Category: Classical Trumpet
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Let’s talk tone: trumpet brands
Tone is one of the most important aspects of trumpet playing we can consider. Is it a magical phenomenon? I ask that because sometimes a player’s tone seems unreproducible. It can be very hard to imitate very personal and idiosyncratic tones like Clark Terry, for instance. I don’t think that everyone’s ideal classical “voice” on…
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A recording should accomplish these two things
When I graduated from the U.S. Navy recruit training command (a.k.a. “boot camp”) at Great Lakes, Illinois, in 1998, the Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy (John Hagan at the time), gave a speech to the graduates. In the speech, he advised us to take advantage of the educational and financial benefits the Navy…
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Recording project: that’s a wrap
Yesterday was the fourth, and final, recording day with Christian Amonson of Arts Laureate at the helm of the recording booth. We recorded Doug Hedwig’s beautiful three-movement work New Worlds for soprano, trumpet and piano. My CSU colleagues, Tiffany Blake (soprano) and Tim Burns (piano) collaborated on this new piece. In fact, all five works…
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Third day of recording
On the third day of recording, there was only one piece on the docket: James David’s Moonwatcher. A colleague, Jim is the composition professor at CSU. He has written many interesting things for trombone and band and many other genres. For instance, here is his Bright Window with Joseph Alessi on trombone: But Moonwatcher is his…
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Recording, part the deux
Yesterday’s recording session ended with a problem over how to record a computer-accompanied piece by Kevin Olson. This piece has computer cues to advance through the score–the cues help determine what the accompaniment is doing (that, and the trumpet sound). The problem was that my bluetooth pedal was not connecting with my computer, so I…
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Recording, day 1
Yesterday was the first day of recording with Christian Amonson, the owner and founder of Arts Laureate. Christian was a very patient and amazing collaborator on a day where some things were not working great. The piano tuner came late, I was having trouble getting through some passages, and there were major equipment failures (not…