Six Ways to Use Intonation Duets

 Six Ways to Practice Intonation Duets

One of my favorite pieces of my fundamentals routine has become playing a handful of these intonation duets with a pre-programmed drone. There are 38 intonation duets taken from books by Kling and Gumpert and compiled into one volume by John Ericson. For each duet, the bottom part plays a scale pattern and the top part plays an accompanying melody. Here, I have programed the scale pattern into my Dr. Drone app and streamed it through a bluetooth speaker to play against. 

I have used these in dozens of different ways to help improve both pitch and time. Here I will demonstrate six of my favorite ways to use these exercises. 

For these examples I'll be using duet #8. 

1. Basic - Play as written with both metronome and drone. Tempo should be moderate - around half note =60 for this one. Play at a comfortable mezzo dynamic. 

2. No Metronome - Everything here stays the same as #1 but removing the metronome presents a challenge to our rhythmic integrity. The change of notes in the drone provides beat one of each measure but we've taken away the half note subdivision. 

3. Extreme Dynamic Changes - I like to alternate between pp and ff every two measures on the beginning of the bar line but this can be altered depending on the melody. Observe tendencies and try not to allow the pitch to change with the dynamic. This can be done with or without the metronome. 

4. Stopped notes - Add stopped horn either by the measure or in strategic places. For this example I've kept it simple and alternated between open and stopped every four measures. Alternately, stopped notes could be inserted on longer values or even randomly. 

5. Alternating Drone - For this variation, I've muted the drone on every other bar, requiring intonation to be maintained without another pitch to compare against. As this variation becomes easier, more measures in the drone can be muted.

6. Alternating Drone, no metronome - For an extra challenge, this variation offers assistance in both pitch and rhythm only every other measure.