Steve,

Very generous of you to post these publicly. I hope and think they will be helpful to others on their journey as well.

I’m not qualified as an instructor to give you any instruction; I think you should take Greg up on his offer to Skype with you–I am sure that would be beneficial and a great experience.

But, for what it’s worth, I’ll give you my $.02 on what I observed:

1. I love September and Krypton too. Those are two of my aspirations as well, being able to play those well.

2. You played a combined of 3+ hours…that seems like a lot of time, albeit you did a good job spacing it out, taking breaks, etc.

3. When you do the Mmmmmwwwwwaaaahhhhhooooohhhhhh, you seem to do it away from the mouthpiece and horn and when you do go to the horn straight from it you seemed to go into pedals.

For me, the whole point of Mmmmmmmmmwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaoooooooooohhhhhhhhh is the setup to play the horn with an open throat and engaged aperture corners–close your eyes and feel the aperture corners as you say the Ooooohhhhhhhhhh part of it…….

Then, continue to engage those muscles by tightening and loosening those muscles as you arch your tongue and do harmonic slurs up and down and observe how that feels, sounds, etc.

I recommend you expiriment with that, making slight tweaks to get a more resonant / freer sound and easier/faster harmonic slurs/flexibility.

For me, Harmonic slurs are much of the key to the Coffee Moment and opening up my range and flexibility, etc.

What started it for me, was someone recommending playing octaves (i.e. G on the staff, followed by G above the staff) with minimal movement. That made me stumble onto using my aperture corners to ascend without my realizing it. Then, luckily, I found WindWorks/MTM/Greg, which made senses of what I had stumbled upon and helped me realize what the heck was going on and how to continue to develop.

The video is kind of far away from you and of course audio quality isn’t the best on YouTube, but it sounded a bit to me like you are likely tightening/clamping/choking off a bit as you ascend; it sounds a bit like what I used to experience. It doesn’t sound free. It sounds like you are fighting the horn a bit, which I think your earlier posts alluded to.

I would spend more time on harmonic slur flexibilities but making sure you’re tightening from the corners, not clamping down top to bottom which you may be doing–that’s what I was doing, and I wish I could have all the countless hours of doing harmonic slurs that way back as I wasted my time banging my head against a wall and effectively got nothing out of it.

That’s my $.02 but I recommend you schedule a Skype with Greg, who has personally gone through this before personally and who has instructed a lot of people, many of which are far better players than me. I am simply trying to help with what limited knowledge and experience I have, for what it’s worth. I wish you all the best and every success! Keep it up!