Transitioning from just using 7 positions to making adjustments for each note.

[chouston3]

How did you make this transition?

How do you practice making these adjustments so they become automatic?

[GabrielRice]

My favorite intonation practice tool is a blindfold.

Seriously, go into a relatively small space where you can hear yourself very clearly, put on a blindfold or sleep mask, and practice slow lip slurs, scales, arpeggios, etc. After a couple of minutes you will start to hear both your pitch and tone color very clearly, and it will become obvious that you get the most consistent tone and intonation by putting the slide in the correct place for each note.

Repeat daily for a while.

[Kdanielsen]

Start with playing 6th partial (F above the staff) notes with the slide out a fingers width (or more). Once that feels good start adding other adjustments gradually.

[VJOFan]

I had teachers from very early on who just told me to pull x note out or in and lead their studios in ensembles where we stopped and adjusted chords to sound pretty.

No transition required with good teachers.

[hyperbolica]

How did you make this transition?

How do you practice making these adjustments so they become automatic?

Once you really start listening for intonation, you can't avoid making the adjustments. Play duets with someone who has good intonation, and really listen. After a while you'll start to notice things. Like your high F consistently needs to be brought down an inch or so. Trigger C on the staff is also a little high. B natural above the staff needs to come up. D above the staff in 4th position needs to come down. You'll find that 5th position is further out than you thought. Develop muscle memory for true 6th position. Playing with a drone is ok, but I try to play with others as often as possible.

Then if you play duets with someone who doesn't listen, it will kind of drive you crazy.

[harrisonreed]

It's simple, if not easy:

There are simply no positions. All you get is your ears, your ability to hold a steady pitch, and your muscle-memory of where to put and adjust the slide on the fly.

[hyperbolica]

It's easier if you think of positions as pockets - a range of locations on the slide that get grouped together. Any note can vary within that pocket. So 4th position might be considered a pocket of about 3-4 inches on the slide.

[LeTromboniste]

For me it was playing on a regular basis (several times per week) in ensembles and within sections where intonation was a top priority, and spending a lot of RAM on that until it became instinctive enough that it can be just a backroung process.

One thing that I think really helped was an exercise my first teacher had us do at the start of every trombone or brass trio/quartet session. If you have two or three colleagues (doesn't matter what instruments) to do this with regularly, I think you'll quickly see improvement. It was to start on a major chord (or major 7th chord if a quartet), and then once the chord is in tune, one person moves down a semitone while the others hold their notes, then when that's in tune the next one moves, and so on. So you'd go for example C major 7 to C dominant 7 to C minor 7 to C half-diminished, to Bmaj7, and so on for one to two octaves. Not only the person moving needs to land in the right spot, but the others also need to make some tuning adjustments to keep the chords in tune as the context of their held note changes (and particularly when the root changes, everybody needs large adjustments). If you do it with three people, you start on a major chord, the third moves first, the fifth second and the root last. If you do it with four people you do seventh chords, starting with major 7th (then either the seventh or third can move first, the fifth moves 3rd and the root moves last), or starting with dominant 7th (in which case the third should move first then the fifth, then the seventh, then the root).

You do that often enough, playing every possible role in the exercise, starting with every possible chord inversion and with every possible voicing, and you quickly start developing some automatism as to a) what to listen for, and b) where each note is on the slide for each of these common harmonic situation. Then you've really stopped thinking in 7 fixed position.

[Posaunus]

How did you make this transition?

How do you practice making these adjustments so they become automatic?

Once you really start listening for intonation, you can't avoid making the adjustments. Play duets with someone who has good intonation, and really listen. After a while you'll start to notice things. Like your high F consistently needs to be brought down an inch or so. Trigger C on the staff is also a little high. B natural above the staff needs to come up. D above the staff in 4th position needs to come down. You'll find that 5th position is further out than you thought. Develop muscle memory for true 6th position.

Sort of. I have to make different adjustments for my different trombones. This is the curse of having a (small but diverse) collection of instruments. But it sure forces me to listen. And the adjustments required depend on whether you are playing with a piano accompaniment, other brass instruments, the chord you are trying to blend with, the genre, or ...!
I wish I could say that I nail all these adjustments, but ...

Then if you play duets with someone who doesn't listen, it will kind of drive you crazy.

So true!

[ghmerrill]

There are simply no positions. All you get is your ears, your ability to hold a steady pitch, and your muscle-memory of where to put and adjust the slide on the fly.

I'm not sure I'd phrase it as "There are no positions." But I'm not sure I have a better way to phrase it. I'm not sure there's any uncomplicated way of phrasing it that's accurate.

I'm totally self-taught in brass. I started by buying a tuba decades ago and just going from there -- working at it. Intonation has always been HIGHLY important to me -- one reason I like the trombone.

So I never made this transition because there was no transition to make: even with a valved instrument I knew the real story. I knew what good tuning and intonation was from a couple of decades of playing woodwinds (just try to play a saxophone in tune). Trombone was much better. You can actually play it in tune without too much stress. I just developed the "right" positions by playing and listening. That's what I still do. And, yes, I do carefully set my three tuning slides -- but regard those settings as convenient approximations.

So ... "making adjustments for each note" doesn't sound right to me. I find that a clumsy indirect way of thinking -- like there are notches on the trombone and your model of playing in tune is to play each pitch a certain distance from that slot. I don't know ... that may be a good simplifying model to start students out with. I'm not sure what a good alternative model for initial introduction to the trombone would be. But of course (fretless) string players face this same issue.

And I guess that we all use the "notch" model at one time or another. It has some utility. But it doesn't have legs.

[imsevimse]

I'm thinking of this each time I do my warmup because I change horn so often. I usually start with some factitious notes because it feels good and next is scales. Starting with chromatics and that's when I go through every position on the horn. When I do this I register how much I need to adjust each tone on every position to be able to play a chromatic scale in tune. I usually go from Bb up an octave and then B, C, Db and as high I feel I need to do. This usually takes five minutes and after this I'm ready. If I have more time I play major scales with the proper adjustments a major scale needs and interval studies upwards where I play Bb, B, Bb,C,Bb,C#,Bb,D,Bb, D# and so on. This means I relate every interval from Bb and according to that Bb I adjust accordingly. During all this time I note how this horn tunes and will use that during the rest of the rehearsal. If I have time I spend a few minutes on fast single tounging, doo-dle and double. If I have done all this then I'm more than ready and so are all the other musicians who had to listen to this

Best is to do this at home. Since I change my horn very often I found this method good to adopt to a new horn, to find the sound of the horn, the response and of course the positions and that includes the proper adjustments for every position, alternate positions too.
I have a "default" schema in my head and then I make notes on what notes need to be moved according to and beyond that. When I play I use all that information, but most important is I listen.

/Tom