Posts made by ROWUK

@SSmith1226 Nice review, but nothing controversial in my view.

@Trumpetb I understand you actually quite well. I also disagree with a lot that you post - because it all seems so random and not based on real experience. It is also very confusing considering that we have readers that can not tell the difference.
I disagree with "zeroing in" between mouthpiece and each horn - unless the mouthpiece has the same rim and cup and only minor shank work is necessary. Before my Monette period, I used the same mouthpiece on all my trumpets except for when I played lead. Monette builds Bb, C and Eb mouthpieces so I use the same size, cup and throat for all of those horns. Even the flugel and cornet mouthpiece have the same rim.
I would also disagree that mouthpieces GENERALLY change with style unless we are comparing lead to everything else.
We are creatures of habit and to get a stable base, we need to reduce our choices to optimize with the limited time that those of us posting here have.
If accuracy is a non issue for your playing, then the free for all is fine.
I do not need multiple mouthpieces for symphonic, chamber, commercial or big band (except lead). My chosen mouthpiece is dynamic enough in its behaviour that I do not experience problems that I can't fix just by practicing more.
Now, the bogus use of the word physics in this context is worth clarifying. IF high quality playing is critical, we actually have very few choices. We need very clear articulation, clear tone from low to high. We need a tone compatible with the section that we play in as well as great flexibility, security and good intonation. Please do not compare Till Brönner to Maynard Ferguson or Jean Francois Madeuf to Maurice Andre. They also have/had narrow choices that cover(ed) their specialized playing.
So, a lot of words around a very simple concept: jack of no trade and master of none. Creatures of habit need repetitions to develop a flexible tone covering many use cases. Creatures of habit need repetitions to build security and style. For players without a very strong foundation, changes are the primary cause of unreliability. Find the mouthpiece and practice routine that is the best compromise and stick with it.
Remember! this thread is about a player with an elusive high G# - so no lead, solo career, no historical performance practice or anything else with "special" hardware or non compatible tone. No hardware will solve this. It is mind over matter and perhaps Clarke is the answer, or maybe Schlossberg, for others it could just be getting too damn much pressure reduced a little bit.

@Trumpetb You argue about a large quantity of mouthpieces? Knowing that the human state is creature of habit, I would argue that you will NEVER get good enough to really tell the differences if you are constantly switching. I need 6 months with a mouthpiece to get really acclimated and have an opinion. That means 24 mouthpieces for me is 12 years. Considering that our bodies change about every 7 years, only a small portion of what we think that we have learned will stick and the great players are great because they leverage the habit. Random mixing, just mixes the face up and that produces random results.

In my 58 years of play I went from a Bach 1 1/2C (4 years) to a 1C (2 years), to a Schilke 18 (22 years), to a Monette B/C2 (30 years). I always had a "real" reason to change. The 1C was because I started playing in symphonies, the Schilke to improve intonation of my Bach CL 229H and the Monette because I switched to an Ajna2 (heavy Monette) trumpet with a large shank.

@Trumpetb We can learn from those before us or attempt reinvent the wheel. I am very much for leveraging what those far smarter than me have already figured out! It saves time and lets us get to the music much, much faster.

@Trumpetb I will heartily disagree with the mouthpiece having anything to do with a G#. In fact, with good habits, our range does not change much with mouthpiece rather our sound and expression. My range does not change with a 7C, my Monette 1-1 or my 10 1/2E for the picc. The picc sounds AWFUL with the 1-1!
Changing mouthpieces in my world is NEVER part of "basic habits" for reliable playing! The fewer changes from day to day, the greater consistency. Once we have an "abundance" of consistency, we can venture into more palettes of color.

That all being said, I did recommend an overdose of very, very quiet longtones and lipslurs. To enhance those exercizes, take a 10 minute hot shower right before hand to get as relaxed as possible. To not use the tongue to get the tone started - just exhale into the tone or slur. Read the circle of breath first.

@Trumpetb said in 1970 Bach 43 elusive high G#:

Make ROWUKs words your bible. This last post by him is gospel if ever there was a trumpet gospel.

Yes to "What is appropriate is whatever works"

Yes to " My goal is not a six-pack in our face and an industrial level compressor with the lungs"

These are the golden nuggets that we should use as a foundation to our beliefs.

Add to that others great advice such as "All we have is our sound" always always always work on your tone make it the most beautiful humanly possible by using ROWUKS words "What is appropriate is whatever works"

Read every other post of ROWUK the man knows what he is talking about.

I have reached many of the same conclusions as he states in here but it has taken me a very long time to reach that position.

Read absorb digest his words and become all the better as a performer for the doing of that.

Thanks for the flowers, but I stand on the shoulders of giants. Nothing I post is originally mine. It is all part of Arban, Irons, Stamp, Schlossberg, St. Jacome, Clarke and many others as well as practicing things like meditation, yoga and Feldenkrais.
I firmly believe that every person has a "different" entry point and finding that is my #1 priority when starting a student. Building vocabulary is the #2 step. Learning what I mean by integration is the critical part. As babies, we do all of the basics of posture, motion and breathing naturally. Once we start going to school, we start to lose these abilities and "break" our bodies in small steps. By the time we get to high school, we slouch, have back and neck tension as well as many other symptoms of our "bad behavior". Some people start to excercise, get therapy, turn vegan in hopes that things will get better. They seldom do because the "core evil" is not the symptom of pain or decreased ability to move, it is a learned reduction in integration of mind and body. That in turn leads to many pathological things.
In my view, when we are looking for a solution to something, we must identify the "root evil". As everybody with upper back pain has learned, treating the pain by massage or medicine is at best a very temporary reduction. Getting the coordination of the skeleton, muscles and mind back would be the best solution, but what specialist can you go to that offers that type of integration? In traditional medicine, there are basically none and Yoga as it is most commonly practiced, is a sports activity not a holistic thing. Many of the best other possibilities are considered too esoteric and therefore, we are all stuck with whatever ails us.
My approach to teaching trumpet is by integration. We need to leverage at the most basic level to be able to build good habits. Neck tension could kill a lesson on double or triple tonguing. Emotional tension severely limits our ability to turn airflow into music.
We are creatures of habit and our development is based on a system of rewards. That is why I say what works is the first definition of appropriate. Accomplishment->Satisfaction->Desire to repeat. This is how embouchure pressure develops. In our early developmental stages, pressure works and encourages further similar behavior. Replacing that with something that in the end MAY be better, is difficult because when trying to change habits, we have many things competing in our brains. Many times we only have lessons in the part of the year where we are performing. That means that we need to focus on what works, we have no time for addressing deeper issues that get worse before they get better!

So, if there were any words that I think would be most helpful, they are not for the physical level, they would deal with the mind and leveraging our reward system. If a high G# is hard, then do not keep trying to "hit it". Leave it alone for 4 weeks and build supportive habits (integration breath and embouchure) that ultimately could uncap blockage for an octave more than that. That is not 3 posts and an online 30 minute lesson.

Let us not forget that there ARE many "students" that benefit from dominating teachers. Some people actually "beg" for this dominance (not just in the trumpet world). For the rest of us, we generally get lucky and find someone where the "chemistry" lines up or at least where personal motivation is possible.

I basically disagree with most of the online schemes as I need a better picture of what the whole body is doing. I do not want to reduce the efforts of online teachers to a practice monitor, but my experience shows a predominance of exactly that. Integrating body use, breathing, technique and musical expression is a HUGE thing and working with people that have not had structure is an even bigger deal. It takes (too much) time just to find a common vocabulary!

At the end of the day, we match expectations with results and the real scammers are those willing to just take the money and run after blaming the students for the rest...

As far as responding to teachers like this. I am most satisfied with NOT FEEDING THE TROLLS. I do not engage them, I do not seek satisfaction by having the last word. At Trumpetmaster, I gave them a vacation if they turned the heat up online (Kurt Thompson comes to mind).

My answer would be: "after considering all of the options, I have come to the understanding that our goals do not line up. Thank you for your patience." Then I block the e'mail address to prevent further "itch to respond".

@JWM said in 1970 Bach 43 elusive high G#:

@ROWUK Too much pressure is surely part of my problem. I’ve made progress in posture, inhale and “exhaling”. I find that I must change my lip position and trumpet position to generate a note. Is that appropriate?

What is appropriate is whatever works. "More" appropriate are the things that most likely prevent failure in the future. If you have summer band concerts, it is tough to make changes and maintain any specific level of playing.

I do not advocate changing the position of the mouthpiece while playing. If we are practicing enough of the right things, lip flexibilities/lip slurs will provide all of the embouchure tension skills that we need. Getting rid of Armstrong is usually the biggest challenge. As I previously wrote: "A buzz is nothing more than the lips opening and closing at a certain frequency. If we apply large amounts of arm pressure to the embouchure, we need far more air pressure to blow the lips apart. That is not a very responsive system!" This means that better breathing does not fix ANYTHING if it is not coupled to embouchure habits. In my world, breathing is an integral part of the embouchure and should be practiced in context (an example is the "circle of breath"). My goal is not a six-pack in our face and an industrial level compressor with the lungs. It is fine motor activity of the embouchure balanced by "just enough" air pressure.

Remember, humans are creatures of habit and we are what we repeatedly do! This is why lessons with a qualified teacher are so important - to build a consistent foundation and confidence in that process. It takes thousands of repetitions for something to become a habit. I have met students however, that have a natural talent for structure. They do not need as much "nudging" as others that have to work very hard for everything.

Practicing in an unstructured way builds habits too - unreliability, uncertainty and frustration.

@JWM The #1 reason for range just stopping at a specific note is too much damn pressure.

A buzz is nothing more than the lips opening and closing at a certain frequency. If we apply large amounts of arm pressure to the embouchure, we need far more air pressure to blow the lips apart. That is not a very responsive system!

In my view, the easiest way to break this habit is to turn the testosterone down. Play ONLY very, very softly for a couple of weeks and focus on the air doing the work. Overdose on pianissimo lipslurs and long tones. Practice to get the sound to start on a wisp of air.

Generally, it takes only a lesson or two to get students doing this reliably. The biggest problem with a social media recommendation is that body use can not be controlled. If someones body is twisted into knots, a big relaxed breath is a challenging thing. Exhaling also becomes a real chore.

My full view is in several posts that I made called "the circle of breath". This is a collection of things from many disciplines. Google it and if there is something unclear, just ask.

@JWM The only way to know if it is you is to have someone way better than you play the horn.
I would say the chances are 99.999% that it is you. There are essentially NEVER any notes missing unless there is a leak and then it is not "a" high notes that get s lost, rather usually in the lower octave.

The notion that tightly slotting horns are easier to play in tune is a myth in my world. We do not play "well tempered" we play relative to the other notes. This is called "just tuning". We need the horn to respond evenly because we need to bend the pitch to stay in tune in relation to others.

The notion of how a horn "slots" has more to do with how well we hear ourselves. In an overly reverberant bathroom or staircase, an instrument will appear to slot better than that same instrument when played outdoors on a cold day. If we insert earplugs (in our ears), the horn will slot noticably worse than if we just got our ears cleaned.

Sure, we want instruments that can securely be played in tune. I believe that the physics of resonance place limits on what works. I also would not agree that heavy instruments necessarily have less overtones. My heaviest trumpet is the one that is most easy to play and projects the best. It is the most brilliant too.

In many cases, we can improve instruments that are difficult to play. This can be accomplished by moving braces, cleaning the grunge out, aligning the valves and to a certain extent improving the mouthpiece shank/receiver connection. Sometimes a smaller mouthpiece can make our sound get to our ears more easily. I have had several students wanting to get a "darker sound" that ended up just being mushy. Recording their sound with various instruments can prove to them that they were following a "less worthy" goal.

Heavier valve caps on instruments not designed for them can make resonance more stable but as a rule have a cost in sound and intonation.

There is also a notion that some instruments project in a way making them easier to hear. This can help match the expectations in our heads to what the trumpet actually sounds like. When we match instruments to our sound concept, they are easier to play.

I think that playing in all keys is important to our playing. Not only the fingers and brain get a workout, but negotiating the changes in back pressure through the valve combinations stabilise our embouchures. Practice scales slowly and precisely, slurred, and then add just enough tongue to separate the notes, then less legato and finally staccato. Play loudly and softly.

@Trumpetb My point is that we do not NEED TO PERFORM WITH the original instruments to get the original intentions of the composer. For some people, myself included, learning and performing with them does however, offer additional palettes of color to use.
As the trumpet through its history has changed about every 50 years, I would place most of the "blame" for lost technique and tone clearly with the trumpeters. Even in the Jazz genre, how many players just noodle around without really embracing the various periods in jazz? How many can play a convincing Bix or Dizzy chorus? What about a whole evening of 1920s jazz (or 1950s for that matter). Sure, we may hear some licks that apply, but a whole evening? The same is true with cornetto choruses called diminuation. It is not a hard concept, the patterns developed over time and also applied to a certain extent to the baroque period.
The ignorance that is displayed - even by some (if not many) professionals, is simply laziness not lack of sources, information or role models. It certainly is not hardware based. There are even courses to build your own cornetto or natural trumpet.
I would not consider anything lost rather ignored.

My personal opinion is that we have lost NOTHING. The trumpet has been evolving/transforming about every 50 years and that the issue is more about what the contemporary view of what is acceptable. The end of the baroque era brought the requirements of chromatics that the natural trumpet could not fulfill. An additional handicap was classical modulation of the key signature that ruled out "mean tone" instruments. Initial attempts to get the trumpet chromatic sounded HORRIBLE, that resulted in it losing its "solo instrument" position in the orchestra and it wasn't until the late 1800s until further developments enabled the trumpeter to recapture melodic superiority. With the advent of recording technology, the requirement of security drove the creation of shorter instruments (in Bb, C, D and Eb). In Germany around 1900 the Bb trumpet common today was called the "high Bb" trumpet and the orchestral players using the deep F trumpets commented on the thin sound and lack of color of those Bb instruments. They lost the battle.
Rediscovery of Bach in the 1920s and 1930s drove development of smaller bore high D, Eb, F and G trumpets. Jazz drove additional changes to the Bb as did raising concert pitch to A=440. Charles Mager bringing french C trumpets to Boston was an additional change. After the second world war, the volume war started. Symphony orchestras (especially the brass) got larger bore instruments to get a "darker" sound that fitted in the orchestral fabric better. Unfortunately, that development increased the loudness, driving orchestral pitch up to the current A=442/443 to make the woodwinds brighter to compete. The string sections got strings that were also much louder.
Now, to get back to my original premise: trumpeters never had any need to ignore history or lose certain playing techniques. This was and still is their own choice. I listen to recent symphonic brass recordings of Gabrielli and wonder why nothing has improved since the 1960s when Philadelphia, Cleveland and Chicago created their legendary recordings. The reason is choice and ignorance. Ed Tarr and many others have made historical performance practice popular and accessible. Choosing to ignore what has been learned is my definition of ignorant. There is NO REASON FOR A MODERN PLAYER TO NOT ENCOMPASS THE ORIGINAL INTENT OF COMPOSERS FROM ANY ERA. Everything is freely available in our information age. I do not need a cornetto to play Gabrielli or a natural trumpet to play Bach. I do need to understand performance practice, phrasing, articulation and blend to serve the original intent however. It is there for the taking as long as we are not too proud to bend over and pick it up!
We can learn a lot from these pioneers.

I do not think that I have missed anything. It is a simple fact that our lives are far more public than we realise and that brings a bunch of opportunities - good and bad.
As far as someone "secretly" recording me and publishing, that would only be a (solvable) problem if my name or picture were attached somehow. Especially in Germany, there are very fast venues to take care of situations like this.

That being said, my practice sessions are generally purposeful and I think for the most part it is audibly very clear what I am working towards. I almost never "noodle around". This means if a recording was made without a picture or video of me or my name, I probably would not care. The chance of someone "stealing" my practice work and making money with it is so unlikely, I have never given it any thought.

The idea of a private detective digging dirt up about trumpet practice sessions reminds me of Guy Noir of "a Prairie Home Companion" fame. Garrison Keillor is my hero!

I would heartily disagree that "warts" are bad. Why can we not accept that we are human, fallible but capable of development? A recording of a live concert by a school band, symphony orchestra or church choir is a time document - showing various realities and triggering honest memories. That is far more "valuable" than pimped material where we would like to portray ourselves as superheros.
As far as the bar for putting stuff on YouTube, we are simply feeding the beast. Like with social Media in general, "weak content" prevails, not because of lack of talent, rather because of lack of humility. I have no trouble rubbing that in peoples noses years later. A CD passed around to friends and family would have been enough but wanting to be a movie star clouded our common sense.
It becomes even more problematic when we try to help the misguided by critiquing the posts. Then the excuses start and those in a position to help are attacked for misunderstanding the purpose behind publishing.
Nope, I say our recordings are what they are and bad decisions are no different. If our first posted recordings are weak but we show incredible growth, we are good model roles. If our performances stay weak but we continue to post, we learn something about that person. Also not a bad thing. Black and white lists are available for most forms of social media.
The choice has ALWAYS been ours but the results involve others whether we like it or not.

@administrator only considering a few aspects...
There is always a "cost of business". When the recording industry was in its infancy, the ensembles had to play an entire side of a record. The musicians did not have a "second chance". I believe in the beginning, that made them more interested in playing safe instead of "with abandon".
Fast forward to the recording to multichannel analog tape. Now we could splice out things less desirable, reality became something else.
Fast forward to digital recording (starting further developed perhaps in the late 1990s). Now we can manipulate with surgical precision pitch, rhythm, phrases or even individual notes. In addition we can add all sorts of "vitamin supplements" like reverb and instrumental effects, we can modify the size and directivity. We do not HAVE to, but we are FREE to.
In spite all of this real musicians have always been very selective about what influences affect their playing. The possibilities are also tempered by the physicality of their playing. How many "reference" recordings of major concertos have working symphonic players as the soloists?
Enter AI with a huge database of what has been (albeit a very incomplete database). How are the styles across centuries linked? How is the physicalities of the instruments implemented? Do we really need an even blonder Barbie with Botox lips for better embouchure, 100-20-100 hourglass figure for better breath control?
Of course we can maintain that the pop industry could produce ever more cheaply. I am also convinced that "serious" music could benefit from AI but not in ways that we currently consider. Just like the fact that it took the digital recording industry a decade to develop its own new face and voice, AI still has a long way to go. I can reference Googles Bach Doodle project which in my view is HORRIBLE! Experiments to finish various symphonies have also failed by not even sounding like the original composer - in spite of dedicated database training.

We also have an ethical issue when we "colorize" black and white photography or let dead musicians perform notes that they never played. Even more critical is when movies get soundtracks from samples and the musicians that created the samples as basis for AI get no credits or money!

I have recently found something else (the exact opposite): a young lady Alma Deutscher that composes and improvises as if she had been born in the early 18th century. This lady has unbelievable instrumental talent as well as ability to improvise.
https://www.almadeutscher.com/compositions. This is my next best thing.

Happy Easter 2024 to all of you! Here is hoping to get to know more of you personally!

@Trumpetb
Wynton is INFINITELY more sociable than Miles ever was. I think that the feud was totally unnecessary and the result of a huge chip on Miles shoulder.
Miles was one of the greatest influences on the trumpet world and he knew it. There was no room for his ego and another trumpeter in the same room much less the same stage.
To be honest, I prefer ignoring the extensive moronic side of Miles and focus ONLY on his iconic playing. I use those same skills when watching TV these days.