Trumpet players face many common challenges, including endurance, range, and flexibility. But the good news is that you can solve any of them with daily practice. However, where to start? In this article, we will explore what exercises should be in your trumpet practice routine.
Is Practice Routine Boring?
All trumpet players dream of sounding the best they can. Unfortunately, many of them take practice routines as boring actions, while they are the key solutions to make you sound better. Trumpet exercises exist for a reason, as becoming a good trumpet player is all about consistency and technique.
Are there ways to make your daily practice less boring? You should start with the simplest thing — take a comfortable position. Find a spot in your home that you like, place the coziest chair, a music stand, and set up the lighting. Your trumpet and music sheet for practice should be within easy reach. You can even decorate your practice room with some inspiring things — candles, aromatic sticks, pictures, and other options to create atmosphere.
You’ll get more satisfaction from your practice if you take a proper position. Check whether you keep your back straight. Your feet position also matters: you should place them shoulder-width apart. Breathe from the diaphragm. Make sure that you don't involve a shallow chest breath. Keep your shoulders relaxed. Remember that any tension in your body or in your lips is a true enemy of your practice.
What You Need To Do In Your Daily Trumpet Routine
Similar to athletes who do stretching, trumpet players need warm-up before moving to playing. Here are basic exercises that you need to include into your practice as a trumpet player:
1. Playing Long Tones
Your own sound is essential, as this is what sets one trumpet player from another. This exercise helps you work with breath control, learn how to guide your air, and help you develop your sound. You can practice playing long tones from soft to loud or vice versa, but make sure that you practice dynamics.
Exercises with long tones are good because it’s just the air you’re working with. Once you do the dynamics you learn to work with air speed, which is an important step for playing music.
How to do it:
- Take a deep and relaxed breath. Start playing the exercise along with the track or piano. Pay attention to pitch as it should be steady. You also need to focus on a clear tone. Ensure that you end each phrase with a full tone.
2. Buzzing
Lip buzzing is about vibrating the lips together. This exercise involves face muscles helping them hold together. You can do it without a trumpet by using a special lip buzzing tool — Trumpet BuzzMaster simulating trumpet playing or T.E.T. designed to help you have better control of airflow, improve lip function, and strengthen the muscles responsible for sound production.
Practicing lip buzzing you work with the form of your lips behind playing the instrument and check whether it’s right. This exercise helps you take notes properly as well as working on your transition between notes, from one pitch to another. Lip buzzing can take only two or five minutes, which is enough to warm up.
How to do it:
- Form your embouchure. Say “mmm” to help your lips take a proper position, form the corners of your mouth and flatten the chin. Start blowing air through your relaxed lips, making a consistent buzz as you move through different pitches.
- Pay attention to the resonance and vibration in your lips and face. Your neck and jaw need to stay relaxed. If you have trouble with buzzing, this can happen because you tighten your lips too much or keep them too loose.
- In the first case, you should relax the middle of your lips to let the air pass through, and in the second case, you need to bring the lips together until they start to create a buzz. You can also do some sirens by buzzing a low pitch and then moving to a higher pitch.
3. Flexibility Exercises
Exercises for flexibility involve tongue in playing. Lip slurs and lip bends exercises help you improve your flexibility, each in its own way. They strengthen the facial muscles, make pitch accurate, and help you switch registers quickly.
How to do it:
- Lip Slurs: Start on a low note in the middle of your range and slur between partial. For instance, start with note G and move to the C above it without involving valves. After that come back to the G and move down to the E.
- When doing lip slurs you should pay attention to smooth transitions between notes. It’s important to take a breath only when you need it. Usually you can see breath marks in your sheet music exercises indicating places where you need to take a breath.
- Lip Bends: Take a note in the middle of your range and bend it downward by changing your embouchure but without using valves. Hold the bent note for several seconds and return to the original pitch. With this exercise you work with control and fine adjustments in pitch.
More Tips on How to Practice Trumpet Every Day
- Metronome. The key tool for playing better is a metronome. It helps you have a better control over playing and gives you a clear picture of where you need to work more on your skills. With the metronome you learn to move right on time with each click rather than accidentally.
- Technique Study. This is where you also introduce your fingers and learn to coordinate them with your tongue and air. You should always start with a slower tempo gradually increasing it. A trumpeter needs to work with the following techniques such as practicing scales, arpeggios, tonguing patterns, and valve coordination. This develops the foundation needed for more complicated passages helping you play them effortlessly.
- Sight-Reading. Incorporate reading new music every day. Sight-reading improves your concentration and rhythmic precision. It also expands your musical vocabulary with new dynamics and phrasing. Even a few measures per day are enough for keeping this routine effective.
Conclusion
We believe with our tips you can really level up your trumpet playing and get better at each practice session. By buzzing your lips, playing long tones, doing lip slurs, working on your technique and sight-reading everyday, you can gradually grow as a musician, expanding your possibilities.
To make your daily practice easier, we have designed many useful skill development products — check them out in our category for Skill Development Tools for Trumpet Players.
Recently we have published an article about Top 3 Tools to Improve Your Brass Instrument Embouchure. Feel free to check it for valuable insights.