On Wed, 23 Jul 1997 17:51:09 -0400 (EDT), William F. Dishman wrote:
>
>Long tones have always been a staple in my personal practice.

Prior to starting the Claude Gordon practice routines, I rarely if ever practiced long tones.  I believe now it was because I didn't enjoy it, because I was not very good at it.  I _needed_ to practice them.  Long tones
seem to expose what is wrong with my embouchure, wind technique, etc.  And not only expose, but build the strenth and technique necessary to correct the problems and build confidence.   For the past 2.5 weeks I've been practicing first couple of lessons in Claude Gordon, which are basically long-tone exercises.  I can't remember a time when I made more improvement in such a short time.  In fact, after spending one week on lesson one, and one week on lesson two, I was so pleased with the results that I decided to repeat those two weeks before moving on to lesson three...

Long tones won't turn me into a great jazz improviser, or a great sight reader, or give me great musical expressiveness, or...  They cannot replace other forms of practice that build up the other aspects of making music on the trumpet.  But in my case they seem to be a very effective way to overcome physical inadequacies in my trumpet-playing machine.  And I'll never make great music on the trumpet until I have the physical tools to produce those beautiful sounds.