(Springtime at BTB)

Hello esteemed BTB reader,

From time to time I receive emails from trumpet players wanting to know what a typical practice day looks like. You know, what to work on, length of practice sessions, how many sessions…that kind of thing.

Since people seem interested, BTB’s “RoutineTracker” is where you’ll find what I’m working on and how I’m working on it. Of course, I’m just some guy, and what I practice is not particularly important. Still,  you may enjoy cross-referencing your own routine against another trumpet players.

Here’s “RoutineTracker: Spring 2019.”

Practice Strategies (How I’m Practicing)

Total Daily Practice Time

These days, I am practicing between one hour and one hour and thirty minutes per day. All-in-all, it’s not that much time, but I do feel the progress I’m making is pretty good*.

*When I first moved to Los Angeles and called up Charley Davis to schedule a trumpet lesson, he asked me how much I practiced. I replied, ‘between an hour and a half to two hours a day.’ He responded excitedly, ‘and you want to be a professional trumpet player?!?!’ Hahaha.

Length of Sessions: Part Un

The practicing is split up into chunks that are a maximum of ten minutes in length. I use the timer, and at the end of each ten minute chunk, stop playing – and thinking – about that exercise completely. At that point, it’s either time for a break or time to switch to a completely different playing task. It seems to be a good way to keep the chops flexible while staying mentally engaged.

I stole this technique from Jens Lindemann, tried it a few years back, and eventually quit. Back then, the timer stressed me out. It felt like there was too much to do and I was literally watching time slip away before my eyes. This time around, however, I met that psychic mumbo-jumbo with a hefty dose of the Skill of Chill.

The Skill of Chill

If you’re new here, the Skill of Chill is a way to acknowledge and condition the mental and emotional responses associated with trumpet playing. It’s the Art of Practice. Effortless Mastery. Fancier people have been known to call it ‘Neuro-Associative Conditioning.’ Even, ‘Utilization Behavior.’ BTB calls it ‘The Skill of Chill’ and you can call it whatever the hell you want.

Getting your trumpet neurons to fire in synchronicity with the chillfulness of the universe is simple. When you notice yourself becoming frustrated, anxious and impatient, that’s your cue to set the horn down and relax a bit. Continue on by moving just a little bit more slowly. It’s great way to learn how to deal with performance anxiety – since that’s literally what you’re doing a couple of hundred times per day.

You’ll soon find there is plenty of opportunity to practice the Skill of Chill. I can’t honestly say it’s helped me play better than anybody else, but it can make the monotony of practice time more fun and therapeutic.

Length of Sessions: Part Deux

I usually string the ten minute chunks together in two main sessions during the day (baby nap time), but any breakdown is good. I find that after 40 minutes of playing the chops need a break. Defining maximums like this is a good tactic if you’re one to shoot a dead horse.

Another useful maximum is limiting the number of ten-minute chunks dedicated to a single drill, per day. I did that with the pedal tone routine outlined below. When starting out, I was having a lot of trouble playing in the pedal register. By limiting myself to four, ten-minute sessions per day, it was easier to stick it out.

Capping practice like this also acts as a good way to gauge improvement. In the beginning, I sucked. Four months later, I’m getting through twice the material in half the time. That means, even on my worst days, I’m still 400% better than I used to be!*

*Now that’s the Skill of Chill!

Playing ‘Set-Up’

Here are the things I check just about every time I play. You don’t have to do any of them, but having a ‘set-up’ has been helpful for me in developing a line of perspective and some consistency.

1. Before picking up horn, float from the crown of the head (Alexander Technique). Let the tongue and hands relax a bit (I don’t do this every time, but I’m always better off for it when I do).
2. Place horn to chops and feel top and bottom lip touching inside the rim of the mouthpiece before playing.
3. Check in on the teeth aperture (more below).
4. Play, then set the horn down.
5. Begin again at step #1

Developing a consistent approach to the horn can completely eliminate the need to endlessly ‘warm-up’ in hopes of some special feeling. 

Tracker Contents (What I’m Practicing)

General Approach to Routine Development

As a trumpet player, I have spent many years trying different things, reading about how trumpet playing should be, and generally overwhelming and confusing myself. Now here I go plugging this book again, but the practice strategy outline in Effortless Mastery, to me, makes the most sense for the most people.

Written from the perspective of a jazz improviser, author Kenny Werner suggests a basic practice routine of only three exercises; one for melody, one for harmony, and one for rhythm. You alternate back and forth between the drills, sticking with each until you can play it perfectly, without thought, every time. Once you have achieved that, you pick another exercise for that category and keep the process going until all of your playing is on par with any one of the licks you mastered along the way.

Following these guidelines, it doesn’t matter how much you practice in a day. It doesn’t even matter if you practice every day. What matters is that you keep practicing the same stuff until you are nailing it, every time – and then you learn something new.

This kind of practice really works – as long as you can stick to it. Because, let’s face it, there is oh so much to do, and yet so little time.

 

(No wonder he’s a grouch. *&%#^$-#_@&-er lives in a trash-can and plays the trumpet!)

However, what I am learning more and more each day is that if you pick an exercise and stick with it, you can learn pretty much everything you need to know about this goddamn instrument. That said, what follows is my most reduced routine to date. I occasionally try other things, but as of writing this, I am committed to only these three exercises.

Pedal Tone Routine

This past winter I saw a video of trumpeter Alex Sipiagin demonstrating his pedal tone warm-up routine. It really struck a chord with me and I started doing it every day.

The basic routine is to start on a C in the staff and play a one octave C major arpeggio down to the root, holding the bottom note for as long as is comfortable*. Rather than trying to get a big, beautiful low note, the goal is to aim to keep the chops in the same position as the C one octave higher.

*Like this.

From there, you simply continue down chromatically until you reach pedal C. Again, the point being to keep the chops/aperture the same(ish) as they are on the middle C. Once you can do that, you start connecting the bottom note of each arpeggio back up to the starting notes. Eventually, the aim is to connect two octaves down and up, and finally three.

As you go further into the ‘basement’ range of the trumpet, the chops and teeth tend to want to open up. Practicing to where you can play those notes with the same ‘closeness’ can teach you a lot about the embouchure and how you use your air. I have a long way to go with these but can say that this exercise is helping me to become a better trumpet player. I’m still not playing on the same chops as my ‘meat and potatoes’ setting, but it’s getting closer and closer as the days go by. I love it.

Major Diatonic Triads

Awhile back I made a YouTube video called “I Am Overwhelmed By My Practice Routine.” In that video, I commented on the fact that I wanted to learn multiple patterns, and eventually had to cut all of them but one.

One of those patterns was practicing the diatonic triads from the major scale – and they are back in full-force. My buddy Mike, the jazziest of the jazzy, told me to get comfortable with them because ‘they work.’ And they do. But remember, there might not be anything special about this particular pattern other than I like it, and I do it.

Here it is.

I started practicing these half-way through January, and for the following month and a half did them every other day or so. At that time I also had three other patterns I was working on. Slowly, I began eliminating the others, and the triads remain as a daily practice.

As far as how I work through them, I originally picked a tempo that I could play through each key without thinking too much – then slowly bumped the metronome up from there. A few times, I hit a technical ‘wall’ and decided to downgrade to a slower tempo and rebuild from where playing was comfortable.

I start on the highest key, and work my way down chromatically until I get to the bottom of the horn. For the first few months I maxed out the high range at G Major, making the highest note a high D. After two months practice, I could play through the pattern up to high D while keeping the teeth aperture consistent (more below). After the second week of March I added G# and A Major to the mix, making the highest note a high E. Just one whole-step has made a world of difference in working my jaw muscles, but things are looking up. I anticipate hanging at A Major for awhile.

Here are some bulleted tips that you can use to help you learn your scales.

1. Each key gets as long as it needs.
2. Work for only ten minutes at a time.
3. Consider capping your daily time commitment for help in the psychology department.

BTB’s Range Builder

If you don’t already have BTB’s Range Builder PDF, you can get that HERE.

Basically, I’ve gone back to the same range building routine I used in high school to get my high chops together. The thing is, this time, I’m applying them more intelligently, whereas back then I just tried to play as high as I could every day.

Now, for all of the things that I suck at on the trumpet, I’ve got pretty good endurance in the upper register. And what follows is my general approach to learning how to play up there more easily. Essentially, the idea is to use your playing ‘form’ as a governor, and slowly build up what you can within those limitations.

For example, if you have a mouthpiece pressure problem, you slowly build up what you can do without that excess pressure – even if it means playing only low C’s for a couple of weeks. When you learn to play that note comfortably, you add another and stay there until the new note feels consistently comfortable. The general concept is to develop your playing range within the confines of your best playing habits. Currently for me, that means paying attention to the alignment and size of the teeth aperture. I’ve recently found a setting that seems to improve my overall control, and am now returning to the range building drills to expand my range using that set.

Occasionally taking a few steps back to work directly on form, rather than pushing your limits, I believe can help you become a more efficient trumpet player. It is the best way I know to get comfortable in the upper register. So if you find a tweak to your approach that improves your playing, find where you can maintain that form and build from there.

I’ve been back at it since the beginning of the year, and started by finding a very slow tempo that I could comfortably move back and forth between the G and A right on top of the staff. Here in April, I’m consistency getting high C’s, and occasionally high D’s with the teeth aperture set. Once I got to high C, I started slowly bumping up the metronome. I practice the range builders every other day, in two ten-minute sessions, freely moving up and down through the ‘keys.’

Some days are better than others, and occasionally the jaw will not cooperate. If that means not playing higher than a G on top of the staff for the day, whatever.

It really works.

Daily Practice Time Breakdown

You bet your ass I’m gonna show you a fancy graph of a typical weeks practice time (in minutes).

Fancy Graph Practice Breakdown (In Minutes)

1. Bottom Blue – Pedal Routine
2. Red – Major Diatonic Triads
3. Green – Range Builder
4. Purple – Slow Improvising w/ A Metronome
5. Top Blue – I did ten minutes of lip-slurs one day, just for fun.

Big Picture

That’s pretty much the gist of it. Of course, from time to time, I have been know to jazz it up a bit after a days practice and really let it rip. However, the above material is what I’m sticking to in a phase of life where time is tight and a tiny baby is trying to kill me.

(He will destroy BTB)

Here’s A Recap:

1. Set the horn down a lot.
2. Severely limit the amount of material practiced.
3. Go back and forth between exercises every ten minutes.
4. Take a break after one, two, three or four ten-minute sessions.
5. Make friends with the metronome.

Thank you for taking the time to read,

James

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