Hi all trumpet players,

Let’s introduce myself first, which I did not do in my first question: About three months ago I found trumpet when digging through the moving goods, untouched for about 40 years. This reminded me of a teacher saying ‘Do not press with your lips’ without explaining how to do that. Nowadays, you simply find such answers on the internet. So, I found and started with this course, with a single challenge: ‘play a high E without lip pressing’. I can say now, starting from hardly able to bring forward any note, this course helped me achieving this goal in a straightforward manner. My new challenge is now: ‘playing the high E with high confidence’, with the help from the lessons at premium level.

I experimented a lot with a tuner and I installed an audio spectrum analyzer app on my phone as tools to provide direct feedback while playing. The tuner was useful for forcing to play centered notes, while the spectrum analyzer made it easy to remove distortions in the sound, visible in the spectrum (FFT Plot, log-scale).

One of the main struggles was getting started with doing the slurs time controlled enforced by the rhythm of a metronome. After a few weeks of making no progress, while focusing on observing unnecessary exertion/engagement or manipulation as instructed, I discovered by using a tuner that I was slurring from D to F, instead of from C# to F#. I called this ‘lazy slurring’. I strongly believe that this is caused by my attempts to minimize any kind of exertion. Slurring from D to F does not require any shape change as the transition happens spontaneous without any exertion but comes with a disadvantage that it is not time controlled. Using a tuner to ensure slurring from C# to F# enabled me to develop an awareness of shape change. Awareness of the shape change is probably my basis of getting rid of the bad habit of lip pressing. It seems that it worked for me.

Does my idea of ‘lazy slurring’ hold? I wonder if others have comparable or different experiences. One of my latest lessons was the lesson devoted to lip bending. I am now trying to increase my range of lip bending as instructed. It is still difficult to believe that this should be possible.