Best posts made by administrator

Congratulations are in order! Esteban Batallan (sorry if it's misspelled) has won the coveted Adolph Herseth chair of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

This guy is excelente, amigos.

I'm still not sold on the whole "drive on the parkway, park on the driveway" thing.

@pss

Since Rowuk isn't here yet, I'll post my views.

I use a 1/3 top, 2/3 bottom approach. I believe this is probably the best approach for most people, however, lots of great players have used other placements. This is something that really comes naturally for most musicians. If I were you, unless you have serious issues in your playing that cannot be resolved with more practice, I wouldn't think much about mouthpiece placement.

Well, at some point it does (think tuba). However, I doubt the difference between .438 and .444 is a matter of air volume. Seems to me that the whole horn has an effect, and changing the bore size will contribute to that effect. To some, it may seem like it takes "more air," but this is often an issue of perception and not reality.

@J-Jericho said in If you've got it, flaunt it...:

@BigDub said in If you've got it, flaunt it...:

@Dr-GO said in If you've got it, flaunt it...:

@BigDub said in If you've got it, flaunt it...:

I don’t think I’d be able to really stretch out in those cramped conditions...

And with the $117,xxx monthly mortgage, what am I going to do with the extra cash I would have?

See if you can get WeatherTech's David MacNeil to part with his new acquisition:

cnbc.com

Here's the story of the $70M transaction: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/01/this-ferrari-just-became-the-most-expensive-car-ever-sold.html

You know you are poor when your car is 3x the value of your 50k Square foot "home."

@Kehaulani said in Health Benefits of Classical Music:

So, if I listen to Berg's "Wozzeck" . .

You will slowly die a painful, watery death.

Here is a fascinating subject. If you watch the video below starting at 21:14, they discuss fitness loss and regaining, and how new science supports the idea that it is actually much easier to rebuild fitness after a period away from exercise than it is to build it in the first place. Essentially, the nuclei of muscle cells do not die as you lose fitness. This seems rather interesting for a brass musician, too. It seems to me like it would be much easier to regain strength than to develop it the first time. I have seen this to be true, as I am a repeat comeback player, and can usually regain the majority of my strength within a month of starting a new routine. Whereas, it took me years as a kid to get to that point in the first place.

I'm kind of irritated that the museum states it has "valves," when, clearly, it is a "keyed" bugle and not a valved instrument (as in perinet or rotary valves).

There is a bike trail near me, and along that bike trail, there is a sign. Somebody stuck a sticker to that sign that reads, "Being a good parent is 2% trying and 98% putting down your phone."

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.

Thanks for joining. Trying to get the site popular, I created a Facebook ad. If you see it, let me know!