Hello! I am going to be my schools Trombone section leader next year and although I have anticipated the title since I was a freshman, now that it has come to me I'm stumped on how to lead it. The members that I had before were all exceptional players but graduated this year and now I'm left with a raw bunch that I've seldom played with. I was wondering if any of you knew any ways that I could unify our sound and intonation as well as some good warm-ups to get us to a higher level?

Thank you for your assistance.

Practice makes perfect

Warm ups really don't need to be complicated. I started with long, low tones and then moved on to the Fussell exercise book all the way from junior high through college.

Ah I see. Yeah, my director has plenty of those fussel books guess I should try those out for the ensemble next year haha. But I was wondering if there was anything on my part that I could do to make them work harder or work their ears and increase their rhythm, etc.

As a Euphonium player, at the beginning of the year I really found warm ups that separated techniques to be really helpful. I hated when a section leader would do a warm up that would work on tuning and then try to nit-pick the rhythms. When everything is separated at the beginning, it really helps the players. It also helps you as a section leader pick out who needs help on what. Normally players have a strength in one particular area. When you find that out early in the season, you can use them as an example. By pulling particular players out and asking them to demonstrate a particular section it really helps build confidence. As the season progresses you can tie everything together. Make sure you always have warm ups that vary in difficulty so the strong players don't get bored.