music

10 Years of Trumpet Learning: Tips for Beginners

October 24, 2023 music 1 comment

I realised recently that I embarked on my journey to learn playing the trumpet a decade ago in September 2013. At the time, it was a very spontaneous idea, and I had no idea how hard it would be on the one hand, and how much I enjoy playing and learning the instrument. For the anniversary, I decided to treat myself to a new trumpet (hopefully to last longer than ten years!) Coincidentally, I stumbled upon a Craigslist ad from a parent seeking a trumpet for their child. In the spirit of sharing (and also because I had collected quite a few) I decided to give one of my trumpets away. Yesterday, that parent reached out to me for advice on how to help their child learn to play. In response, I’ve compiled some of my own experiences and insights to assist aspiring trumpet players.

The trumpet is a unique and challenging instrument. Unlike musicians playing other instruments, I have found professional trumpet players to express their unique frustrations and the experience of being constantly challenged. This difficulty stems from the fact that much of the technique required to play the trumpet is hidden inside your mouth. Initially, no one can fully explain how to make the necessary adjustments, and even if they could, you might not have the muscle control to implement them. And then, even if you do have the technique, when you happen to make a mistake it is going to be quite obvious to the listeners, because of the volume of the instrument. Patience is key, and it’s important to understand that it may take a considerable amount of time, possibly even a year, before you can produce pleasant or enjoyable sounds. Don’t get discouraged by mistakes or slow progress – enjoy the journey and celebrate every small improvement. I was happy to not have any timeframe or goal to meet — I just liked the challenge and the (small if not tiny) progress that I was making. I still think it is one of the hardest things I have undertaken.

Before even thinking about the technicalities of playing, I think it’s valuable for any trumpet player to know how to disassemble and assemble their instrument. It is also not particularly difficult, and the first step to clean it from the inside. You can find helpful tutorials on YouTube for this purpose, here is one example.

While self-learning is possible, finding a qualified teacher is highly recommended. A teacher offers valuable corrections and guidance, inspiring and encouraging you throughout your journey. I had weekly one hour lessons. (Although many beginner students do half hour lessons.) I found my (three) teachers through twitter, online search and a party. I practise around 15 – 30 minutes daily (except weekends).

The Internet is a treasure trove of resources for aspiring trumpet players. A simple Google search for “trumpet tutorial”, “how to begin playing trumpet”, or related keywords and phrases will yield a wealth of advice, lessons, and tips to suit your specific needs. Same for searching Youtube. I trust you can adapt your search terms as needed. Also, you can do an image search for scores (example, Bach Minuet Trumpet), or search for “trumpet – tune – pdf”. (example, Amazing Grace Trumpet PDF). One of the first things you may find immiediately useful are fingering charts. With the Internet, it has never been easier to learn. I find YouTube so useful I am paying for a Premium membership, in order to avoid the interruptions by ads. This also comes with YouTube music.

The first practice technique that I highly recommend is focusing on long tones. These exercises help build your embouchure, tone, and breath control. You can find a helpful tutorials on long tone exercises on YouTube, here is one example.

I really like the Second Clarke Flow Study. You can access the sheet music online, and watch recordings on YouTube. The Clarke flow studies are versatile and can be practiced starting from any note, from the low G below the staff to the high G above it. A beginner may find it easier to start on the C – F notes (32 – 37 in that PDF).

With the major scales and 3 different kinds of minor scales, you can easily spend 5 minutes a day and still take quite a while to be able to play all of them by heart. I have actually written them up myself. The thing about scales is that many melodies will have shorter or longer sections of ascending or descending notes, so it is good to be familiar. Also, even the simple scales are challenging enough — if not, just try playing faster. And it is good to be comfortable with different key signatures. (So Long Tones, Clark Flow and Scales would easily make up a good first 10 minutes of a daily practise session).

In the beginning producing a good sound will be more difficult than anything else; still it will be good to play with a metronome just to get used to it. There’s many mobile apps if you want to spare the expense. So turn it on for long tones, the flow studies and scales.

Of course, there are many other exercises, like lip slurs, articulation exercises, or sight-reading practice. But I wanted to highlight these as they seem to me to be good for beginners and advanced players alike. Happy playing!

Musical scales with inline flats and sharps

October 19, 2019 music, systems No comments

I have started to learn playing scales on the trumpet. Mostly because it should be helpful for playing faster runs, and also for improvising.

When I play from scores with the usual presentation of scales, I find it difficult from time to time to make out whether the following note is sharp or flat. This is because that is usually indicated at the beginning of the line, in the key signature. So I have to look left, count lines, etc.

So I have prepared scores where the flats and sharps are written immediately in front of each note. There are usually no “cancelling” naturals, because it is taken for granted that if there is no flat or sharp, the next note is meant to be played natural.

To begin I started with the 4 main scales: major, natural minor, harmonic minor and melodic minor.

Of course, there is also value in learning the key signatures, and the positions of the half-tone-steps, and the whole system that holds these scales together. But I think that can be separated, and playing trumpet, and playing these scales in particular, is already hard enough.

I used the free musescore program to create these files. It works really well, and the result looks very good! WordPress doesn’t like me to upload the musescore (mscz) files of the scores – so please email me if you’d like to have a copy.

Here is a list with clickable links for the PDF files. Below are the scores as images, also clickable:

Major Scales
Major Scales
Natural Minor Scales
Harmonic Minor Scales
Harmonic Minor Scales
Melodic Minor Scales
Melodic Minor Scales

Testing the Soundcloud Player: On Copying and Owning

August 17, 2016 music No comments

Wanted to do a little test for the Soundcloud player (in a WordPress blog).

Here’s a tune I put together 4 years ago.

I had made an earlier version where it says, the piece is:

based on the essay “On Copying and Owning” by Chris Drost at drostie.org/on_copying.html. With sounds from LMMS and beat similar to www.home.no/mlinux/us-lmms.txt (Mikkel Meinike Nielsen). Text-to-speech by MARYTTS, mary.dfki.de; the voice is cmu-slt-hsmm (Note: Chris Drost updated his essay in the mean time; I liked the original!)

Three notes:

  • The MARY text-to-speech system was a lot of fun to work with (they have an online demo).
  • The theme of the song is still totally relevant.
  • The Chris Drost (drostie.org) website is no longer available (Summer 2016).

The pieces I play/played on the piano

December 9, 2013 music No comments

A friend asked about the pieces I play on the piano. I thought, why not just post the list to my blog?

So here’s a couple of Youtube links. I found it quite interesting to explore different piano versions of the same piece. Most of these are actually not written for piano originally.

Enjoy. There’s no particular order. None of these links show me playing. I can’t play all of them any more either, nor did I play all entirely, and for some not much at all.

Please leave suggestions for new pieces in a comment below, if you have.

La Cumparsita: Piano Lesson with Linda Lee Thomas

March 19, 2010 music No comments

Last fall I practiced Nocturne No 9/2 by Chopin on the piano (on youtube: Horowitz, Rubinstein, Shebanova, Yundi Li). I found it pretty difficult, because it’s very delicate, and for me there was a lot more stretching, and the left hand moves a lot farther distances than in the Moonlight Sonata). The right hand needs to play louder than the left hand and the pedal is absolutely necessary.

“Discovering” La Cumparsita

I managed to play it reasonably well by the time we had our piano party, after which I wasn’t sure which piece to practice next. I looked through some score books that I discovered in my bookshelf. I could recognize most titles, and tried them out and nothing seemed appealing, when I got to a piece titled La Cumparsita. I didn’t know it, so I went over to trusty youtube, searched for “La Cumparsita piano“, and came across a lot of nice versions, but I found this rendition by Alberto Dogliotti just amazing. Isn’t that wonderful?

Little bit of background

La Cumparsita is originally not a piano piece. From wikipedia:… it was written by Gerardo Matos Rodríguez, an Uruguayan musician, in 1917. It is among the most famous and recognizable tango songs of all time. The title translates as “The little parade” and the original lyrics begin: “The little parade of endless miseries…” It was named cultural and popular anthem of Uruguay. (There are some more links further down)

Starting to practice

So I tried going through the scores that I had. They didn’t come out anything like what I found on youtube. I went to a music store, to buy scores, but they had none (to my surprise). So I searched the internet for other scores, and found this one. I practiced that for a while but didn’t find it too satisfying.

Pointed to Linda Lee Thomas

I mentioned my latest ambition to my friend Chris Startup, a professional Jazz Saxophone player. He recommended I should ask Linda Lee Thomas for help.I called her up and left a message and got no reply. So I thought of looking her up on the Internet. Oh my, she is the principal pianist for the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. I mean I’m really not that good of a player. I called a subscriber of the Vancouver tango mailing list, Gabriela Rojo, if she knows someone and she also recommended Linda. Ok well, I called again. She was very encouraging! I told her I am kind of stuck because I have no scores, and she said that’s right, I need to “make something up”. She would be away to Argentina, the heart of Tango, until the beginning of March. We could meet after she returns.

“Making something up”

So ok, I tried to make something up. I simply changed the left hand from the scores that I had: just repeat the whole chord + the octave (in the scores the chord is broken up) in quarter notes, and at the last 8th play a half note down. I thought that sounds like tango, and it took me quite a while to complete that for the whole piece. I also modulated the volume a little bit (in fact it gets quite loud). Sorry, I don’t have a recording. Its really quite simple. Still it is enjoyable; for example, I heared my family humming the tune after my playing. On the other hand it is far from what I found on Youtube;  they do a lot more with the left hand, but I couldn’t figure out what it is.

The Lesson

So I thought that was a good basis for a lesson with Linda; I called her up at the beginning of the week, and we arranged to meet today! My hope was to find out what happens in the left hand. From what I could tell it was playing a few bass notes, then contributing to the melody, breaking up the chords into much less notes than my scores had, and how I was playing it.

So now let me explain what I learned at this lesson.

I started to play what I had put together. I didn’t make too many mistakes, still she praised me for getting this far by myself. She said I must have a good ear. I guess I cannot tell, but maybe that helps. However, she said the way I played it is the “American” way, as opposed to the “Argentine” way, the American way being associated with Ballroom dancing, which is looked down upon in the Latin tango world. Hey, that makes sense. I guess I was after that Argentinian way.

So she sat down and played the Argentinian way: yes that is great, that is what I want to learn. How to get there? I really need to practice a phrase over and over again, so on the spot I find it difficult to duplicate. So she reduced it to a lot less notes in the left hand. Let’s just break up the chord, play its notes as individual quarter notes, but then syncopate the first note – play it a little earlier.

Ok, I think I got that. Now we made it even more simpler: play the root note of the chord, and then the same note an octave higher. With the melody in the right hand that already sounds a lot better!

As far as I understood the right hand then plays the chord notes added below the melody note (which is pretty standard for the piano I guess), plus maybe an octave lower.

Well, that is as much as I could reproduce on the spot. She scolded me for using what she referred to as the American phrase, which is the last-but-one bar in the scores that I have. This is associated with the “American” tango. Instead, what she plays at the end of part A (the piece comes in parts A-B-A-C-A), is d-g, possibly completed to chords, possibly the chords broken up into very fast notes. It really sounds very nice!

Now I also asked her about how she starts the piece. While getting to understand the syncopation, she was playing the right hand (and me the left), but she would always have a nice introductory phrase. I wanted to know how that works – I’m not quite able to grasp whole chords and play them. So this phrase has two parts, the first one of which is just F-F#-G which she pointed out as an important element. After that follow three chords, G-minor, F-major, E-flat-major. Then with the D-minor chord the tune starts.

I asked about using the pedal. With my version, I couldn’t make out any use for it. But when playing just a few notes in the base, and the melody with higher notes, it makes sense to use the pedal to make the bass notes last.

She pointed out that Tango likes to take up the full range of the piano, all high and low notes, “just play it higher, and then lower”.

As I mentioned earlier, I couldn’t immediately play that much of what she showed me right on the spot. I hope that I now can better hear what is going on. She gave me a list of names to find artists  for inspiration:

I think what is not in the scores is what you can only learn from teachers, and really at the heart of learning music; here there are no scores available. So thanks a lot to you, Linda, for sharing your knowledge!!

Related Links

(Some of these also appear above)

how to play the moonlight sonata

March 28, 2009 music 1 comment

I’ve been learning the piano over the last few years, off and on; probably less than 1 hour a month on average. Recently it has become a bit more and for the last month or so I’ve been practicing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. I feel it is a good piece for beginners. I’m lucky to have an above average reach, so one note more than an octave is not a stretch for me.

I find it helps a lot to listen to the piece on youtube, and replay certain sections over and over. This got me quite far; but when I got to the 40th bar (of the 1st Movement) I thought it would be good to get some feedback and see what to improve and what’s ok, and if I’m on the right track in general.

So I asked my friend, Andrea, who has been playing a lot longer than me, and she agreed to meet. Because I am not totally happy with our piano, and to make it easier for her, I asked to play at her place. Our piano seems overly sensitive, so that it is not easy to play softly, and consistently so. Sometimes I even think that I hit a key, but no sound resulted (not easy to reproduce either).

What follows only covers how far I know the piece at the moment: the 1st Movement up to bar 42 (where a repetition of an earlier phrase occurs.)

Of course, the way she played it – on the same piano – was a lot better. The way it was better, was, first of all, much more consistency in the right hand: even rhythm, even volume. It was obvious to me that this is important for the piece, but it wasn’t clear to me how much more consistency is possible.

On top of that she applied the pedal almost throughout the whole piece. I had heared that the pedal is important, but not to that extent. Pushing the pedal down is the easiest of course, however, this piece is so delicate that that will not do. The trick is to push the pedal not all the way, but a little more than half-way and, to release the pedal with each chord change, and each time a melody note changes. Once you know, that makes a lot of sense, and it works. But I find that extremely difficult to do. Some scores indicate when to apply, when to release.

The third thing, and I was aware of this, was to bring out the melody notes (“the ones with the stems sticking up”) by playing them louder, compared to the other notes that are played at the same time. I find it pleasing enough to play the piece without this; I think that is also very difficult. Related, around bar 14, where there are two F# half-notes in the right-hand, I was neglecting the second one.

Around bar 28, when a new theme is introduced, she explained to me the meaning of “phrasing”, of how to control the volume, and that the  A in the right hand should be the loudest; equally bars 32 to 40 have phrasing hints; I knew I had ignored those, but now I know how to read them and what they mean. (She also explained that Horowitz manages to regulate the tempo at this part of the piece, by slowing down and speeding up, but such that the total time is still as it should be)

One of the other difficult aspects of the piece is the polyrhythmic motif. (Apparently I’m not doing that badly in that respect.) Apparently, much more advanced players take liberties with this one; this blog entry has sound showing how the author thinks is the right way to play this one.

Thanks again Andrea!

Couple of links for your convenience

Scores

Videos on Youtube

Note: I realize I refer to the idea of “the correct way to play this”, or the “proper way to play”; surely you can ignore that if you prefer.