Hi Jutta, nice to meet you at the Malvern Big band gig the other day. Hope you enjoyed it!

Keep up the good work with Greggs Wind Works.

Cheers

Carl

Thanks for your input Greg – good to know your take on it – seems to make sense to me. Sorry I couldn’t make the live session as I was at a rehearsal – was it recorded/archived?

One more thing – large interval studies might also help train you to do this. The first exercise from Arban pg. 125 is a good place to start – nice easy range and key to start you off but you will have to perform intervals of up to 1.5 octaves (with no kicking!). Play it all slurred to start off with and nice and slow.

Not sure if this will help, but if you lightly grip a large diameter paper straw (say 5mm- 7mm) between the teeth in the centre of your embouchure, do the ahh ooh, then release the breath through the straw – close the eyes, and that should give you a good idea of where the jaw needs to be while playing. I’ve also seen this done with a pencil, but…[Read more]

Hi Luis – Only my opinion, but I don’t think you should try to manipulate the lips to get all the red inside the mouthpiece if they don’t fit. IMO what happens in the centre of the lips between your corners is more important than what’s going on around that. When you do the bluZZ with the lips, make a note of where the lips meet each other and try…[Read more]

Hi Ronald, The funny thing about trumpet playing is that you have a lot of technique and musical knowledge and still have deficiencies in your sound production/playing machine. For me I really have a problem playing consistently above High D/E, even though I can play for hours below those notes – no matter how much I practice any improvements are…[Read more]

Yep, apologies in advance, I shall be playing lead 🙂 – be sure to introduce yourself if you come along. Cheers. Carl

Well spotted! Yes it is – I don’t work for them nowadays but still live in Malvern. Where are you?

Yeah – I think you’re right that it’s not too much of a problem. Some teachers advocate minimal movement of the jaw and I was thinking if I try this the lip corners will have to work more to create shape in the lower register ie. building habits that will feed into my playing in the higher register.

Final vid I promise – but here is a better profile view. Spent a while getting my mic setup this morning so decided to record again!

At the risk of opening up a whole other can of worms here is a video showing movement over the the full range – low F# to high C.

Quick video here – the movement feels a lot bigger than it looks here.

The pivot gets bigger as I descend below C down to F#. If I consciously try and limit the pivot I can still play low but tone and flexibility suffer. It’s this that got me thinking PROCESS and if I should spend time ironing out things at the…[Read more]