Lucaaaa

Helloooo I’m Luca! This blog is an alt acc, main acc is @meganeguma (i sometimes post art and stuff there). I play the euphonium and I love umamusume, hence the username for this acc lmao

I’m making this blog in the hopes that I can motivate myself to practice more to prepare myself for music school. Thankfully I’m not going to anything too crazy, just community college, but I still have a lot to prepare myself for since their music program is super good. If I have a blog I feel obligated to keep going, maybe having that sense of accountability will motivate me. My practice ethic, admittedly, is total ass, but I want to change that, so I’ll be working towards getting over myself and actually being able to improve my playing. I love playing music and love my instrument, so I want to be able to continue playing going into the future.

Basically I’ll be posting (or trying to post) daily practice logs while I work to improve. I’ll make goals, talk about what I did, anything I realized helped, that sort of thing. I may also shitpost here and there, who knows…

You don’t need to follow along if you don’t want to, I’m really just doing this for myself, but feel free to come along for this very scuffed ride!

Goal: work towards hitting a high Ab

I didn’t practice yesterday because the 4th of July wiped me OUT 😭 I would’ve liked to practice more but my mom was trying to go to bed so I didn’t practice for more than 25-ish minutes.

Started with a basic warmup, did some buzzing on my mouthpiece then played a few basic scales and lip slurs, nothing too crazy. I did a quick double check that I could still hit a G after 2 days of not playing, which thankfully I did, so I started to work on Ab. I did a two octave scale to start then worked on just that upper octave. I still need to work on speeding up my air rather than pinching down to hit it, but the fact that I can even hit it in the first place makes me pretty happy. After being able to hit it semi-consistently I did lip slurs up to it, which felt super weird because it uses open rather than first valve like you’d expect so it sounds kinda funny when slurring up to it. I was able to hit it pretty well, but still had a hard time with speeding up my air. To be fair I was pretty tired and I hadn’t played in two days, so tomorrow I’ll try focusing on that.

While today’s practice sessions wasn’t too long I think I’ve made some good progress! I have some notes for myself so I can work on getting better tomorrow :)

Goal: work on lip slurs and scales in my upper range

Today actually went pretty well considering it’s only day two! I tried not to be too ambitious while also being a little more specific when deciding what I want to do which helped. I noticed that if I physically write down a list of what I want to do during a practice session it makes it feel a bit less daunting. Since I have a journal lying around I’m probably gonna be using that to write down practicing stuff from now on.

I started with just buzzing some lip slurs in my mouth piece which honestly helped a lot. It was a tip from my private lesson teacher, so maybe the man who’s been playing his instrument for longer than I’ve been alive actually has some helpful information… During warmups I just went through some scales and lip slurs while trying to focus on embouchure like yesterday, but since I’ve kind of broken down that barrier of frustration it took much less time. I focused on hitting a high G, and did that by practicing G major in the upper range but reallyyyy slowly. I also did lip slurs from low A to high G, which combined with the upper long tones made it so I could hit a G much easier. Still a bit tight in that range, but it feels a bit easier.

I’d call today a success! Doesn’t feel like too much, but it feels good to at least get something done. My next goal is to tackle upper Ab, a little scary but if I can hit an upper Bb on a good day I think I can do it.

Goals: Work on lip slurs in my upper range and practice accents

As a quick disclaimer, none of that happened 😭

I haven’t actually picked up my instrument in a week before now, and before that I hadn’t picked up my instrument in nearly two weeks. Hey at least the two week break was out of my control, I didn’t have access to an instrument, but I digress.

Today was essentially a series of playing for a few minutes then cussing out my euphonium. Ended up taking a break after not even a few minutes out of frustration over being unable to play a Bb scale without flubbing (I was basically just ragebaiting myself at that point). After calming down I pushed through, did a few scales and long tones while trying to focus on my embouchure, kept on having to correct myself on how I hold my instrument because I’ve been holding it wrong for basically all 6 years I’ve been playing euphonium, very basic things.

I wasn’t too happy that I couldn’t get to what I wanted to do to catch up on basics and had a good moment of staring dramatically out the window and questioning my life choices, but I realize now that it’s not the end of the world. I’m starting at rock bottom, only up from here!!