I just started trombone, and I'm going into my second year of marching band. I started on oboe and I still play it in concert. Last year I played in the front ensemble, but the people in it this year made me want to change.

So Here I am playing trombone. I have a major question... Where are the corners of your mouth supposed to go as you get tired? And where do they start? Oboe, they go in, but I don't know about brass. Oh, and I have the school's Stradivarius. And 6 1/2 AL mouthpiece.

Is there anything else I should know? And what's a really good warm up? I can really do pedaltones, but I have never been able to do high notes on brass. I tried mellophone before trombone.

your mouth isn't suppost to go anywhere when you get tired...tired=not practiced enough...and since you've been playing for about a month and a half, i wouldn't doubt you would get tired. but you need to build up your mouth muscles to play trombone. plactice long tones, if you odn't know what that is, then just hold out a note, and then go down, or up, just depends where you are on the staff. a strad to start out on...lucky...good mouthpiece to start out on...but yah, practice long tones, and a tip on sluring. on key/valve instruments all you have to do is press a button of some sort and it slurs, on trombone you have to actually tounge the slur. I use a mix between a "d" and a "t" tounge. Keep your slide moving fast when you do. but practice your scales over and over until you have those the way you want them to sound. also, when playing, don't keep your teeth too close together. a tuba player told be to drop my jaw as low as i could when i played, i do that now, and it actually increased my tone because it didn't get any fuzzy like buzz in the sound when i played. lip slurs are good to do, go from like a Bb to a F and down to a Bb and back up. going back up is the hardest part at first. use plenty of air, in fact, my advice would be to use all the air you can in 1-2 measures in 4/4 time. as time goes on, then i would advise you to begin to pace out your air, that would help out a lot. if your horn has a trigger on it, its probably tuned to "F." learn how to use the outer postions before using the rotor. One of my private tutors (which you should get, either another trombone player in your band, or a actual paid teacher) kept saying to be everytime i used the triggar, what would you do if the trigger, right before the concert, broke. you could still use the horn, but not the triggar...use the outer slide postions before the trigger. For the higher notes, after practing the notes on the staff, the way i learned to hit high notes was to get a slide chart and slowly worked my way up the staff. go from one note to the next and stop when there was pain, a few hours later redo what i just did. do this for a few days and you'll be able to hit higher notes...but it would be the best idea to start on the staff before attempting this, since as you should know, the note on the staff has the same tambre as the note an octive above it. But yah, all this would also be covered much more throughly with a private tutorer...good luck, and if trombone doesn't work, or if you just don't like it, there are a lot more instruements out there to try.