Dr. Donald S. Reinhardt’s Ten Test Drills for Trumpet

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Dr. Donald S. Reinhardt’s Ten Test Drills for Trumpet

In his later years, upon completion of your personalized Orientation and Analysis Period of the Pivot System, Dr. Donald S. “Doc” Reinhardt would send you off with the Ten Test Drills. He would determine your embouchure type, your tongue type, your pivot and your pivot angle, and have you embark on a six to eight week incubation period to get your embouchure headed in the right direction for your particular physical type.

Your personalized Pivot Deviation Sheet in conjunction with the Pivot Stabilizer were your first two initial chores. There are many who would argue that the Pivot Stabilizer is of no use without an orientation period, and in many cases this is true. However, the wording of the text issued in The Reinhardt Routines (Boptism Music Publishing 2007) was designed to guide players with no exposure to a Reinhardt teacher toward the right path to get them playing and pivoting correctly.

That same text is what precedes the Pivot Stabilizer on the next page of this packet of drills.

The musical notation of the drills that follow are written-out versions of those test drills. In some cases, the short-hand that Doc used left room for misinterpretation, and the design of this packet is intended to avoid similar misinterpretation.

A friendly warning about these drills: they are (for the most part) very difficult to play, especially in a musical fashion. Each drill bears down on some aspect of playing, the results of which you may not see until you’ve done these for many, many consecutive days and are then “put to the test” on the bandstand.

What you may find (which has been the case for many) is that when the time comes to play music on your horn, you’ll “suddenly” feel like a million bucks and will feel like a whole new player on the gig. That’s because you’ve been ironing out the wrinkles in your various areas of technical proficiency, and now when “all you have to do is make music,” you’ll experience a sense of freedom and artistic abandon that you may not have ever experienced. Enjoy! That’s what this is all about.