Connecting slurred notes can be a struggle but once you understand what is involved, correcting this problem will be easier than you might think.
The most important adjustments are as follows-
Part 1. Speed
Clean slurs require an instantaneous change from one note to the next. This rapid adjustment is complicated through the use of tonguing in 95% ( I’m just guessing) of our playing. The study of tonging is required at the higher level of trumpet lessons (private lessons, Colleges, Universities) as illustrated by the number of books focusing on this topic in our personal collections of practice material. Unfortunately, these books are sometimes neglected and this would be the first study material to use to improve your slurs. In saying that, if you do not have such material, I would recommend my favorite book on slurring- Earl Iron’s “Twenty-Seven Groups of Exercises”.
When the use of tongued articulation is removed from the equations, the need for a rapid and connected change in pitch is required. Any sign of non-instantaneous change from one note to the next will be indicated in a hesitation or a slight bending in pitch between notes.
As you can see from the examples below, tongued notes and slurred notes have a very obvious look and sound.
When slurred, as shown in the top two lines, before each note you can clearly see a dip and in contrast a complete break is obvious when each note is tongued as seen in the lower two lines. By tonguing notes, the performer has more time to adjust his/her embouchure to start the next note which tends to disconnect the two notes. This space tends to make the player slower in changing his/her embouchure. Even tonged notes should be placed as close as possible to each other.
Something also interesting to understand is the difference between the upper slurs and the downward slurs. Notice the smoothness when moving from E to C to G which are all downward slurs and in contrast, the dip when moving from C up to E and from G up to C. This indicates that upper slurs need more attention than downward slurs.
In our next post we will show you how to solve this problem so be sure to first understand the material offered here before jumping into our next post.
