I know Warm ups are very personal but I would want to know if you warm up the same way when you are going to study for 2/3h , when you have an rehearsal with the orchestra/band or when you have an audition and you are going to play only a few minutes.

what changes in each case? How much time do you usually spend on it? thanks

Mine is always tailored for the situation.

My usual gig at the park is pretty hard on the face, so I make sure my air works, my chops are supple, and I stop there. Sometimes 10 minutes or less.

If I'm practicing, there's not really a line between warmup and fundamentals practice. They lead into each other.

There is one warmup that you should do early in the day before you do anything else. This is your extensive warmup that goes through long tones, lip slurs, scale patterns, tonguing, etc.

When you go to a rehearsal, you generally don't have a lot of time to do a warmup. Just enough to shake off the cobwebs and be ready to play.

When you go to an audition, you are about to hit a high stress period where you must be at the top of your game from the outset. Don't do a lot of warmup just before an audition -- just enough to get the lips moving. Not so much that you overdo it.

For a concert, you can do whatever you want, provided you have enough time beforehand. Note that you should not be warming up extensively in front of everybody else -- you will not get friendly looks from everybody else you are blowing away. Find a quiet corner of the venue where you can blow without making everybody else listen to you. I used to use a boiler room backstage. Again, you should have been doing your daily at home and you shouldn't need to spend an hour warming up.

When I studied at the Royal Accademy of Music I had a warmup that was no shorter than 20 minutes, and I was still not ready to play. Now my warmup is at most 3 minutes. After this I can do the rehearsals and the concerts I do. Sometimes there is no time at all for warmup, then I might buzz a few notes on the mouthpiece. I guess if my first phrase in a concert would be very exposed and very high then I would make sure I did a longer warmup before I left home. Sometimes you do not know what the first thing is you will play, then it's best to do some sort of warmup, just in case the first thing you play is very exposed and high. You could do it at home as Bruce suggest. Nobody wants to hear your warmup at place. Thats my experience.

/Tom

Warmup should take maybe 10 minutes, then practice in the morning. No matter what time the gig is, you're good to go at the site. Just need a couple of notes to remember how the room feels.

Some days I pick up the horn and it sounds just right, from the very start.

Some other days, there is no amount of warmup that gets it right.

That isn't much of a tip.

The biggest reasons why the chops might be bad, say at an audition, are likely things you wouldn't think of. Here's my short list of problems I've noticed trombones having:

1. They are unfamiliar with the acoustic of the room they have to play in. This is so vitally important, but most forget about it completely. The best players, when they play a few notes in a new room, aren't really "warming up" but are instead figuring out how to play the room.

2. They are dehydrated.

3. They are used to warming up in a way that doesn't reinforce or highlight efficient ways to blow or change registers. In other words, each day is a crapshoot. Combined with the above two issues, some find that bad chop days are random, like the weather.