A Modern Approach to Playing the Trumpet | Page 3

3 Introduction Since starting to play the trumpet more than 30 years ago, I have considered a modern approach to playing. Over the years the range of music that I have played has steadily diversified and the expectations for a professional trumpet player now are different to when I first started out. Versatility is expected, so we must identify the areas of music we wish to perform and then learn the easiest way to adapt our technique. This is an exciting journey and one you can enjoy, using the Modern Approach to Playing the Trumpet (M.A.P.) to help you reach your musical destination. Whatever your trumpeting background, this book will help to improve your technique by: synchronising and developing an awareness of airstream, then adding an articulation approach with the use of breath accents and a soft, fast single tongue that can develop your rhythmic ideas, along with solidifying your consistent working range from bottom F# to top C. The most important focus is the co-ordination of all of these techniques, so that in time they all become one natural and gentle approach that requires little or no thought when improvising. A trumpeter’s goal is to play to the best of their ability with ease for a healthy amount of time every day. In this richly diverse time for making music, trumpeters are asked to cover a wide variety of styles and are often required to improvise. To reach a point where we can best serve the music, we must spend our lives developing the muscles and technical control that make playing the trumpet as easy and as painless as possible. The long term goal of control will lead to the development of strong muscles. When improvising on the trumpet the technical focus can often be forgotten, as the musician is thinking of artistic issues; playing in style and expressing an original and personal approach to the music. When playing with ensembles containing drums and amplification, your technical control can change as the natural harmonics of the trumpet are harder to hear. Your excitement can build in a way that does not occur in the practice room and this can make you play louder than normal. With these technical and environmental hurdles to deal with simultaneously, it is not at all surprising that trumpeters sometimes develop an insufficiently supportive technique where brute force can replace control. Incorrect habits could be forceful breathing and tonguing too hard, thus stopping the airstream and leading to too much mouthpiece pressure, then bruising resulting in inconsistent playing ability from day to day. We can protect ourselves by thinking of these issues and preparing ourselves in the practice room. If it does not sound good in the practice room playing at a quiet to moderate volume, then it will compromise your ability to develop if you only sound impressive playing at a loud volume with a loud drummer! With good technique you can control the trumpet easily in order to realise your ideas and develop them further. Quiet playing will also enable you to play louder with more contrasting tone colours to choose from. Ideals of the Modern Approach  The trumpet should become a legato airstream machine.  Visualise that you have only one register  Tonguing should be viewed as a nice start to the note and nothing more, with the airstream the main focus in attain