Advanced Interval Studies

The market is inundated with educational material, all guaranteed to improve your trumpet playing ability. And here’s one more to consider.

Through many decades of teaching and practicing myself, there have been many methods, etudes and exercises which have been helpful to me and my students.

Previous exercises on interval study have centered around the melodic approach to interval study which I feel is not the most effective direction. The reason I took a different approach was to isolate the intervals and in doing so, make the practice much more difficult and at the same time create a more productive technique to improve accuracy in approaching the less used intervals.

There is nothing melodic about my exercises for using the melodic approach makes it easier to produce the correct pitch. In my exercises the player must rely on the eye more than the ear to anticipate the correct pitch.

I think that you will find the exercises toward the middle of my exercise to be much more challenging than the early examples. I think that you will find examples at the end will have increased substantially in difficulty and thus proving my belief that melodic exercises are much easier and thus less productive.

As you practice these exercises, remember to take frequent, short breaks to let the blood back into your lips.

An effective way to make sure that this happens is to play each exercise and immediately finger through the same exercise without making contact with the mouthpiece. Fingering each example and following it with your eyes will help to reduce lip fatigue and still build visual recognition of each interval which you have just played.

This 12-page collection of exercises can be purchased from the following site….

Advanced Interval Studies

Bruce was a member of the faculty at the University of Northern Iowa, School of Music in Cedar Falls from 1969 until his retirement in 1999. He has performed with many well-known entertainers such as Bob Hope, Jim Nabors, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, Anita Bryant, Carman Cavalara, Victor Borgie, the Four Freshman, Blackstone the Magician, Bobby Vinton and John Davidson.