On Tue, 22 Jul 1997, Gregory Alley wrote:

> It takes an unusual mind to analyze the obvious, and I'd like to analyze
> long tones.
>
> What good are they anyway?

  (Too many people to count have replied to this one, so I won't bother)

> Why do they work?
> How do they help endurance?

  These two go together.  By holding a note for a long time, you are working the muscles associated with playing the trumpet for the duration of the time that you hold that note.  Obviously, by working out, your
muscles grow stronger, and this is why long tones can help range, endurance, pitch, etc.

  The other way they help is by giving your mouth time to shape itself so that it resonates.  If you keep on putting it into this shape over and over with the same note, eventually you'll go into that shape more or less
automatically, thus allowing you to center the pitch of that note more or less automatically.

> I play Cichowicz, Stamp, and Schlossberg exercises slowly and carefully,

  Which is good, but unless you hold out each note as long as you possibly can, then I doubt you're getting the full effect of simply holding the note (and if you are, I'd doubt that you're getting the full effect of the exercises!)

> but camping out on one note seems so far removed from reality that I've
> never done it in all of my work.

  It does sound odd, but think logically: what will this do to my lips if I add this to my practice?

> begin 600 WINMAIL.DAT

  Can we all not do this?  It's a really annoying waste of bandwidth, and it doesn't even add anything useful (or anything at all if you don't use M$ junk (unless Netscape or Eudora or Pegasus or other stuff like that supports it, but not only do I doubt it, I don't like them anyway (Text rules!), so that wouldn't really be much of a shock)).

- --
Kyle R. Hofmann  <rhofmann@crl.com>

"There are no significant bugs in our released software that any
significant number of users want fixed."  -- Bill Gates