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Methods Available for Individual Instruments
Truly FUNdamentals is available for C, Bb, Eb, F, and Bass clef instruments. Choose your key and get started having FUN today.
Playing Music is FUN!
Before you start playing, do some simple stretches to loosen stiff muscles, especially if you’ve been sitting for some time. Just like athletes stretch before running or playing vigorous a game of sports, we musical athletes need to get limber too. I explain all this in this short 6-minute video. Also available on YouTube.
But how does it get to be fun, especially when you are just starting out?
Well, the more you play, the more your skills improve.
When your skills improve, you have more fun.
When you have fun, you play more,
then your skills get better,
you have more fun,
you play more…
Now you can experience this FUN with the music method from Mary Ellen Grace: Truly FUNdamentals, The most FUN musical warmups ever.
This new music method has students and teachers talking! I take a complex subject and make it easy to understand. Bonus: You have FUN while you’re learning!
“I love the style of your book. I can Truly say that I resonate with your approach to music education.” – John Brigante.
Longtones & Scales – These are the basic warmups for any wind musician. Longtones build embouchure strength and help you develop pure, beautiful tone. Scales are the building blocks of the music you play.
Sadly, many musicians, both beginners and advanced, neglect these necessary exercises. We find them to be a drag – uninteresting – even boring. Yes, I include myself among those who have been less than thrilled with longtones. My own teachers from grade school through college constantly pressed me to “do your longtones.”
It was my own lack of excitement for these important assignments – and that of my own students – that led me to develop my creative and FUN way to do longtones. That’s what you’ll find in Truly FUNdamentals, The most FUN musical warmups ever.
I’ve put the FUN back in FUNdamentals. My book contains exciting ways to do your longtones. The same fabulous treatment is given to major and minor scales.
Not stopping there, I include chapters on arpeggios and articulation exercises; making them both enjoyable and FUN.
An added bonus is my chapter on warmup exercises for developing improvisation skills. Improvisation is not just for jazz musicians. Knowing how to create music by ear and from chords extemporaneously are key skills that all well-rounded musicians need.
Order your print or ebook copy today.
Look at all Truly FUNdamentals includes:
- Leave the drudgery of longtones behind by playing familiar melodies in a longtone fashion. Add to that, playing your FUN longtones with rhythm accompaniment – You will look forward to doing basic warmups that you had previously dreaded.
- Transposition is demystified into understandable, logical components. I unravel this ungainly topic into small steps that, when taken individually, make transposition a snap!
- Articulation exercises become a game in which you naturally test and improve your skills.
- Have you felt intimidated by improvisation? by even the idea of improvisation? Never again with these six improvisation skill-building exercises.
- Thirteen tracks of rhythm accompaniment for the exercises are provided on the included CD.
- Four valuable appendices explain essential music theory including key signatures, the circle of fifths, interval recognition and ways to practice in all 12 major and minor keys.
In this book you will learn:
- how to transpose short recognizable phrases of music;
- become familiar and fluent in all 12 major and minor keys;
- how to recognize major, minor, and perfect intervals;
- how to improvise; creating music on your instrument without relying on printed notation;
- a FUN way to remember all the major and minor key signatures;
- and have FUN practicing with your very own rhythm section!