Helping Beginning Trombone Students to Reach 6th and 7th Positions

You have a beginning trombone student. He or she is having difficulties reaching 6th and 7th positions on the slide. What do you do?

With the inherit design of the instrument; this can be a common problem for beginning students. After all, the arm only stretches so far in front of you. Younger students with shorter arms are going to have more difficulties than students who are a little bit older.

One of the tricks that you can use with these students is to have them turn their head slightly to the right as they are reaching for one of these positions. What happens is by turning their head; they change the angle of the trombone in relational position with their body. This allows the student to be able to add an extra 2 to 3 inches to their reach and allows them to be able to more easily reach the 6th and 7th positions.

There are teachers who will not advocate this approach. Their theory is that by changing anything with the neck or body, you will ultimately affect the tone quality. While this is true, if the students are using the proper techniques (breathing, blowing etc.), this effect is nominal. What we are trying to accomplish by using this technique is to improve the accuracy of pitches.

I have a student that I am teaching currently teaching that I have to remind constantly to let out her slide a little bit more when she is playing 6th or 7th position notes. Because she was not able to accurately reach these positions early in her trombone-playing career, she “learned” what these pitches sounded like incorrectly. Now when she goes to play those notes, she is playing what sounds right to her ear and not what is correct with the tuner. While we are making progress retraining her ear in her lessons, it is a process that is taking some time and might have been avoided altogether if she was able to hear the pitches correctly by having the slide in the right position early on.

This technique might not be for everyone and certainly if there are teachers who disagree with this technique, I will love to hear from you and your reasons why you disagree with this technique. This is a technique that I have used that seems to work well and it is something that I think other teachers can use effectively also.