You will play the way you practice, so knowing how to practice well is essential to playing well.
- Practice playing music. Play like you are playing for an audience at all times.
- Practice with a trumpet sound in mind. Listen to good trumpet sounds to emulate before you begin to practice. Hear it, feel it, envision it, and keep that sound in your head; and practice with that quality sound in mind from warm up to completion.
- Practice with prepared lips. Rely on warm up exercises to prepare your lips for practice. This will protect your lips from harm, prepare them for good technique development, and allow you to practice longer.
- Practice with rested lips. If your lips are tired and lose flexibility the day after a practice, you over did it, and hurt your lips. You should practice so that you can play as well or better than the day before. You must determine how much is too much for your own lips, but it is recommended by some to play for one or two minutes then rest one or two minutes. Playing with tired lips conditions you to compensate with bad technique. If you want to play with ease, then practice with ease.
- Practice with a metronome. This allows you to measure your progress in playing a song; it trains you to play with a consistent tempo; it helps you learn difficult rhythms; and it develops your experience of playing and listening to ‘others’.
- Practice music you need to improve on. You will play what you practice. If you want to play high notes, then you must practice playing high notes every day. If you want to play fast slurs and double tonguing, then you must practice doing these things every day. Playing what you already know to do will not improve your playing. You will play what you practice.
- Practice centering your notes. Long tone exercises with a pitch generator, such as a pitch pipe, will help to train your ear and embouchure to center on the correct pitch of each note with a quality sound. You will play with the quality of sound and pitch-centeredness that you practice. From warm up to completion, practice attacking and sustaining each note dead centered.
- Practice at a tempo that allows you success for sound quality, note centeredness, tonguing efficiency, and fingering accuracy. If you play at tempos that are too fast, then you will reinforce mistakes and lengthen the time needed to learn a music piece. Worse yet, to play at a tempo that is too fast to play well, you will train yourself to play with bad technique and poor sound quality. You will play the way you practice. To practice playing with a faster tempo, set your metronome at a tempo that is comfortable to play, and then increase the beat one notch at a time to play comfortably until you reach your tempo goal. Be patient. Impatience will be your worse enemy to achieving success.
- Practice with a smooth air flow. To play with ease and smoothness, you need a comfortable and smooth air flow from your diaphragm through your air column and out your lips. You will play as smoothly as your practice.
- Practice systematically. My personal experience with Harold Mitchell’s method book has been very positive. In this book, there are eighty-two lessons that progress from beginner level to advanced. Following such a book that progresses systematically with a balance of developmental exercises will develop your sound, ease of play, sight reading skills, and range.
Use a good systematic training book for advancing your trumpet skills, while supplementing with other books to focus on a skill that needs more work. A well-rounded training book will provide developmental exercises to help you advance in seven fundamental skills.- Embouchure (jaw setting, mouth, tongue expansion, lips, aperture, mouthpiece position)
- Air flow
- Tone quality (combines embouchure and air flow techniques)
- Lip Flexibility
- Tonguing
- Fingering dexterity
- Range
- Practice with an audio or visual recorder. This will give you immediate feedback for critique and correction to help you improve your sound and technique.
