Archive for the ‘In My Humble Opinion’ Category
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20
Nov
2009
Getting through the “bad trumpet days”…
A fellow trumpeter asked me the following question earlier today:
Those days when you can never seem to get a clean note out, and your lips just feel like they have no strength at all. They happen every once in a while. Any advice on stopping them fast?
Here was my answer:
Like I said, I used to hate those weeks, but they’re caused by a combination of physical and psychological factors and I’ve learned a few tricks to help myself get back on track. The short answer is, take a break from all exercises, just play songs and pieces you love to play because you know you sound good when you’re playing them. If you can, do this in a room with a lot of reverb. Another possibility is a problem with your breathing, so you might try to pay special attention to that and make sure you’re taking deep, yet comfortable and relaxed breaths. (As the saying goes: “inhale to expand, don’t expand to inhale”) You could also take a day or two away from the horn. There’s a chance you’re over-practicing and just need a rest. (I remember you had that audition recently). The long answer is…..
In one of my first lessons with him, my last teacher (Vincent Penzarella) told me that playing the trumpet is 90% mental focus on the music, 9% breath control, and 1% embouchure control. When I started studying with him, my embouchure was a mess, I didn’t know how to breath properly, but most importantly, I wasn’t really thinking about music when I was playing the trumpet. I knew he studied with Arnold Jacobs, so I was expecting him to get into the breathing stuff early on. It took him a few months. In our first lessons, he had me doing a lot of basic things like major/minor scales & long tones. I was a senior at MSM, so it was a bit of a blow to the ego, but I was pretty open to his ideas since I’d heard so many good things from his other students. The important component he added to these seemingly simple exercise was his insistence that I mentally sing whatever I play while playing. Actually, he went a step further and always told me to “sing on the trumpet, don’t play.” If I was working on major scales, I would have to sing every single note in my mind while playing them. The feeling on my lips and what came out of the bell of the trumpet weren’t important, what I heard in my mind was. For long tones, he told me to subdivide the notes in my mind, but also hear myself playing each note in the context of a full orchestral brass section playing that note in surrounding octaves. Long tones quickly became something that wouldn’t be practical to work on while watching TV.
After a few months of this, we started working on breathing exercises. Penzarella always stressed the importance of hearing the music in my mind while working on breathing, so those feelings of effortlessness would transfer to the trumpet. The breathing exercises would be useless for trumpet playing if they were learned outside of a musical context. A few months later, we tried to fix my embouchure, but I was having trouble making the adjustment because I was too attached to how the mouthpiece felt on my lips after years of playing and the new embouchure felt uncomfortable.
I didn’t correct my embouchure until after I completed my Masters degree at MSM. Actually, the correction didn’t happen until about a year after I graduated. It was also a sort of accidental process that I didn’t understand till a few months had passed. I was a little disorientated and unmotivated after graduation. Practicing occasionally, I once went about 10 days without even touching my trumpet. When I picked it up again, I thought I would try the corrected embouchure Mr. Penzarella showed me. Because I had enough time away from the horn, I had “forgotten” the old embouchure enough to feel more comfortable with the new setup. I knew I would have to build up strength again, so I gradually increased my playing time everyday, but I started by only playing pieces I enjoyed, pieces I knew well, and new music that was easy to read through. After a few months, the new embouchure felt completely natural and now I can’t even imagine going back to the way I used to play. There’s no way I could’ve played the intervals in that Bach Violin partita movement with the old embouchure and I wouldn’t have been able to make it through the Hindemith at the tempo I recorded at. These days, the room I do all my practicing in is small, but it doesn’t really matter, because I’m more concerned with the clarity of the music in my mind when I’m practicing.
The point of all of that was to share my little epiphany about just how much our state of mind can effect our playing. Have you noticed how endurance seems almost unlimited when playing in a church or large hall with a lot of reverb, but playing in a small stuffy room seems to bring fatigue quickly? Creating a beautiful sound on the trumpet does require practice on the instrument, but it also requires a lot of imagination and focus. That comes naturally to a few fortunate ones, but a lot of us need to consciously stayed engaged with the task at hand, or things don’t sound too great.
Finally, I suggested the possibility of taking some time off and just listening to some good music because frustration can be a distraction from the music, and catalyst for tension in the body, which restricts your airflow, which makes playing more taxing for the embouchure, which will frustrate you, which can distract you from the music…..well, you get the idea 
Hope that helps =)
23
May
2009
TrumpetMaster.com
A couple days ago I received a message on Twitter from trumpeter Dan Gosling. Besides being a trumpet player and teacher for over 20 years, Dan is also the creator of ChopSaver®, a special lip balm he created specifically for brass players. Dan was writing to inform me that he had posted a link to the YouTube video for the 261 Days campaign on a few trumpet enthusiast sites to help spread the word. I thanked him because I know that what we’re trying to do gains more momentum whenever someone new believes in the idea enough to spread the word for us. I noticed that my website had a few visitors who were referred from one of those trumpet sites, so I was curious to see what the referring page looked like. After the reading through the three pages of comments about the video, it was apparent that some people on the site had some very important questions. So….
To “Rowuk” on TrumpetMaster.com,
I’m sorry you lost your mother to cancer. I’ve never lost anyone close to me, so I’m always at a loss for words when speaking with people who have, but I can definitely understand why reading the words “publicity stunt” and “donation to cancer research” on the same page would be nothing less than infuriating to you. In my efforts to attract the attention of the masses, I lacked the foresight and sensitivity to realize the effect my words could have on those who had suffered because of cancer. For that error in judgement, I offer my deepest apologies. Your donation to the bone marrow bank is beyond commendable. It’s a beautiful thing to know that there’s a girl somewhere in Canada who has fully recovered from leukemia since someone living thousands of miles away was inspired to improve the lives of others because of a loss he suffered. You turned the tragedy of your mom’s passing into the gift of health and longer life for someone you’ve never even met 
To everyone else:
First of all, Rowuk is right, please donate blood or register with a bone marrow bank if you can. It’s definitely a more immediate solution than what I’m doing. As for the discussion about my fundraising efforts, here are my thoughts on that matter.
I’ve noticed the excerpts from my “publicity stunt” paragraph are the most quoted on the thread that started with Dan Gosling’s posting of my YouTube video. I wrote most of the text on www.261days.com a couple days after Ashton Kutcher was on the news for donating 10,000 mosquito nets to the fight against malaria after he beat CNN to 1,000,000 followers on Twitter. If any of you are annoyed by what I’m doing, think about how annoyed you could be by a multimillionaire being praised for donating $100,000. That’s what lead to the arrogant language in my original statement. At the time, I also wanted to be clear that this was a marketing ploy to contrast Ashton’s basking in the country’s admiration of his “philanthropy” after he donated a relatively small percentage of his wealth.
The YouTube video is meant to generate excitement for the campaign. It’s short, and fast moving because most people don’t seem have the time or patience to read all the text on www.261days.com . The video something that people can easily send to their friends and family. It also demonstrates how 1,000,000 sales are possible in 261 days, even for an unknown artist. Susan Boyle’s YouTube video was viewed over 100,000,000 times in about a week. If she had a single for sale on iTunes and just 1% of the people who watched that video bought that track, she’d have sold 1,000,000 tracks in a week. For many people, the combination of an animated explanation of exponential growth set to the soundtrack of a familiar but challenging piece of music is enough to convince them to buy the album. For anyone who is curious to hear clips of all the selections on the album, samples are available on iTunes, my Facebook music page, MySpace profile and website. For those who need more detailed information about my fundraising plans, there’s the text on www.261days.com . I’ve come to understand that there are still a few issues to address, so I hope to address them here.
My original plan was to donate $1,000,000 dollars if I sold 1,000,000 albums, but then I realised $1,000,000 wasn’t enough. The problem with increasing the donation was accounting for the variable pricing of the album. The 7 track album costs as low as $6.93 CAD on iTunes Canada. After Apple and my distributor take their percentage of that amount, I’m left with $4.37. The physical CD sells for as high $10.00 USD. At the current exchange rate, that’s $11.19. After subtracting the money I lose on packaging and the cost of manufacturing each CD, I’m left with a around $5 per CD sold. My reason for choosing the lowest possible profit amount is tied to taxation, Since I don’t believe in claiming charitable donations on my tax return, I have to account for paying income tax on the album sales. The federal income tax rate for Canadians earning more than $126,264 is 29%. After that and Ontario’s provincial tax of 11%, about $2.75 million would remain. At the time, $2,000,000 seemed like the easiest number for people to remember, but after reading my own breakdown of the numbers here, I’ll admit $2,500,000 would have worked just as well. I’m also encouraging people to buy the album on iTunes because we get the benefit of a third party accounting department without spending an extra cent on administrative costs. By posting the video on YouTube and the announcement on a page that is cached by search engines, there’s a public record of my statements. That combined with the sales reports from Apple, PayPal, HMV, Amazon and Indiepool hold me accountable to fulfill my promise when 1,000,000 albums are sold.
Some people are troubled by the omission of any information about how the money will be spent if I don’t reach my goal of 1,000,000. I agree this is a detail that will make some suspicious. I didn’t want to discuss the possibility of failure in the initial announcement because I wanted people to know I believe this will work. If October 23rd arrives and the final tally is something as low as 100,000, or even 10,000, I’ll still be able to afford to give half the money away, so I promise I will, but like I said, why should we settle for something so low when it really could just take 2 people and 20 days to reach our true goal of 1,000,000?
Just to clarify things, I am NOT affiliated with the Canadian Cancer Society in any way whatsoever. I did contact them before I posted the announcement to let them know what I was doing first hand. I didn’t ask for an endorsement or any promotion from them, I just wanted to let them know my intentions were sincere, so if they heard about my efforts from someone else, they wouldn’t think I was trying to scam anyone by using their name. I posted a link to the Canadian Cancer Society’s website so people could learn about that organization. I chose the Canadian Cancer Society because I didn’t want be ambiguous about WHERE the money was going and they seemed like the most appropriate group to handle a donation to fund cancer research.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I’ve had a change of heart since I posted that initial announcement. While I’ll never deny that this STARTED as something that was ultimately about selling my first album, something changed after the first person bought the album after reading about the $2,000,000 donation. I panicked a little. I realized if this was too much of a challenge, I would have to refund that person’s money immediately and explain to him that I was giving up before I really started. Something about that didn’t seem right. I had a choice between giving into my fear of failure, or summoning the determination and resourcefulness I would need to make this happen because proving it’s possible would really change how people looked at wealth and what it means to be generous. To my harshest critics, I hope I’ve proved the legitimacy and sincerity of my intentions to you. While your voices are strong in opposition, they could be even stronger in support.
Suresh S.
–iii-<
25
Apr
2009
A little video action to help with the cause….
I always tell people that there’s really no point in having a blog if you don’t update it frequently. It looks like I have become what I have mocked, haha! Sorry about that. It’s been a hectic week with the launch of the 261 Days campaign. Our slogan has become “2 people, 20 days“, so I felt I had to prove it was possible to sell 2 albums a day by just getting complete strangers to listen to it online. I’m happy to say I’ve met that daily average since last Friday even though 4 of those days were before I decided to turn the album sales into a fundraiser for Cancer Research. I noticed my recording of the Hindemith Trumpet Sonata is now the 3rd most popular recording of that piece on iTunes and the album was just released in February. Thanks for helping me climb the obscure classical trumpet charts everyone!
Anyways, I know there are going to be a lot of people out there who are expecting this to fail because it’s “unrealistic”. I’d like to remind all of them that just about everything that has made a difference in the world was completely unexpected. Think about how things would change if we pulled this off. We’ll prove that a person can give away MORE than they earn and still be ok. I remember “admitting” this was a publicity stunt in my own announcement, but something changed when I posted that very announcement on my site and emailed the Canadian Cancer Society on Tuesday night. I realised I couldn’t really take this back. If I backed out, everyone who bought the album since that announcement would feel cheated. I realised that this really is a huge responsibility now. That’s one of the reasons I spent most of Thursday and Friday getting that video ad together to post on YouTube. It’s funny how something that only lasts a minute can take so many hours of work, but I’m glad I did because in a way, it proves whats possible when we’re motivated and believe in something. Optimism and confidence are contagious! If you haven’t bought the album yet, please visit my website and check it out. If you already have a copy in your library, I thank you for your support and ask that you tell your family, friends, and co-workers about the music and how I’d like to spend the money from the album sales. I think sending people to the new YouTube video (the one at the beginning of this post) is the best way to do that. Here’s the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iNA_730Y5Y
See you guys at $2,000,000
Suresh
–iii-<
18
Aug
2007
Have we become too specialized?
I was listening to some descriptive physics lectures at UC Berkeley by Dr. Richard Muller today(thanks to the free educational section on the iTunes store). After I got past Dr. Muller’s arrogant tone, I found the first one pretty interesting. He was talking about the advantages and disadvantages of hydrogen as fuel source. I was listening to the second lecture, when he said something that sounded so wrong, I had to rewind and listen to it again. Read the rest of this entry »
8
Dec
2006
Confused and venting…..
I was watching this video of one of Bill O’Reilly’s appearances on the Late Show with David Letterman, and at one point, Letterman asks O’Reilly if he thinks things are better off in Iraq now than they were before the US invasion. O’Reilly’s response?
“it’s a tie”
I know there are people who think that the Iraqi people are better off now because Read the rest of this entry »
