"No ensemble can exceed the skills of it's individual members..."
Fine intonation. It's the thing that sets the great ensembles and performers apart from the good. It's also one of the hardest aspects of fine musicianship to develop. You've just found one great way to make it far, far easier...
The Tuneup Basic Training System was developed to enable any musician, no matter the natural aptitude, to develop a firm grasp of pure, perfect intonation. The System consists of a text/workbook introducing the subject of musical intonation, but goes quickly to an audio CD providing the player/singer with both the tools and the time necessary to develop solid intonation skills. The key to the success of the System is it's focus on the ear!
Each key contains three developmental exercises. The first exercise uses a standard tonic drone with powerful pedagogy designed to "expose" the perfect, pure location of each interval. The player/singer learns to associate each interval in relation to the tonic of the key. In the second exercise, the player/singer places these new found intervals in the context of pure chords, focusing on different chord members and inter chord movement. The third exercise teaches the player/singer to place the difficult minor intervals in the context of the chord.
Once the player has mastered their instrument and the key, the player is encouraged to use the System with additional players. This is especThe Tuneup Bootcamp System incorporates these individual aspects for use in the full ensemble. Bootcamp uses the same pedagogy as the individual Basic Training System but enables the director to incorporate intonation training into the daily routine. Bootcamp consists of 5 Basic Training Systems (one of each transposition: C, Bb, Eb, F and Bass Clef) plus a data CD consisting of all exercises, all keys for all instruments in PDF format. The director chooses a key, prints out the PDF masters of the key, then duplicates as needed for each instrument. Eventually, the ensemble is proficient in all keys and spends only a few minutes per rehearsal brushing up on a key! ially effective with quintets, sections and then full ensembles.
