we will look at the most commonly used stroke, the free stroke. The thumb moves differently from the fingers and [...]
L106 Extended Scale in C Major
A scale is simply a series of notes in ascending or descending order, it doesn’t have to start on any particular note. So we can still play the C major scale even though we [...]
String crossing and alternation
String crossing is an incredibly important fundamental of our technique. I am quite insistent on the importance of good string crossing because it is one of the most overlooked techniques by beginners and can [...]