Playing really fast

[PiccoloTrombonist1]

I’m not sure there’s much elaboration needed, so here is the question: how do you play notes consecutively really fast (for an example, the 32nd notes in Vivaldi’s winter)?

[BGuttman]

Learn double and triple tonguing. Double tongue is for duples (in 2) and triple tongue is for triples (in 3).

If you want a good example, find the video of Tommy Pederson playing "Flight of the Bumble Bee".

[tbdana]

In addition to what Bruce said, at that speed you need to use good slide technique, which includes alternate positions and ensuring that you are making as many of the moves as possible short movements and movements going in the same direction. It’s impossible at that speed to be sawing logs and make all the notes.

[CharlieB]

Vivaldi Four Seasons Winter:

On trombone ????? !!! Very lofty goal.

But for learning less ambitious fast pieces.........
Learn a passage at soft volume. Much easier to control than playing it loudly. More volume can come later.
Concentrate on staccato and play the passage over and over, gradually increasing the tempo as you improve.
Patience. It will take lots of practice to teach your muscle memory what you want it to do.

[harrisonreed]

Vivaldi Four Seasons Winter:
On trombone ????? !!! Very lofty goal.

I don't know how he plays the end of that movement in one breath.

[Posaunus]

I don't know how he plays the end of that movement in one breath.

Guessing:
• Use very little air
• Huge lung capacity
• Hours and hours and hours of practice

[Burgerbob]

I don't know how he plays the end of that movement in one breath.

Editing

[WilliamLang]

Using an alto helps a ton! The smaller mouthpiece, bore size, and resistance can but you extra time if you're efficient. If memory serves (I've spent a long time trying to recreate the ability to play this piece) it's just under 30 seconds, and that's on the edge but doable, especially back in the days that Christian trained for marathons and whatnot.

In my opinion, I don't think this is edited within the large excerpts. He's spoken about how hard it was to get people to take him seriously, and how engineers and producers would always look down on him while he was recording, and how hard he had to work to prove himself. It would surprise me if he took a shortcut in a recording with orchestra, also given how expensive it is to record and take a lot of time, and his high standards back in the day.

Back to the OP - double tonguing is how he does this one in particular. People have preferences on syllables that they like to use - mine are usually tu-ku, and sometimes du-gu. But whatever you use, if you work on making the second syllable sound as close to the first as possible, and do a lot of slow practice while you're learning, playing this speed is possible.

Now! to play with the same facility across registers and intervals like in this recording is the real trick. It's much easier on the Pryor-esque showpieces that were written a little more idiomatically for the horn.

[Matt K]

Lindbergh has indicated in interviews that he seldom practices up to tempo. For things like that, he practices at half speed, getting things perfect and doing muscle memory. Practice until he can’t get it wrong - from memory- and then it just comes together. Or something similar to that at least

[JacobsianApostle]

Obviously you need to learn to double/triple tongue or be one of those freaks who can single tongue insanely fast, but in terms of an approach to practicing playing fast, you have to practice on both ends of the spectrum.

You need to practice slowly in order to make sure that you can hear every note before you play it. Once you know that you really hear what you’re playing and can execute it slowly, playing fast is about sublimating all that information into a single phrase which feels like one “event”, the same way that as a child you learn to combine all these different muscle functions needed to walk into a single command.

Playing very fast but breaking things up into very shorter chunks until I can feel each phrase as a single gesture, then adding on, is what works best for me. You can’t count on just playing slow over and over again to play fast because the brain process is different-you’re not singing every note in your head before you play it in the middle of a bebop line - and the slide technique is different; you don’t stop on every note.

It’s like taking a bunch of different files and putting them into a single folder. You keep chaining individual parts together until they feel like one “thing”. If you haven’t practiced slowly, if you can’t hear every thing you’re playing, then the information is muddy or corrupted and this doesn’t work, or it just produces mush.

[timothy42b]

Lindberg can practice at half speed because he can already play most things at double speed. You can practice faster, see this:

[tbdana]

And then to get really out there, there's also doodle tonguing as another way to play fast, which is the way Bob McChesney (LA jazz and commercial player) plays Carnival of Venice.

[Wilktone]

I’m not sure there’s much elaboration needed, so here is the question: how do you play notes consecutively really fast (for an example, the 32nd notes in Vivaldi’s winter)?

Everything above is worth paying attention to as fundamental to improving your ability to play fast passages, but to really give you a targeted answer we need to know what your current capabilities are. Have you spent any time on multiple tonguing? Are you familiar with alternate positions and how to utilize them efficiently? How is your ability to lip slur and play "against the grain?"

[harrisonreed]

I don't know how he plays the end of that movement in one breath.

Editing

I'm sure that the recording was edited, and it was recorded in digital in 1987, so maybe the digital editing was good enough back then to crossfade in the middle of those 32nd notes.

I don't think it was quite as crazy of editing as what they do these days (tens of edits in a single phrase, sometimes) but yeah, no doubt. At the very least, they probably recorded that one phrase on its own.

He had told me he did it in one breath. But also that he hasn't played the piece live. Maybe once or twice only.