While visiting my doctor today, I noticed the eye chart hanging on his wall and decided to modify it for our use. I hope you all can read it and for all you jazzers out there, just add a lowered 5th and raised 9th and you will be fine.
These posts are written by: Bruce Chidester
“One way” to Clean Your Trumpet
In the preceding post, I featured what I considered to be one of the worst instructional videos I had viewed. This can be very risky but, as one of advanced age, I felt my duty to expose this atrocity. Some times such actions can turn around and bite you on…
The Worst Instructional Video On The Internet
Continuing in my limited series of disturbing videos I have selected this gem. YouTube has an ever increasing library of self help videos which strive to inform our world on various subjects. Many of these are very helpful and in some cases, they can be very destructive as in the…
How I Practice- Playing Etudes
I try to allot time each day for playing new material and because of the unlimited amount of etudes available today, we will never need to be without material. The internet is one source of quality etude material and no one can use the excuse that they can’t afford to…
How I Practice- Finger Flexibility and Coordination Exercises
Clean breaks between notes require fast and coordinated valve action and for that reason you should practice finger or valve exercises daily. I have included a few exercises which will help increase this area of your performance. Playing fast material will hide many fingering faults where slow material will quickly…
How I practice- Lip Slurs for Improved Tone And Flexibility
In our previous post we directed our attention to the chromatic warm-up and this post explains the benefit of lip slurs to improve flexibility as well as improving your tone. The more strength you developed in your embouchure, the more lip slurs will be needed to keep your flexibility in…
How I practice- The Warm-up
The importance of warming up before hard playing cannot be over stated. Just as an athlete stretches, a ball player throws easy at first; the trumpet player is very similar in that a sudden blast of a high note may work for some but the more intelligent of the masses…
How And What I Practice
I have had a few readers ask what they need to practice to be a better player. Without hearing or visiting with these people, it would be impossible to suggesting what might work best for them. The best I can do is to share a typical hour practice session which…
Valve Slide Conversion Rings- The solution to Low D & C# Intonation Adjustments
An Alternate Fix for Low D and C# We all know that low D and its neighboring C# are sharp and we all know that to play in tune, we are told to push either or both the third slide and or the first slide out in order to solve…
How/Why Early School Stage Bands Ruined Many Fine Trumpet Players
Only through a careful look at past history are we able to understand what we do and the reasons we do them. This is especially true when trying to understand mistakes we have made in music education. I will try to explain my thinking as one who was there and…