Too many balls in the air?

Anyway I know that we’ve all been there, so what’s the best way to deal with it? Here are a few tips that I try to keep in mind when I start to feel like I’m juggling too many pieces and not actually learning any of them.

Priorities*
I always try to plan out my time leading up to a performance of a new piece. I want to make sure that I’ve really learned it without over-practicing. When you know that you have these challenging parts coming up figure out how much time you will need to learn them. It’s always better for me to start early. Once it’s too late there is nothing I can do to recover.

Head Time X Face Time = Go Time!*
Make sure that you aren’t learning the music only with your chops and your fingers. I find it very helpful to spend working on the piece mentally also. Make sure that you are learning the rhythms correctly by spending a lot of time with the metronome, but without the trumpet. Find time to sit at a piano and sing the part. This can help your ears and also help you to come up with musical ideas.

Divide and Conquer*
Split the music up into manageable sections. Sometimes this means splitting one piece up into several different parts. Nothing is more depressing than looking at a stack of new music and feeling like you’ll never learn it all. I try not to keep my music on the same stand. It’s just too overwhelming sometimes.
So those are a few of my ideas for new music. We have one more week of the festival and I think I am over the hump now. By the way this year’s festival focussed on Osvaldo Golijov. If any of you are unfamiliar with his work I highly suggest you check out his music.

I hope this is helpful.

Best,
Andrew

It's a simple equation, isn't it???

There are a lot of things that affect the sound. Certainly the equipment that we use will help to shape our sound. Mouthpieces and bells, lead pipes and bore sizes all have some influence on the sound. I’m not a big equipment guy myself, but I do try to get the equipment that makes me sound and feel the best about my playing. However, I’m not sure that this is really the bottom line on what we sound like.

Another thing that can really affect the sound is our own personal concept, or what we want to sound like. That is usually formed by who we listen to and what our tastes are. My own concept was formed largely by listening to the Montreal Symphony recordings with James Thompson playing the principal trumpet part. I love his sound on those recordings. It’s big and powerful, but incredibly refined. It really had a big influence on what I wanted my sound to be like. But while I think that concept is an important part of developing a great sound, I don’t think that is the bottom line either.

What is the bottom line? Think about where the sound actually comes from. What is the very first thing that sounds when we play? If you guessed lips you are correct! Way to go! Now we have the question of what makes the lips vibrate? If you guessed air you are correct again! How the air gets to the lips and how they subsequently vibrate is really the bottom line in sound for me. I spend a lot of time every day working on this very thing. I do that by spending time on mouth piece buzzing, and also some time every day free buzzing. Both of these things really help me to focus the vibration of the lips while also trying to maximize the area that is buzzing. It’s very important for me to get the air to the lips at the right speed and volume without forcing or adding tension. This leads me to the title of this blog.

As a general rule I don’t like math, however in this case I make an exception. Here is what I try to think about in order to keep my sound healthy.

Here is my equation:
V x V x E = note/sound
These letters stand for Velocity (how fast the air is moving), Volume (how much air is moving), and Embouchure Strength (how close the lips are together). If these three things are in balance you can play any note you want with a great sound.

So that’s the blog this week. Please feel free to ask any questions. I know this is a fairly big topic and it’s hard to get everything in one blog.

Also check out the studio corner. There are some updates on my GGS studio class and Eric Ruske’s master class review will be posted soon.

Lastly I want to point out that Joe Alessi , principal trombone of the New York Philharmonic will be here in Toronto giving a master class at the Glenn Gould School on February 14, 2010 at 10:00 am. If you’re in town please come and visit us.
Best,
Andrew

It's not the Vienna Philharmonic, but who cares?

I always love attending semi-professional orchestra concerts. The playing isn’t at the highest level, but you can tell by watching that they love what they are doing. Every time I hear these kinds of concerts it reminds me why I started playing. It wasn’t to make money, or to have a website. It was the privilege to perform on the trumpet and being surrounded by musicians who loved what they were doing also.

The concert took place in a local high school auditorium. To say it was not the most flattering acoustic would be a gross understatement. It didn’t dim the spirit of this orchestra at all. I was walking around after the concert and I heard a young violinist saying to one of her friends how exciting the concert had been. She couldn’t believe she had just played Pictures at an Exhibition. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see her giving high fives to her colleagues. (I can’t remember the last time I gave one of my colleagues a high five?)

Now I’m not saying that professionals don’t love what they do. Or that we are so jaded that we no longer enjoy playing such great music. I think all I’m saying is that sometimes it’s good to be reminded what a special gift performing can be. It doesn’t really matter what level you are playing at, what matters is that you have the opportunity to express yourself in a way that not everyone can. I think that’s worth a high five or two.

Andrew

Ps. For those of you who are wondering Stephanie played great!

Ole!

We left the club around 1:00 am and walked back to our rooms. This particular resort had small buildings and each building had eight or ten rooms. Between each building was a fair amount of landscaping and grass. On our walk home we noticed that there was a cow between our building and the next building over. As luck would have it we happened to have a cow expert with us. My good friend Gord Wolfe, whom I have written about in past blogs, has quite a bit of experience with cows. (Please don’t ask what kind of experience, it’s not relevant to the story nor is it appropriate for most adults.) Gord told us to look under the cow around its mid section and if we could see anything that looked like it was hanging downward then it might be a bull. Now as I mentioned before it was 1:00 am and thus quite dark. Added to that was my belief that the only reason to go to an all inclusive resort was for the free drinks. Given those two facts my visibility was not at an all time high. In fact I was still working on how many cows/bulls were actually there.

It seemed to me that this would be a great time to take a picture of the cow/bull. I believe in retrospect that my first mistake was putting my head down and pawing the ground with my right foot while also having my hands on either side of my head with my index fingers sticking out in an effort to look as though I had horns. It was funny at the time and we all had a good laugh. Riding the wave of this success I decided to start walking towards the cow/bull very slowly with my camera at the ready. Suddenly it happened. It turns out that it was a bull, and it was charging at me with real horns! As I was running away I accidentally snapped this shot of my sweat shirt. The bull charged maybe ten feet and then stopped. I was several hundred yards away by the time I noticed the bull had stopped. My wife was even farther away having left me to fend for myself as soon as the bull moved. I suppose that supporting stupid behaviour was not one of the wedding vows that she agreed to uphold.

Now you might wonder what this has to do with trumpet. I know that I am wondering that right now. How am I going to tie this together???? I’ll get back to you. In the meantime try to make informed choices. If you aren’t sure if you are dealing with a bull or a cow, make sure you clarify the situation before you approach! And that’s my blog for this week neatly tied together as usual.

I hope that everyone had a safe and happy holiday season.

Adios!
Andrew

I have a few reasons for taking time off, but only one that I’m going to focus on in this blog. The biggest reason that I take time off is simply bad habits. Over time it’s easy for any of us to form bad habits, or at least it is for me. One way to help fix them is to get some time away from the horn and start fresh. Do you know the saying, “If I only knew then what I know now.”? Well now you do know. Why not use that knowledge. When I take time off and come back to the trumpet I was always try to imagine that I am starting from scratch. I think about being in fourth grade and picking it up for the first time, only this time I know what I’m doing. Try to imagine how good you could be if you had known everything you know now in fourth grade. Wow, I could have avoided so much trouble!

I try to start back really slowly. Efficiency is the most important goal here. If you try to come back too fast you are likely to fall back on bad habits to get things to work. I generally like to have about a week to get back in shape. If I’m playing efficiently this is plenty of time. You can really use any method books to get back in shape, the most important thing is your mind set. Be patient, be smart, and be methodical.

Now I know that not everyone can take a lot of time off. Even a few days can help. Try taking two days off at first and two days to get back in shape. Remember to come back with a different mindset or it won’t work. We are just trying to re-learn good habits. For me the only way to get rid of a bad habit is to replace it with a good one. Try it sometime and let me know if it helps.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to take some time off and go fishing. No, I won’t be taking my trumpet or my mouthpiece. They are on vacation too!

I hope everyone has a happy, healthy and safe holiday season!

Andrew

Blog Extra***

So I’m back with a little more information. I had a few requests for more information about getting back to the trumpet after a break. The main reason I didn’t include that information is that it’s difficult for me to know what any given trumpet player needs without hearing them play, having said that here is my disclaimer. These are just suggestions. They may or may not work for everyone. I strongly encourage you to use your imagination and your own personal experience to develop strategies to get back to the basics and “re-learn” the trumpet without bad habits.

This is a basic order of what I like to do to get my playing going again.

Day 1-
The first morning back is very, very important. You need to start slowly and enjoy every little accomplishment that you have. You are setting the stage for a re-birth on the trumpet. (I know that sounds dramatic, but imagine for just a minute that it’s true and you are able to go back to the beginning. All things are possible. There is nothing you can’t figure out. It’s an exciting prospect if you can get yourself in that head space.)
I start with ten minutes of easy mouth piece buzzing. You can do anything you like here. The key thing is to make sure that the air is free and consistent and that you aren’t forcing the sound. Slurring or tonguing are both fine for this part.
The next thing I like to do are the Vincent Chicowicz flow studies. I want to make sure that I fully connect all of the notes. Again, make sure that you playing as smoothly and evenly as possible. Enjoy the way the trumpet sounds and feels. Don’t take it for granted!
My last ten minutes the first morning are spent warming down. You can use anything you like for this. I like the Clarke book a lot. I also have some studies that John Rommel gave that I think are very good, and of course the Michael Sachs book is great.

I will do another thirty minutes that evening. I want to keep all of the things I mentioned earlier in mind here also.
I will start again with mouth piece buzzing for ten minutes. I will do this the same way as the morning session.
I will then switch to some light tonguing, either the Clarke book or some simple scales will do. I am trying to make sure that the tongue is just interrupting the air. The air stays forward and consistent and the tongue simply interrupts it briefly. I am trying to keep everything as smooth and seamless as possible.
After that I will warm down again the same way I did in the morning.

The rest is just as expansion of the first day. Again I’ll say it, be patient! This is not a race, it’s a marathon.

If you want more information you’ll have to come to Toronto. I teach at the Glenn Gould School and I’m always looking for new students! Just kidding.

I hope this helps clear things up a bit.

Andrew

Ps. If anyone has any other ideas please post them in the comments section. I would love to hear how you do it.

Bramwell and I after the world premiere of his new concerto.

Two weeks ago I premiered a new trumpet concerto, Songs of the Paradise Saloon, written by Bramwell Tovey, Music Director of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. We performed it with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in Roy Thomson Hall conducted by Maestro Tovey. This is the reason for my lack of blog writing over the past few weeks. At the end of this blog I will post some links to interviews that Bramwell and I did during the week if you are interested in learning a little more about the piece.

What I’m going to write about this week is how I went about learning this new concerto. It was a long process that started in early September and continued all the way up to the week of the performance.

Let me tell you a little about the piece from a trumpet point of view so you can understand what I was dealing with. First of all it was originally written for four different trumpets. The instruments were C trumpet, flugelhorn, Bb cornet and Bb piccolo trumpet. This eventually expanded to six trumpets when we added D trumpet and C cornet. These two were added for sound, style and key reasons. So now I have a concerto that involves six trumpets and four different mouthpieces. The mouthpieces were a Bach 1 ½ C trumpet mouth piece, and 3B Dennis Wick cornet mouth piece, a Bach 7D cornet mouthpiece for piccolo, and a Bach 1 ½ C flugelhorn mouthpiece. I knew going in that I would need to spend a lot of time making sure that I was comfortable on all of these instruments, and that I was comfortable switching back and forth very quickly. I also needed to make sure that I was really dialed in on the pitch. To work on this I would take some of the short solos in the back of the Arban book and play on each instrument back to back with a tuner. I was trying to get comfortable away from the concerto. I knew that the concerto would be difficult and I didn’t want to work out the pitch and comfort level during the learning process. I do this a lot with rotary trumpet also.

In early September I started to get parts of the concerto. The first part to arrive was the beginning and the end. I think I counted about six high concert D’s a high Eb and a high E all on C trumpet. To say the least I was a little alarmed. I would have liked to see the look on my face when I first saw these parts. I’m sure it was priceless!

I knew that I was going to have to work on extending my playing a lot, especially my high register and endurance. As it turned out the concerto was around twenty five minutes long! Ouch! It covered a range from pedal C to high concert F. There was multiple tonguing, lip trills, long lyrical passages, huge intervals and just about anything else you can think of. I had my work cut out for me.

The music came in bits and pieces over the course of a few months. I finally received a complete part about three weeks before the first rehearsal. The biggest thing I had to accomplish was to stay calm, work slow and steady, one page at a time. I knew that if I stayed patient I would get there. It was just a matter of perseverance. I find with most things that patience is the key. If I can just manage to take my time and start things soon enough things will work out in the end.

I couldn’t possibly finish writing this without saying thank you to Bramwell Tovey. This was the experience of a lifetime. Every part of it was fun. The piece is really terrific, the composer was fun to work with and the orchestra played great! It was a blast!

Below are the links to a few interviews. I would love to post sound clips, but I’m not allowed to under the TSO’s recording policy. There are some small clips during the interviews. I hope that you enjoy the interviews and the blog. As always if you have any questions or comments please let me know.

Andrew

Bravo! News
(The portion of the interview that talks about the Tovey concerto starts at about the 3:50 if you are interested in fast forwarding.)

Zoomer Radio AM740, David Bale with Bramwell Tovey

Grandma and Papa Shoemaker

I’m thinking about this because last week I turned thirty nine and my sister e-mailed me with the question. So this week I’ve really been thinking about it. I believe it’s because I actually feel a lot older now than I used to. I’ve decided however that instead of dwelling on my own age issues I’m going to change the question. Here is my new question. Are you getting any better sugar?

I think that we all want to answer that question with a confident yes. I tell my students at the Glenn Gould School that if you aren’t getting better you’re getting worse. There aren’t any holding patterns in our business. Expectations will always rise with time as will the competition. The best we can hope for is to keep getting better.

Getting better isn’t easy. It takes a lot of work, thought and commitment to improve consistently over time. In short it’s difficult. Always try to ask yourself the question. Always try to give yourself an honest answer. If it’s not going the way you want that’s fine. There are plenty of ways to get better, just look for a different one. The only crime is in not searching for new ways to improve. They’re out there; you just have to find them.

So that’s my thought this week. Am I getting any better? I hope so. Next week I’m playing the world premiere of Bramwell Tovey’s new trumpet concerto, “Songs of the Paradise Saloon”. It’s about twenty five minutes, uses six different trumpets, and ends on a high concert E on C trumpet. I’m hopeful that I’ve improved enough in the past year to be able to play it. I guess we’ll know soon.

Best,
Andrew

Jim Markey and GGS Low Brass

The master class with Per Brevig was held on Thursday November 5th, 2009. This was an interesting master class because Per was coaching us in Toronto from New York through video and microphones. We could see him on a TV and he could see us as well. It would be more ideal to have the coaching face to face for obvious reasons such as the sound he heard us play came through a microphone intermediary so it wasn’t exactly our pure sound that he heard. However, he could hear and coach our intonation, rhythmic accuracy etc. There are many positives to this kind of system the biggest of which being that even though it wasn’t possible for Per to come to Toronto, we could still be coached by him. We each played a solo and three excerpts for him. He stressed the importance of proper breathing and did some exercises with us. Another positive about this system is that the next day, our Trombone teacher Gordon Wolfe gave a master class to Per’s students. Gord uses a lot of easy to understand analogies to get his points across and also plays a great deal to demonstrate. Gord coached Per’s students mostly on excerpts and stressed confidence and musicality as very important keys to success. Between the two master classes, we all learned a great deal.

The master class with James Markey took place on Monday November 9th, 2009. This was a more traditional master class in that James made the trek north to Toronto to coach our studios. James started the master class by playing a solo for the audience. James displayed everything involved with great Trombone playing from soft and delicate to the virtuosic. The most impressive aspect was the musicality James relentlessly demonstrated. The energy in the room was great and what a way to inspire the students about to play for him. In the morning session we each played a solo for him. What made his master class great was that he coached each player very specifically to their weaknesses. James made everyone of the performers sing passages from their music and talked about how important singing is for ear training and the overall product. “If you can’t sing it, you can’t play it”. He stressed musicality, perfect intonation, rhythmic accuracy like many coaches do, but his knowledge of the repertoire is so great that he would work on specific passages and correct them. He was even very familiar with the John Williams Tuba Concerto that was performed for him. This made the learning experience so much easier and the master class flew by.

The afternoon master class was spent working on excerpts. Each of us played two excerpts for him. James stressed everything as in the solo master class from breathing to tuning. He mentioned a tool to the performers called the slow downer. It changes the key of the music that you played and you can hear everything from tuning issues to unwanted glisses in slide movement. While correcting issues, James had a way of making the players feel very comfortable which again helped the process move along at very fast rate.
It is very obvious to us why Per and James are so sought after as clinicians. They strive for nothing less than perfection at all times in all categories of playing. They were both very encouraging and helped us all improve a great deal in the time we had together.
Our next Trombone master class is in the New Year with another New York juggernaut and colleague of James Markey, Joseph Alessi of the New York Philharmonic.

Our next trombone master class is February 14th, 2010, with Joseph Alessi, Principal Trombone, New York Philharmonic.

The GGS Low Brass Studios.
Tenor Trombone Studio of Gordon Wolfe:
Nathan Fanning and Nathan O’Neal
Bass Trombone Studio of Jeffrey Hall:
Isabelle Lavoie

Gord Wolfe golfing (I think he may have missed the ball on this shot.)

Gord has had tremendous success auditioning for some of the biggest trombone jobs in North America and it’s always interesting to hear how he prepares for them and what he thinks about when he’s performing an audition. One of the most interesting ideas I’ve ever heard from him is the idea of, this is my favourite excerpt. He told me once that no matter what they put in front of him at an audition, the first thing he says to himself is, “oh great, this is my favourite excerpt!” Now that may not seem like it would work, but I think he’s onto something here. How many of us have ever been at an audition, concert, or any kind of performing situation and thought, “oh crap, not this one!” Hands up please! Mine is up for sure! Gord has told me that the worst feeling he can have going into an audition is the fear that they might ask a particular excerpt. Who has had that experience? Hands up again please? Preparing yourself to believe that you love each excerpt and that you are ready, willing and able to play the crap out of it is a big key to successful performing. The power of positive thinking can be an incredible tool. However I don’t think it always comes naturally, or easily. Like anything else we have to practice it and put the work in on our instrument to make positive thinking possible.

I was accused once by a conductor at Eastman of looking incredibly arrogant in the orchestra. He told me that every time he looked back at me he thought I was thinking, “Prepare to be amazed by my incredible playing!” I can assure you that’s not what I was thinking, but now looking back I wonder why not. If you’ve done the work and you are prepared, why shouldn’t you play great?

So this is my new thing. The power of positive thinking! I think I’ll start now. This is my favourite blog ever. Go on, you give it a try too.

Best,
Andrew

Alcatraz Prison

How many of you have ever been to Alcatraz? When I lived in San Francisco I went there a lot. It seemed like I had a lot of visitors when I lived out there and one of the big things to do was go to Alcatraz and take the tour. It’s a really great tour! It’s the kind of tour that is guided by a recording and everyone uses headphones to follow along. You can start and stop the recording at anytime so that everyone can go at their own speed. (For those people who may not know what Alcatraz is, it is a famous prison located in the San Francisco Bay that was home to some of the most dangerous criminals in the mid 1900’s. Al Capone was one of the inmates incarcerated there.)

Anyway, my favourite part of the tour is the dining hall. There is a quote that I really love when you get to that section of the prison. There were a lot of rules at Alcatraz. In the dining hall there was only one rule. You could take as much food as you wanted, but you had to eat everything that you took. This finally brings me to my topic for the blog this week. Breathing!

One of the biggest problems that we as trumpet players face is over breathing. How many times have we come to the end of a solo, or a study, and find ourselves out of breath and panting? Well I have. The reason for this is over breathing.

In my opinion the main reason we over breathe is because of tension. When there is too much tension in the body the air has trouble getting out of the lungs. When that happens we feel like we need another breath. In reality we have a lot of air left, but our body has already used the oxygen that was in it and now it needs fresh new air to feed the body again.

Now when we have taken another breath, what happens to the air that is still left in the lungs? Nothing good, that’s for sure. Barbara Butler used to call this stacking the air. We are putting good air on top of bad air, and the more we do that, the harder it is to get the bad air out. Think of it as a very slow process of strangulation. I know it sounds dramatic, and it is, but in a way that’s what’s happening. You are starving yourself of good oxygen and the body is in desperate need of it. If you do that long enough you won’t have to worry about the Ballerinas Dance from Petroushka ever again!

So what do we do? My suggestion is to follow the Alcatraz rule. Take as much as you want, but use all that you take. Be careful that you aren’t always taking huge breaths. Take breaths that make sense to the phrase you are about to play. I also don’t mean for you to play until you are squeezing out that last drop of air. We want to use our air, but we want to be sensible about it.

Here is an experiment I used to do at Eastman. Take the Clarke Technical Studies book and go to any of the exercises. Start on one that’s in the middle register. Take a nice, regular sized breath and start to play. Play until you really feel you are out of air. When you feel that, stop and exhale. Often I find that I’m not really using the air that I have taken in. By practicing this way I’m able to train myself to use the air that I have taken in more efficiently. Remember this is just an exercise and you don’t need to play to the very end of your breath all the time.

I hope this is helpful. Please let me know if you have any comments or questions.

Best,
Andrew

Ps. Air is still one of the greatest bargains in life. It’s free, use it!