TromboneChat

I just got promoted to bass bone in a big band. For most of my life I've played single valve horns. I now have a King 7B double independent valve 'bone. The second valve is new to me. Any suggestions for books to study - exercises, etc.?

This is good - https://www.hickeys.com/music/studio/un ... dition.php

I play a 7B also and used Raph's The Double Valve Bass Trombone for exercises. (Aharoni hadn't been published yet)

Bollinger, Blair, Valve Technique for Bass Trombone Subtitled "You've Got TWO Valves, Use BOTH," has some great exercises as well even if you don't use his tuning system.

The Alan Raph book mentioned by BGuttman was my first base trombone book in 1996 and I still refer back to it. There's a routine in there that he says to do daily without fail. That alone has helped me so much.

I'm working out of Brad Edwards' Bass Trombone Craft. It starts at a very rudimentary level, but gets to the useful stuff pretty quickly - alternate positions with valve(s), valved slurs, Gb valve singly, connecting registers, sufficient air,... all the usual suspects.

The Aharoni's non-classical bass bone book has a lot of idiomatic exercises. I like it to get the feel of different styles of bass lines. It gets away from the classic Arbans type of exercises, and helps you figure out style.

Thanks, everybody. I have a coaching session soon with a local pro bass bone player and will see what he says.

BGuttman wrote: ↑Tue Jan 17, 2023 6:29 pm I play a 7B also and used Raph's The Double Valve Bass Trombone for exercises. (Aharoni hadn't been published yet)

I feel like this book is under-appreciated.

Something more modern and detailed, with very thoughtfully arranged sequential exercises using both valves independently, is Sharpe's method, available at https://www.csharpeeditions.com/method- ... -technique.

There’s a BUNCH of stuff now written for the bass trombone. I, too, started learning before Aharoni. Here’s what I used:

The Lew Gillis books are a good resource for learning and relearning bass trombone with two valves. He has some nice, brief melodic and technical etudes.

I also used the first Faulise book for a while. It helped me set a routine, and I learned warm-ups and patterns specific to the bass trombone. I used his first book and ignored his markings—he wrote the book for dependent bass trombones, but the exercises work well for indies, too.

Charles Vernon has his own edition of Blazhevich etudes for bass trombone. From the four samples I saw they look fun and helpful.

For lyrical type playing, can always play Bordogni/Rochut down an octave.