How do you do what I think is called in English legato tonguing? Just in case I've got the wrong term, what I mean is when you have two (or more) notes the same with a slur over the top but a line over the top of each note so that you need to articulate both (all) of them.

My daughter has been told that she should say her normal "tu" for the first note and then "lu" for the others but when she does this the notes aren't separated at all. I'm assuming that she is putting her tongue in the wrong place but maybe I have got hold of the wrong end of the stick entirely because she said she thought her teacher said she shouldn't be using her tongue to separate the notes.

Can anyone enlighten me as to what is supposed to be going on inside her mouth? She plays the trombone but I presume the technique would be the same whatever the brass instrument.

Ahhh right I think I understand.

On a valved brass instrument, you can slur just by not tongueing as the valves do it for you (though you have to change your embouchure etc).

However on a slide brass instrument it is different as if you moved the slide without tongueing then the notes would just sound like they are bending from one note to the next which is not what you want. To get the effect of a slur on a trombone, trombonists do very legato tongueing to get it as smooth as possible.

Your daughter should try tongueing with "ta" (as she normally does) and then move the tongue slightly further back and do a "da" action with her tongue, and then back further to "na" and then back even further to "la" to practise getting very smooth legato. She may want to try saying "ta da na la" first so she can feel where her tongue naturally goes.

Therefore, 'slurring' is not the same on trombone as other brass instruments

It takes practise, but she should go through her concerns with her teacher in her next lesson.

Thanks, I'll get her to try the different syllables.

Part of the problem is that my daughter is bilingual but speaks French with an English accent and her teacher is French. She had trouble learning to tongue intially because she couldn't produce the French "tu" sound her teacher wanted. It turned out that he was focussing on the wrong bit of the "tu" sound (the vowel rather than the consonant) and it was eventually solved by a (French) trumpet teacher who had spent some time in the States and within a matter of minutes gave her an English sound to imitate. Unfortunately this teacher has now left the music school, otherwise I would have told her to ask him.