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 =)