When I'm hired to play two services at a church, the second one is going to be played just a little bit better than the first one, because I'm awake, and the second cup of coffee has kicked in.
That having been said, on Christmas Eve the 6:00 p.m. service is going to sound better than the 10:45 p.m. - 12:15 a.m. service, because I'm beginning to get a bit older, so I'm also no longer a so-called night owl.
This morning though, after breakfast I put some oil in Fat Bastard, turned up the heat a little bit - since it's down the 40s outside, and played through Kopprasch 31 through 50. B-flat tuba reading is still not on autopilot, so it got my brain to working. I guess I spent about an hour doing that. I don't really "warm up", but - since it was in the morning - I messed around for 2 or 3 minutes before playing through those to knock the night time crusty stuff off my lips. Once that mess was over with (all of those Kopprasch gymnastics) I was quite awake and focused - and I didn't do a bad job playing through those, if I do say so myself. Maybe I should shift to the morning, and let the tuba sit quietly at night...??
(yeah... and some cataract surgery - along with some reading glasses that work - might help eliminate a lot of this guessing...but I can't help but assume that people who work on eyeballs have become more incompetent - just as people who work on everything else, so I'm putting that off as long as I can. As I pointed out in the past, most everyone thinks that 96% is a really good score to receive in school, but I don't think I want to fly in 96% of an airliner. I made the decision to quit flying a couple of decades ago, but I can't make a decision to quit seeing.)
Something I've been trying to do lately is to breathe more deeply, doing so in those busy exercises in that part of the Kopprasch book is a little bit challenging, and it gets my attention. I watched part of an Arnold Jacobs masterclass video where he was talking about a player who had a lot of lung capacity and managed to get through phrases without breathing deeply, but once that player got in a habit of breathing more deeply as other players do, those long phrases were even easier for him to do, though he already had the air to do them. It occurred to me that this pertains to me as well, and - particularly now that I'm not young - it's probably a really good idea to get in the habit of taking in more air when I have the opportunity to do so.
bloke "and not that I'm religious about practicing, either, so the morning NOT fighting end-of-the-day-exhaustion tack might actually work...??... and working to improve and master this huge instrument in B-flat serves as a pretty good distraction from reality, which seems to be pretty bleak...reminiscent of around 450 AD or so"