Go Hornless

There's more than one way to skin a cat, or so they say. I don't know who they are, but they must not like cats. It's a true enough statement, though, however mean it may be to our feline friends. There's also more than one way to practice. For example, you don't need a horn. Most of what we do as musicians is mentally based. Our brain is coordinating fingers and lips to produce a sound. Our mind is also processing and remembering what is on the page. We're building muscle memory. This is the reason a hard to read passage with lots of accidentals gets easier the more you practice it: your brain has learned to remember how to read it, what it is, and what has to be done to play it.

Armed with this information, imagine how much you can get done without wasting your lips. Scales? Done. Arpeggios? Done. Crazy hard scale on page two of your solo? Done. Whether it's rhythms, scales, articulation patterns, or specific intervals, you can work on it without the horn. Thinking through the fingering patterns, hearing it in your head, and thinking about what you'd be doing with the embouchure to play it can be very helpful. It's a nice way to occupy boring bus rides home or time waiting for a bus to come. You'll still be committing difficult passages to memory, increasing coordination, and building muscle memory. When you actually go back and put it on the horn it will be much easier to play, you won't have killed your face to get the results, and you'll have made otherwise useless time on the bus very productive.