@Dr-Mark said in Blues Band with Horns:
Please feel free to take a picture and post it.

Here it is. Please note the base of notes is on a circle and the functional relation is a separate square that sits on top of the circle held in position by a peg, to allow the square to be dialed to the key one is wanting to play a function against:
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@N1684T said in Intro from a Global Moderator:

Ive given up training Bear. He trains me;)

Training is a cooperative thing. He learns from me and I learn from him.
Different people approach dogs differently. As for me, if my dog doesn't like someone, I won't like them either because he's a far smarter and a better judge of character than I am.

@rowuk

As always, Robin, I look forward to, and cherish, any input you have on interesting subjects such as scales. They have done, and continue to do, so much to help me play the trumpet, especially now that I am in my mid-80s and finding it tougher to play well each new year.

@Dale-Proctor said in Oiling trumpet:

@Shifty said in Oiling trumpet:

@Dr-GO
I had a co-worker who went through college on a band scholarship. He said their entire trumpet section used STP as a slide lubricant.

I can’t imagine that working unless they thinned it out with some other oil. STP is as thick and stringy as honey.

It did work well. The drop of red colored solution was thinner than my UltraPure oil.

Here we go. Thanks to an anonymous donor:

p.s. Can we make this a sticky?

Circle of Breath
New
By popular demand: the circle of breath:

The first step is a prepared body. If our chest cavity is "collapsed", we have to inflate it with force. That is pretty stupid. When we are sitting or standing up straight but relaxed (yoga is VERY good for this), all we have to do is inhale. We can get a huge amount of air without having to pressurize the lungs by force. Learning to prepare the body for playing is easy with beginners and increasingly difficult for players with more experience as they have to break habits to make new ones! It is important to have this activity monitored.

Once the body is big and relaxed, we draw a big circle. The left side (moving clockwise) is inhale and the right side is exhale. Notice at the top and bottom of the circle that it is still round - no disturbances. Our transition from inhale to exhale and exhale to inhale must mirror that. We do not hold air in, it is either moving in or out. We have to practice getting BIG breaths without building up tension in the throat or upper body. We use the diaphragm to inhale, but subconsciously. We don't need to think about how those muscles work, we just give them the big, relaxed body and they know what to do!
We do not need to "push" our air out, we just exhale. Generally students have a BIG problem getting a big breath and then just exhaling. There is so much "learned" tension present that they need weeks to get this down.

Once our breathing works (in my lessons that means when I am satisfied - not when the student thinks that they are done), then we replace exhale with play. We do not tongue notes, we just switch to exhale and what happens, happens. The goal here is to develop the breathing apparatus and lips so that we are so relaxed that sound comes at the peak of the circle with no kickstart by the tongue. A couple of weeks of long tones this way shows us a lot about everything that we have been doing wrong. Notice how Rashawn in the youtube just exhales a triple C? Completely free of hard work! This is how it has to work in every register. Just exhale the note.

When I am happy with this stage, the student exhales into lipslurs - same principle - no tongue! Just exhale! Another couple weeks goes by to "perfect" this (it is never perfect) and we have made a considerable step forward. Our tone is no longer dependent on the tongue to reliably speak - regardless of how high or low, loud or soft. Generally with no tongue applied, we can lip slur a fifth to an octave more than we had before. The range caves when making music because we are still missing too much stuff.

At this point I have very specific things to learn to add the tongue. Critical here is that we do not use the sledgehammer tonguing that we needed when we were using pressure, we have to develop infinitely small "T", "D", "K", "G", "L", "R" attacks that are only used to "articulate" the beginning of the tone that occurs at the peak of the Circle of Breath. The tonguing must occur EXACTLY at the point where we switch from in- to exhale. If we tongue too early or late, we screw up the transition. This means we are back to long tones and trained ears and eyes to insure that old habits don't screw up what we have now carefully built. Once long tones work, we can tongue the initial intro into the lip slur. If our tone without attack was clean, the articulation is only frosting on top of the cake!

Following this, the student gets easy tunes like from the hymnbook and we work on proper breathing and articulation of real music.

This Circle of Breath is as far as I am concerned the biggest deal in trumpet playing. Without being able to do this, the rest can't ever click. It is as simple as inhale/exhale. The problem is understanding what we have done to ourselves: how sloppy we sit, stand, walk. How crappy our posture is, how caved in our upper body is, how tense our neck and shoulders are because we hang our heads, how brutal our tonguing is to kickstart a screwed embouchure that uses excessive pressure to enable playing at all. In addition we have a learned unwillingness to accept very small steps of improvement because we have learned to download cheats and believe the idiots that claim to have silver bullets for problems. We do not even notice the small improvements and therefore get frustrated that we haven't experienced the "miracle". I won't even get into lifestyle and attitude.

The human state is a product of what we repeatedly do. We need challenges and successes. We need the wisdom to prepare ourselves adequately for the challenges any time that we can. That foundation can carry us a long way if it is solid.

I am very passionate about process and that is why people get angry with my "approach". I don't really care. They can put me on their ignore list, go somewhere else or rally enough people to drive me off. TrumpetMaster is for free and to be honest, I am here because what I do has helped quite a few. If the community changes for what I consider to be the worse, I have no financial or emotional ties.

@Trumpetsplus said in How To Play Trumpet With Less Tension:

One should never play a piece of music the same way once.

Some of us can't help it. 🙄

I also remember an interview I heard of Jaco Pastorius that commented he remembered vividly listening to his Father's album of Charlie Parker playing Donna Lee. The speakers being very distorted he said sounded more like a bass lead than a sax lead. And as they say, the rest is history:

@Dr-GO said in New Player has entered the Game - Part 2:
Like Joey DeFrancisco. Man for a person known as an organist, he plays a mean trumpet.

I was at a jam session once, and the tenor player played some nice stuff for most of the evening. Then after he had played the head of a tune on tenor, reached behind him off the bandstand and came up with a trumpet and killed it some more. What a surprise.

I, myself, harrumph, have played professionally, Trumpet, French Horn, Alto, Tenor, and Soprano Saxes, Recorder, Irish Penny Whistle and Irish Natural Flute,

There are plenty of multi-instrumentalists. Kenny Dorham also plaed good tenor sax. I heard Ira Sullivan play on trumpet, a very tasty head to a tune, the rhythm changed and the solo came in on sax. I was Ira. There's Maynard on Bone and Euph. Gunhild Carling, who plays just about everything. Multti-doubler James Morrison and the list goes on.

@dr-go said in Louis Armstrong’s Trumpet:

With what I paid in taxes this year, I could have bought 5 of them.... Would have give 4 of them to the closest of my friends here on TB.

MAKE ME ONE OF YOUR CLOSEST FRIENDS, DOC pretty please 😊

@neal085 said in Personality and Taste in Classical Music:

Yep, booted the flute. I typically find it difficult to enjoy that instrument.

Could not eliminate the flute. Goes back to high school when member of the flute section wore tight sweaters during the winter months... so am a bit biased by fondled mammarys.

@administrator said in Guilty Pleasure Listening:
Was part of the "sound" of the Shaggs no sense of time?

They were just inept and forced into it by a father who must've lived in an alternate universe. You can google them. BTW, Frank Zappa gave them kudos.

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A last mouthpiece blowout, apparently. Facebook link, sorry for that. Big discounts!

https://www.facebook.com/kanstulfactory/posts/2709576339076437

"This is it! Last week to order from Kanstul.
We still have mouthpieces. Bigger discounts. Call or email for info. 714.563.1000/sales@kanstul.com. (When inquiring please know what you're looking for and we'll see if we have it. 🙂)
All sales final."

A few weeks ago the discount was 70% so I wonder what it's like today.

@fels I've been using a Stork Vacchiano 3 for my Selmer high-G picc, but recently I've fallen in love with Ivan Hunter's Jaegerbrass 3M for the purpose. And as a constant go-to I've got the Stomvi Mouthpiece System (one rim, two stems, eight different cups, and you can get a separate extra-lightweight picc stem - either trp or cornet - as well as any number of additional rims and cups...)

I just gifted one of those same cornets to a local school band program. Solid little horn, but I certainly had no need for it.
As for nylon valve guides, it’s funny that the trumpet world can see them as a detriment, but they are an absolute necessity in the low brass world. A tuba with brass valve guides - that clacking would be projected across the concert hall. In a trumpet the click is barely noticeable to the player, so we can be a bit more (or less) picky about our guide material. This was something I never really thought about until apprenticing in a shop that specializes in tubas! The plus side to nylon is that they are quiet, the downside that they wear out a little faster.