The blues is a wonderful teaching tool. It’s a joyful way (ironically) to start lessons, especially on brass instruments. If your idea of the blues is a gentleman in the southern states of America sitting on his porch bemoaning the fact that his wife has left him and the rain is falling, then you may wonder what it’s got to do with teaching brass instruments.
Well, we’re not fully capturing the spirituality of the blues created by African Americans in the Deep South in the 1860s, but we are using the form and scales that spread into popular culture in the 1920s and 30s. We’re making our teaching more creative by using the clear framework of a repeated 12-bar pattern. I find up-tempo versions in a major key work best to kick off lessons – think Elvis Presley’s ‘Hound Dog’, or ‘Tutti Frutti’ by Little Richard.
What do you need?
The best way to use the blues is to have a backing-track. An iPad, or similar device, and a speaker are fairly standard pieces of equipment for the modern teacher and give you the ability to get involved with the lesson hands-free, unencumbered by a piano or another accompanying instrument. You can just search YouTube for blues backing-tracks, but by far the best investment you can make is in an app called iReal Pro, which costs around £20 and is absolutely worth every penny. It contains thousands of song backing-tracks that you can play in any key, at any speed and in a whole range of styles – you can even create your own. If you haven’t got it already, invest now!
Chords
I’m sure that most of you will be aware of the 12-bar blues: a distinctive but simple sequence using chords I, IV and V, that can be broken down into three groups of 4 bars. This chorus creates the backing for a number of tasks that provide pupils with a great start to their lessons. You can segue from one exercise to the next and organically move from call and response to long notes or lip flexibilities, and introduce improvisation even to complete beginners.
There are a few different chord variations in the 12-bar blues. Many musicians will know this standard version:
- I - I - I - I - IV - IV - I - I - V - IV - I - I
I like to use what’s called the ‘quick change’ or ‘quick to four’ version, which changes the second bar to chord IV. I use V as the last chord so the pattern effortlessly loops round as we use it in different ways and also use 7th chords.
This is my favoured version:
- I7 - IV7 - I7 - I7 - IV7 - IV7 - I7 - I7 - V7 - IV7 - I7 - V7
(To find this exact sequence on iReal Pro download ‘Bessie’s Blues’ by John Coltrane from the free iReal Pro community playlist Jazz 1460.)
I find this variation has a little more interest than the standard version – and when playing a backing-track numerous times on a loop, a little extra spice is a good thing. You can also go far more complex, but for your average brass teacher this is complex enough.
Melody
It’s really easy to make up melodies over a 12-bar blues pattern; we just need to know the minor pentatonic scale.
The minor pentatonic scale in C
Now I’m hearing groans from some of you: do we really need another scale; aren’t major and minor enough? Well, this scale is rather special. You can create a solo over the entire 12-bar pattern using these notes and it will sound good, without any knowledge of the chord sequence underneath. In fact, you can solo on just one note over the entire sequence, and that’s where we’re going to start our exploration of the different exercises for brass players that can be performed over a blues backing-track.
Beginners – single notes (pitching)
One of the first difficulties that we encounter as brass teachers is getting our pupils to play at the correct pitch. Two essential ingredients here are aural skills and repetition. Of course, we can give physical instruction – lips together, blow stronger, squeeze your left buttock cheek (whatever works for you!) – but unless our pupils can clearly hear the note they are aiming for and repeat the process of playing that note, progress will be slow.
So, put your blues backing-track on and play. If I’m starting my trumpet pupils on an E, I’ll play the blues in the key of (concert) D so that they can clearly hear the key note they’re aiming for. We’ll start with call and response and then I’ll encourage them to solo over the track just using an E.
Long notes
While we’re on the subject of just playing one note, why not use your backing-track to accompany long notes? The dreaded long note can be simultaneously the most useful and the most dull of all the brass training exercises – so make it fun! Why not set your metronome mark at 120 beats per minute, making a 12-bar pattern last 24 seconds. Can your pupils play for a whole chorus? Or even just the 8 seconds of the first 4 bars?
Call and response – from pulse to simple melodies
For the majority of our pupils, most of their learning will be using notated music. A brass player needs to get the sound of the written music into their head for it to successfully come out of their bell, so why not start lessons developing their aural skills and allow them to dispense with any reliance on notation? You can use simple ‘call and response’ in many ways: the pupils can copy anything from counting a simple pulse to playing melodies. Copying one- or two-bar patterns (depending on your chosen speed) can work really well. Buzzing on the mouthpiece is great fun as well; you might unleash some wonderful jazz solos when the tyranny of having to get the correct fingering or slide position for each note is removed. Rhythm games suit this, too – see if they can copy a bar of crotchets, or quavers, or you can even throw in the music teacher’s favourite four-quavers-two-crotchets pattern of ‘Do not play this rhy-thm’ where any copying is met with scowls and derision from those correctly copying with silence!
Improvisation
Ah, improvisation. A word that we knew was coming when discussing the blues, but is feared by many. But here’s the thing: it shouldn’t be. We should all be free to create music (music’s a creative subject, right?); this isn’t just the preserve of jazz players. The sooner you can introduce your pupils to improvisation, the sooner it removes the stigma of being something that’s difficult.
So just start slowly: as we’ve mentioned above, you can create a solo with just one note. Use repeated rhythms and gain familiarity with how different notes sound over the sequence. To expand from that, allow your pupils to explore the note names and sounds of the minor pentatonic scale. The scale in the written key of D (so use a backing-track in the key of C for the trumpet, for example) uses the notes D, F, G, A, C. If you add a low C as well, this covers a range suitable for all treble-clef players at around Grade 1 level.
Lip flex
You’ll notice the lovely open 5th available in the minor pentatonic scale starting on the key note. This gives us the option of some lip flexibility exercises, which I often weave into my ‘call and response’ work. It’s a great way for your students to be able to hear, identify and copy different articulations, so mix up some lip slurs alongside some well-articulated tongued rhythms.
Bass lines
If you want a real test of your pupil’s aural skills, you can move onto bass lines. For these, you do require a knowledge of the chord sequence, as you need the key note of each chord on the first beat of the bar of each chord change. How about this for the ultimate pupil and teacher challenge: can you play a duet with one of you improvising a medley and the other taking the bass line? Alternatively, it’s possible to turn the bass line off on iReal Pro, so you can jam with just a rhythm and chord backing. Magic. Good luck!
An example of a lip flexibility exercise for trumpet. A suitable iReal Pro backing-track would be ‘Bessie’s Blues’ in B flat
