TromboneChat

When I play anything in 6th partial ( ) or lower, I just play it, letting muscle memory find the right partial. But for anything higher, even the F#, I have to hear the pitch in my head before I can play it. F has always been the cutoff, since I was a wee lad; it hasn't moved as I've improved as a player.

Is that everyone's threshold? Do other people even think of notes that way? Is it possible to raise the threshold? Is it a mistake (musically) to rely on it?

I can still be shaky, intonation-wise, on the shortened 7th partial positions. Maybe that has something to do with it?

I have to hear every note I play.

Practice singing or whistling where you have trouble hearing the note(s). I also definitely rely on feel as well as sound.

In my opinion, you should hear every note in your mind before you play it, but you need both hearing and muscle memory together.

It's an interesting question, and hard to determine the line in an objective way, maybe? If I think hard on it, I would have to say I'm more of a feel person - my musical imagination was never a strong suit, but my kinesthetic/athletic sense always felt like the more natural state.

In an ideal world, hearing, but I think we typically go by feel more than we think. Learning to bass sackbut pitched a 5th, sometimes a 6th lower, where you can't really just go by feel and really, really have to consciously audiate everything and adjust your whole concept of resonance to every note, made me realise that I had indeed probably been relying on feel more than I realized. Which in turns has improved my tenor playing a lot .

Coming from playing bass a LOT for a long time, to really working up my doubles, I found out just how much I relied on feel rather than listening.

I can pick up the horn and somewhat reliably play a note from to without hearing it aforehand.

So that's muscle memory. I don't have perfect pitch.

Above or below that i need to have been playing and have a mental notion of the pitch, especially for very low notes which are very easy to mis-target and just make a flop instead of a note.

There's also a muscle memory to those notes high and low, it's just a more-recently-reinforced memory. I think that's what "warning up" is... reminding yourself how it feels to play the horn right.

When my tenor chops were in order, I definitely heard all the notes, and the sounds were linked to muscle memory, marking the feel of each note. If I didn't hear low notes, I'd crack the note.

I notice, though, that bass requires more physical and less mental concentration. Although you can totally miss judge low notes too.

Hi.

I think that we need both hearing and feeling .
I always go for hearing first , but I also like to feel the note on my chops.

Anyway , one can test his personal training about these two aspects , hearing and feeling .

Just try to hit , from the nowhere , some tones on long slide alternate positions , as D over the staff on #7th position , or high G ( three lines above the staff ) in 6th position , or high Bb in b6th position , etc ; if you have a F valve horn , an Ab in the staff in 6th position with the valve engaged , etc .
Of course , without any previous source that can let you ear the tone first !

Regards
Giancarlo

For me, it's both, and also hard to differentiate.

I am fairly OK with a "pre-audiation" of what I'm reading but also I need the muscle memory. In a way, reading the shape of a musical line in terms of how I'd expect it might sound is a separate thing from reading the shape of a musical line in terms of how I'd expect it to physically feel.

For sure, to do good sight-reading, everything needs to be in sync.

I think my cutoff for where I need to audiate is pretty close to that, likely around F4. I think I similarly didn't really make progress above there until I started to hear those notes before playing, but I don't know if I really knew to even do that until I started taking trumpet lessons a few years after starting trombone.

That said, I think it helps my tone and attacks if I can hear notes below that, too.

I think audiation (added to my vocabulary) is ideally first, followed by an association with the physical aspects of forming the embouchure and anticipating the associated airstream, is what happens.

I think this association is what saves you in instances where you can't really hear yourself when you play, because the note gets lost in the mix, or because the dynamics or even the acoustics mask what you're doing, then you're glad to have the physical sensation of playing the right pitch to fall back on...

Imagine that were the extent of it though, just a physical sensation of producing the right note, but not hearing it: I think we'd find making music very unsatisfying.

I think whoever said range has something to do with it might be onto something.

A couple weeks ago I was playing a feature at a gig that suddenly shifted from the key of Eb to the key of B, and I had to come in right on the sudden key change with a high B (B4 I guess) and go up to a high E (E5). After hearing the whole tune with Bb and Eb, I failed and clammed both those notes because I just could not hear them before I had to play them.

Sucks. But up there the partials are so close together I cannot do it on feel. I need to hear what I'm going to play in order to be able to play it. An octave lower and I probably would have had no problem.

So back to that other thread about what orchestral players are doing on stage before a show. Anytime Brahms 1 was programmed, you'd see me bring my horn up and play just one note about every 2 or 3 minutes. The sonic context may have been helpful, but I also wanted to have that A locked in like a pitcher slotting a fast ball.

There are a lot of out of nowhere entrance like that in orchestral music, so probably the "classical" players here skew more to having a good kinetic sense of notes to back up their aural sense than those who do more commercial/jazz work.

we're not talking about hearing a pitch with your ears. It's hearing it INSIDE your head...a skill most good jazz and commercial players have developed. Try playing a solo over changes that seem to follow no logical pattern...that's why jazz player hear the pitch inside their heads.

AtomicClock wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 10:30 am F has always been the cutoff, since I was a wee lad; it hasn't moved as I've improved as a player.

No, this is false. A bit of foolin' around on tuba had me hunting for patials in the midrange, and that reminded me of doing the same thing on trombone, for my first probably 3 or four years. So now I think it (playing by muscle memory) is definitely a learned skill.

I had a teacher who once told me to hear the note in my head and then "taste" it as you play it. Combination of all these things I guess

It's definitely a combination of both for me. I have to make sure I really listen and "hear" the notes more when I'm playing alto or small tenor, because the feel is different from my home base of large bore tenor.

Jim Scott

AtomicClock wrote: Fri Apr 03, 2026 8:23 pm

AtomicClock wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 10:30 am F has always been the cutoff, since I was a wee lad; it hasn't moved as I've improved as a player.

No, this is false. A bit of foolin' around on tuba had me hunting for patials in the midrange, and that reminded me of doing the same thing on trombone, for my first probably 3 or four years. So now I think it (playing by muscle memory) is definitely a learned skill.

Way to tell yourself you're wrong! Get 'em!!

Every brain is different.

My youngest daughter has absolute pitch. She doesn't think before naming a note. She is 14 and I discovered it two year ago. She play piano but doesn't want to play any other instrument. Took her to the local school band but she stopped in the door after listening a few seconds. I have no absolute pitch.

For me it's a lot easier to feel pitch when playing with others. Especially professional people. Playing alone is more difficult becauce then it's more likely that I focus on legato, slurs or attack etc. But playing in a mirror makes me listen better.

I believe it's lot of individual views on this where nothing is wrong. We are just different in the end.
But our ears are the best tool.

Leif

While I like to think that I hear the pitch before playing it, I think that in the upper register I may go more by feel. This post got me thinking more about something I have noticed while working with private students - not infrequently, one will squeak out a "high" 1st-position note, just to show off a bit, and ask me what note it is. I cannot answer until I play the note myself, I will then instantly know what the pitch is. So, I suppose I too may be going more by feel than hearing the pitch.

If I need to come in cold on a note a little above my "feel" range, I can imagine playing my top "feel" note ( ), listen to my imagination and hear it. Then climb the scale in my mind to the needed pitch, hear it, and play it fairly well. But I can't do it quickly, so it often doesn't help in performance.

GabrielRice wrote: Sat Apr 04, 2026 8:45 am Every brain is different.

Some more than others, ya know what I mean?

I just rely on muscle memory. Rarely go above F# above the staff on a regular basis. Awhile back felt like a high C was in order. My warmup on the sixties was a 2 octave chromatic scale on baritone. Still using same mouthpiece in my trombone. Practice came and hit it right on. Service time comes, hit it again. Yesterday put trumpet down after first song and picked up trombone, wanted a high A second measure, no sweat. I have probably average pitch perception, unlike grandson who tunes his bass by ear. Yesterday he was beside me on his trumpet.

When Jim Pugh missed a note (... told to me by Dave Taylor during a lesson some 20 years ago)

Dave said they were doing a session and Jim missed a high note on an entrance.

They were all stunned (as Jim was apparently), because he Never missed any notes...as in never.

Dave says that this event lead to a great discussion about the physics of brass playing.

Jim conceded that he had 'lost focus' and wasn't concentrating on how his tongue should have been set up for the entrance. He had his thoughts, and Dave had his thoughts on the matter. But, as Dave pointed out, the importance of what we do with the tongue in our head cannot be over-stated.

The point is (as was part of my lesson with Dave), was that Jim trusted his physical as well as 'mental/musical setup' in order to play as he does.

AtomicClock wrote: Fri Apr 03, 2026 8:23 pm A bit of foolin' around on tuba had me hunting for patials in the midrange, and that reminded me of doing the same thing on trombone, for my first probably 3 or four years.

I'm still hunting around for the right partial when I play tuba. But as a casual experiment, I put my largest bass trombone mouthpiece in the tuba, and suddenly the muscle memory was working again! It felt like a giant valve trombone. (Of course, all the obvious problems were there, too.)

I encounter the same problem... And I know why. I hear every note I play above the low Bb but down there and under, it's more of a swim pool for now. Because I use this register way less than the middle and high one, the ear tends to focus and feel at home in its comfort zone, where 80% of your playing happens. In my case it really helps spend more time on practicing low register especially for that matter

I often find myself both pre-hearing (not just pitch but sound, style, volume, etc.) and pre-feeling before playing notes. I focus on the actual feel and sound once I play. I think that I incorporate the information I get into the pre-hearing and pre-feeling of subsequent notes. It’s a continuous cycle of prediction, awareness, reflection, and either adjustment or confirmation.

I was thinking about this not too long ago. I wanted to develop a more reliable "feel" for when I wasn't confident in my ear. So I wrote an exercise using tone rows with displaced octaves. It uses the same row twice (inverting the octave the second time), then switches to a new row before your ear can start to make sense of it.

The idea is that the lack of tonal center makes it challenging to hear the pitch, and all the large intervals make it so you can't rely on the kind of "relative feel" you get with smaller intervals. It forces you to develop a stronger feel for each note on its own, independent of its neighbors or a tonal center.

You can read it forwards or backwards, and apply whatever meter/rhythm/tempo/dynamic/articulation you feel like working on.

Here are the first few lines to give you an idea.