Below are enriching music activities to help us continue your music education this year. These exercises below are meant to further your skill set while we are apart. Use these as a starting point to really take your playing to the next step!
For the brass and woodwinds: Here is an awesome website to make warming up and practicing way more interesting! John McAllister's Cinematic Series has dramatic accompaniments that you can play along to when warming up your instrument. It also has practice exercises to focus on specific aspects of your playing. Just look at the line for the tuning of your instrument, for example trumpets and clarinets would look at the Bb line, flutes would look at the line for C, and trombones would look at the Bass Clef C.
To the percussionists: Here are 2 combined practice playlists to work on your rudiments. In the first playlist from Drumeo, they explain each of the rudiments and how it is played. In the second playlist from Vic Firth, you can see how those rudiments are written out and you can practice with different tempo changes. This will really help you unlock that next level in your playing and really make the notes on the page make sense!
Frank Ticheli's "Angels in the Architecture" is one of the only times I have ever seen someone use whirlies in a band piece. This is a pretty cool song that presents the idea of good versus evil, and what those two things might sound like.
This is an old recording, but totally worth it! John Williams himself is conducting "Journey to the Island" from Jurassic Park. Take some time to find out about movie music and what the process looks like from the composer's pencil to the big screen!
What it looks like to be performing with a marching band. A member of the drumline of The Ohio State University Marching Band attached a GoPro to his cover from the time the band is getting ready to go out on the field to when they leave.
One of the best youth jazz bands in the world, performing a well-known Latin standard called "Besamé Mucho". Jazz bands take a familiar melody and improvise variations over that idea to create something totally new every time they perform it.
It would seem a band has gone rogue here! Meute is a self-proclaimed techno marching band from Hamburg, Germany. They use wind and percussion instruments to recreate the electronic sounds that a DJ would normally create with a mixer.