Where do you do most of your practicing? Is it in a band room? Do you slave away every day in a practice room? Is most of your time practicing spent in a small room, a big room, a room with drapes and heavy carpet? Where you practice regularly will affect your playing in many ways. I have to admit that my practicing is done most often in a wonderfully designed room. The dimensions are ideal for what I want and it was not an accident that my practice room is as wonderful as I could imagine. I was lucky…

I found this site today and felt compelled to share it with you. In a previous post I covered the importance of being able to read rhythms quickly and accurately. It is my belief that being able to recognize rhythms quickly is the most important area a musician needs to improve his/her sight-reading ability. When I found this site, I knew immediately that I needed to point my readers in that direction. If you want to improve your sight-reading ability, check out this site and let me know what you think of it. Rhythmic Studies

For most of us, the need to play in an ensemble is obvious. During our musical development, we all participated in ensembles, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes because of departmental requirements. Whether in a marching band, a jazz ensemble or a brass quintet, we all had experiences in this area. To most of us, the requirements to participate in a marching band had more to do with entertaining the wealthy alumni than it had to do with a beneficial musical experience. I have to admit, I never cared care for my marching band experience. Playing in chamber ensembles, jazz bands and…

Recently, we have been seeing more and more questions about falls and doits. More specifically, how are they played? Playing doits (ascending effect) and falls (descending effect) are very easy and I will demonstrate an easy way to get the most out of your fall and doit. The secret to an effective fall or doit is in the correct position of your valve and here is an easy way to find that position. 1. Establish the starting pitch and the final pitch for your fall or doit. 2. Place the first finger of your left hand directly in the path…

I have continued to test and evaluate the merits of this approach to better intonation and have some additional information for my readers. I have been playing every day with the ring inserts and have become convinced that the rings help intonation problems and I’m still fine tuning the lengths of each ring to improve my horn even more. Each day I make notes when recognizing undesirable pitch discrepancies and evaluate the value of making length adjustments to each ring insert. If one note is the slightest flat or sharp, I evaluate the benefits of slight adjustments to that note…

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 butt…. and it did. Shortly after posting this video, one of  my current and very kind students suggested that I make a video showing the proper way to clean a trumpet. Thanks Jen€. In an effort to prove my manhood as well as show my limitations, I spent yesterday…

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 purchase study material. An example of this great resource is this- visit 200 fabulous etudes€- AND THEY ARE FREE. One of my favorite etude books was written by Vincent Cichowicz and is called Trumpet Flow Studies. “The material is not as important as the habit of reading new material every…