I've mentioned before that I'm a very goal-oriented person. I believe that the right set of goals helps me stay focused and centered on the tasks that I need to accomplish. The most effective goals fall into three categories: Short-Term, Intermediate, and Long-Term. Each of the short-term goals feed into your intermediate, and the intermediate into the long-term goals.

Short Term Goals
I like to think of goals as a pyramid shape. The base of the pyramid is made up of short term goals. These are goals like “Today I’m going to increase the tempo on ScEx 2 from 80 to 90 beats per minute.” Or, “I’m going to find a way to hit the high E in the Gregson Concerto before Friday this week.” Short term goals tend to be on the scale of days or weeks. They also may seem insignificant, but they can really begin to accumulate over time. Imagine where you'd be if you set a short-term goal of increasing the tempo of a double tonguing exercise by two beats every day. How far could you get in a month or a year? You should have many short term goals, maybe three for each intermediate goal. Every short-term goal should feed into the next level of the pyramid.

Intermediate goals
The middle section of the pyramid is made up of intermediate goals. These are goals that you'll need to work toward spanning a time frame from a month to a year before they can be accomplished. My primary intermediate goal right now is this: "Before July 4th I'm going to be able to play ScEx 1-3 smoothly, with no gaps/breaks at 160 BPM at any dynamic level from pianissimo-fortissimo." Here's another example: "Before June 17th I'm going to have three episodes for TuVlog ready for release on YouTube." You should have fewer intermediate goals and like short term goals, they should also feed into the next level of the pyramid.

Long term goals
Long term goals are achieved over the course of years or your entire lifetime. What are the things you want to accomplish by the end of your life? An example of a good long term goal for me is, "I will be Full Professor by the time I turn 40 years old." Another example for a younger person is. "I will graduate with my Doctorate in Tuba Performance with a 4.0 GPA in two years." Long term goals take enough of an investment of time that you should only have a few. Any more than five or so and you risk your ability to accomplish the goals due to lack of focus. So pick just a few that you’re sure are worthy of your time. Also consider that you want the long-term goals to be as challenging as possible, while remaining realistically achievable.

Notice that every level of the pyramid feeds into the step above it. Short-Intermediate-Long. The base of the pyramid is broad, with lots of short term goals. The top of the pyramid is narrow. So there's only room for a few long term goals. Bill Gates says,  "Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years."

I've mentioned in past posts that I keep a practice journal. There are many benefits to practice journaling. You can see the progress you're making, you can look at what you've been spending the most time working on, it makes it easier to plan what to work on, it makes it easier to diagnose problems with fatigue, and the list goes on. I recommend that  all my students keep a practice journal.

For this post I've included pictures of my practice journal in the three main sections in it. I'll go over exactly what I keep track of in each section and the various elements of each.

Section 1: Daily Log
​In section 1 I keep track of the things I do in my daily practice sessions. There are several elements I like to track from one day to the next:









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When brass players attempt to think about the way to move their body as they play, they become overwhelmed in trying to consciously control the cripplingly complex entity that is the human body. This is known as paralysis by analysis and is documented as far back as Aesop's Fables. Try this: describe, in detail, every single body movement required to shoot a basketball through a basketball hoop. Or, try to shoot a basket by thinking of each step involved.

Here's a taste of the complexity involved in such an action. First, you have to jump.
How do you jump?
You forcefully extend your legs.
How do you do that?
You have to contract your quadriceps, glutes, and calf muscles.
Awesome, how do you do that?
You have to send a signal from your brain along the specific nerve pathway to the appropriate muscle group...?
Sweet, so you know how to consciously send signals through your nerves?
No.
Oh, okay.

The point is, at some point along the way you would have to delve into areas that only the subconscious mind is capable of controlling. The same is true for playing an instrument. So many players, myself included, get caught up in forcing our bodies to work in a way that it isn't inclined to do. We try to consciously control the physical aspects of our performance. We have almost no business in doing so. The single exception I can think of in this case is incorporating a new movement pattern in place of one that is limiting your progress as a performer.

I recently came to the realization that this was happening to me as I would play a specific interval during my daily routine. As I attempted to play the interval, I'd think about how to form my embouchure or how to shift. Inevitably, I'd miss the top note of the ascending interval. Then I'd repeat the process of playing the interval until I played it accurately a few times.

This cycle repeated itself every day over the course of months or years. I'd try different things at different times. I'd sing, buzz, and then play. I'd transpose the interval to a different range higher and lower. Really the only thing I've found that works reliably is focusing on the sound I want to produce, rather than the exact movement required to produce it. For someone who's been playing a brass instrument this is similar to a movement cue.

Movement cues are simple instructions which inspire a specific result in the body. Here's my favorite. When I was learning to squat I had trouble increasing the weight I was lifting beyond a certain point due to lower back pain. My trainer told me that I just needed to engage my hip-rotators. At the time, I had no idea what she meant by "hip-rotators" nor how I was supposed to engage them.

Basically, the hip-rotators are a group of muscles around the hip joint that help control how the femur moves and helps protect the spine as you squat with weight on your back. The second trainer had a great movement cue for engaging the hip-rotators: spread the floor apart with your feet as you squat and stand back up.

Try it! Put your hands on your hips and try to spread your feet apart. You don't even have to squat to do it. The muscles that flex as you do this are the hip-rotators! You didn't have to think about it at all. You just spread the floor with your feet. That is an effective movement cue.

Now, a similar phenomenon needs to happen when you play your instrument. Think of the result you want to achieve, not how to achieve it. You want to play an interval? Hear the interval in your head as clearly as possible as you try to play it. You could even imagine your favorite player and how they would play it. Doing this gets you out of your own way.

Here's another example. Say your name out loud. Done? What did you think of to make it happen? If you're like me, all you thought was (in my case), "Jeremy Lewis." I didn't have to think of sending electrical impulses through my nerves to my vocal folds, jaw muscles, and neck muscles. I literally just thought my name and my brain made my body produce the sound. The same thing works for singing, walking, chewing, writing, or any other physical task you want to accomplish. You don't have to think about performing these tasks because your body knows how to do them.

Next time you want to think about the mechanics of playing remind yourself that your brain will take care of the hard part. There's no need to introduce complexity to a situation that your body can handle on its own.

Thank you for reading!

I've written before about daily routines and their importance to the development of every brass player. My stance on that certainly hasn't changed. The daily routine is where the majority of your progress as a brass player will take place. Something I've been experimenting with recently though is the use of multiple routines over the course of a few weeks.
The reason for this experimentation is this: I'd been doing the same routine (Routine III) for a two years.
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I'd made great progress, become a more complete player, and...reached a point with one of the exercises in particular where I was becoming overly concerned with the mechanical aspects of playing. This is a bad thing. It's called paralysis by analysis. More on that next time. Long story short though, after a certain point you should really only think about what sounds you want to come from the instrument.

In any case, I thought Routine III had run it's course for me. So I decided to adopt a new strategy. I'll probably come back to Routine III during my off-season (starting in MAY!). Until then though, I plan to rotate every couple of weeks to a different routine. The performance season is September-May this year. So for what's left of performance season I'll use Daily Fundamentals for the Trumpet by Michael Sachs, The Brass Gym, Daily Drills and Technical Studies for trumpet by Max Schlossberg, and a few others I've found online.

I'll let you know what I find out as I go through the process of developing this idea. For the time being, I'm excited to be trying something new because I believe it could yield great results. At the very least, it will help me to stay well-rounded during the performance season.

Let me know what you think.

Thank you for reading!