Re: QUESTION - Got my Tuba yesterday


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Posted by Chris B on January 24, 2003 at 14:19:56:

In Reply to: QUESTION - Got my Tuba yesterday posted by Rob Edmiston on January 24, 2003 at 12:44:59:

I agree with what has been said so far. Find music you know, even if it is nursery rhymes so that you will easily hear wrong notes. Scales and other exercizes with consecutive notes will help get you there. Then move to thirds, etc. It will take a while before you can simply see a note and have the fingering pop out. I think the association between the written note and the fingering needs to eventually get to this automatic phase, but when you start, you may find that your mind does a kind of translation process where you think in Bb and then mentally transpose. You know you're really getting there when you can visualize a note on the staff and immediatey imagine the CC fingering instead of the BBb. May sound weird, but that means you have cut off the triangle of BBb to CC and back for every note.
Besides, who hasn't picked up a sheet of music and seen that some previous player penciled in the fingerings :) Only problem with that is it doesn't really allow you to learn the fingerings. It does get you through the piece. What I really like is when the fingerins written in are wrong. I find them really distracting and burn up a lot of erasers getting rid of them.
Now for a real challenge, if you already read Bb treble easily, wait until you try that on a CC horn. That took me a while. One good thing is that if you do read it, you can now play all the flute parts in the world by using your Bb treble fingerings for the notes on your CC.
Lastly, immerse yourself in CC and don't go back to BBb until you are rock solid. Eventually you will be able to go back and forth pretty easily.


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