This Week's Checklist for Students | The Joe Dixon Studio

Fix Your Face, Fix Your Hand

This Week’s Checklist for Students 4/20/2024

A timely collection of reminders from this week’s lessons. Which ones apply to you?

1. Learn to understand key signatures.

2. Please learn the order of sharps and flats in the key signature.

3. Learn the meaning of time signatures.

4. Utilize a counting system that you mathematically understand.

5. Be able to verbally say note names while fingering on the instrument.

6. Please don’t learn scales by position numbers. Learn the alphabet A-G, G-A and add the key signature.

7. Practice a stable embouchure, not constantly shifting and mutating. Corners seated; no smile outwards, nor air pockets, nor bunched chin.

8. Please constantly reinforce good posture.

9. Please don’t allow articulation between the teeth.

10. Please work for noise free releases without using the tongue.

11. Use slide action that is well synchronized with the articulation, the foot, the metronome.

12. Utilize slide action that is quick and graceful, not forceful or jabbed.

13. Practice having a mental and physical preparation for an entrance, including breathing in rhythm.

14. Practice the level of focus/concentration that’s needed in performance.

15. Learn to properly use a metronome.

16. Please don’t bend a note out of tonal center to fix pitch. (We have a slide.)

17. DAILY LIP SLURS!

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