Trumpet Journey

Category: Trumpet Pedagogy

  • Axes of tone: head placement

    —

    by

    Stanley
    in

    There are so many ways to maximize tone. Slotting, vowel placement and equipment, for example. Today we continue our exploration of the different ways we can change tone. I like to think of these ways as “axes.” An axis is a way to imagine a factor that has a range of impact, and we can…

  • Axes of tone: vowel

    —

    by

    Stanley
    in ,

    Over the last two days, we looked at how the “slotting” of a note can greatly affect your timbre on the trumpet. The slotting, as we found out, was manipulated mostly by the openness of the jaw and the tension of the embouchure. Very closely aligned with this notion is the vowel placement we use…

  • Axes of tone: one more idea about slotting

    —

    by

    Stanley
    in

    In yesterday’s post about slotting, we discussed how to get to the “sweet spot” of the slot by doing lip bends on long tones. Today I wanted to introduce a contrasting method for practicing the slot. I don’t know what other trumpeters call this, but, for today, I’ll call it “tuning slide forced-tuning.” In this…

  • Axes of tone: slot

    —

    by

    Stanley
    in

    Finally we are at the point in our exploration of tone that we can consider our body and the way it affects tone. The trumpet contains an air column that wants to vibrate at a given fundamental pitch or any multiple of that pitch (we call these multiples “overtones”). It is pretty mathematical, but there…

  • Tone journey: relax

    —

    by

    Stanley
    in

    I little while ago, I started blogging about improving your tone. I started with trumpet equipment and then moved on to mouthpieces (remember the “clocking” post?). Today, I want to begin exploring ways that we can improve tone with the way we use our body to play. In my opinion, this is where the biggest…

  • My personal thoughts on Bach trumpet mouthpieces

    —

    by

    Stanley
    in , ,

    Yesterday, I introduced Bach mouthpieces, because they have been such industry standards, and in this post I will talk about my personal opinions of Bach mouthpieces. I use a stock Bach 1C for my B-flat, C and E-flat trumpets. I will use a Bach 10 1/2 C with a 117 backbore for piccolo (a Benge…