Beginning Trombone Lessons - How to use the Trigger (F Attachment) on your Trigger Trombone

Hello, welcome to Trombone World. Luke Malevich here, and today we're going to talk about how to use the trigger on our trigger trombone. Please don't forget to hit the subscribe button and the notification bell so that you'll be notified whenever I post a new video. And as always, please share the videos with anybody that you think is going to find them helpful. Today we're going to be talking about the trigger on your trigger trombone and how to use it. I'm going to post links to two charts in the description below. One of the charts is going to be specific to the trigger that's going to have only the notes that you can play with the trigger. And the second chart is going to be specific just to a standard tenor trombone without a trigger, and it's going to have only the standard trombone notes. So again, there'll be two charts, one specific to only the trigger and one specific to a trombone that doesn't have a trigger. The trigger, as I mentioned in the previous video, is called an F trigger because it puts the instrument in the key of F, meaning that you go from your low Bb, press the trigger, and you'll end up playing a note F, which will sound like this. Let's talk about how to tune the trigger. Now let's assume that you've tuned the instrument to a key of Bb, whether it's a tuner or a drone that you were listening to, but the instrument itself is in tune. Now the way that we tune the trigger is we tune it to the note F in the staff. I'm going to play my F and then I'm going to press the trigger and I'm going to play the same exact note, and when the two notes match, that's when I know that the trigger itself is going to be in tune. I'll do that one more time. Now for example, I'm going to mess around with the tuning so you can hear what it sounds like when it's out of tune. So I'm going to push the tuning slide all the way in for the trigger here, so you can hear the difference when the note's going to sound sharp. Let me play it again. Now what I'm going to do is pull out the tuning slide for trigger so you can hear what it sounds like when the note is really flat. So you can see I pulled out the trigger mechanism quite a lot. You'll be able to hear how flat the note sounds. Now let me put it back and make sure that it's in tune. Let's double check. Let's start by talking about two of the most common notes that you're going to play first when you get your trigger trombone, and those are going to be your C and your B. Now those notes you can also play with your regular trombone. You could play them in 6th and 7th position. With a trigger, you're going to play them in 1st and 2nd. C in 1st and B in 2nd. Now keep in mind that every instrument is going to be a little bit different, so that on some instruments you might actually have to go out just a little bit for the C to be in tune and out just a little bit from 2nd position for the B natural to be in tune. So the general rule is to always use your ear. Now the next two notes you're most likely to use are going to be your F and your E below the staff. So normally just like with C and B, those are in 6th and 7th position. So your F in 6th and your E in 7th. And again you can play those two notes in 1st and 2nd. So F and here is your E. Now the four notes that we talked about, your C and your B, your F and your E, you can play in two different places. You can play them with a trigger and without. Now just because you can play your C natural with the trigger in 1st position, doesn't mean you're always going to do that. That really depends on the line that you're playing. Depends on what's written in the music. Sometimes it actually makes more sense to go and play the C in 6th position rather than playing it in 1st. For example, if I'm playing a line that goes from D to D flat and ends on C like this. Now it makes a lot more sense to keep going rather than coming back to 1st, which would be really awkward because you have to make a quick turn and bring your hand all the way back to 1st position. That's very tricky to do and there's really no reason to do that. You would just go out to the 6th position. Same thing if I'm going between D flat and C over and over. I would never play the C with the trigger in 1st. I would just keep going between 5th and 6th position. And the same thing applies to our F and our E with the trigger. If I'm going between G flat and F, I would just keep going 5th and 6th. Now let's move on. The next four notes that you can play with the trigger are only available with the trigger so that there are no other options to use. So if you see those notes, you have to play them with the trigger. The first is going to be our E flat. Now that note is going to be in between 3rd and 4th position. So if our 3rd position is here and our 4th position is here, the E flat is going to be just about in the middle. And again there are always slight variations. It could be here, it could be here. It just really depends. So you have to listen to make sure that the note is in tune. Let's play our E flat with a trigger. Now you can use a drone or a held note to make sure that that E flat is in tune. The other thing you can do is play the E flat in 3rd position an octave above and tune it to that. So now I'm going to go between my E flat and the staff in 3rd position with a trigger E flat in three and a half. Now more than likely you haven't played any notes that are in between positions. So you're going to really have to make sure that you get used to doing it. The most common thing for students to do is to either stay in 3rd or go too far. So if I stay in 3rd position to play that E flat, it sounds really sharp. Moving on, we have our D. D is going to be in 5th. Sometimes it could be 5 and a half. It depends on the instrument. But a good starting point is to play it in 5th and see if you can get it in tune. I'm going to jump up the octave like I did with the E flat. I'm going to play my D in the staff in 4th and then the D with a trigger in 5th. Moving on to our D flat. Now D flat is going to be in 6th position. Let me jump up to the D flat in the staff, play that in 5th, and then play the trigger D flat in 6th. Now the final note that we're going to play with the trigger is going to be our C. And C is going to be almost as far as you can go. Basically in 7th and a half, 7 and a half position. And that's really the last note, which means that there is no B natural, right? Because the next note that we can play, the next regular note we can play in 1st position is going to be our pedal flat, which means there's going to be one note that we're not going to be able to play with that trigger. So let's go play our C out in 7 and a half. So let me go now between my C in the staff in 6th and then the C with a trigger in 7 and a half, just to make sure that I'm in tune. Now there are a couple of other notes that you can play with the trigger that are down in the register. And you have your pedal F in 6th and pedal E in 7th, which you can play in 6th and 7th position, just like the octave above. But you can also play with the trigger in 1st and 2nd. Now what I would suggest to get used to playing the notes in the trigger register is to practice them using scales. For example, let's play our F major scale descending from the middle of the staff. And we're going to end up playing the C with the trigger and then our final F with the trigger as well. You can do the same thing with your E major scale, playing the B natural in 2nd with the trigger. Then our E flat. So I would encourage you to play scales, to play melodies, to play anything that you know, even down the octave using the trigger just to get used to those notes. Hopefully this video has been helpful to you. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.